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The Man Behind Montana’s Contradictory, Confusing, and Occasionally Crazy Political Culture

In the First Half of the 20th Century, US Senator Burton K. Wheeler Was Deeply Independent—and Often Confrontational

by Marc C. Johnson
September 12, 2019

There is an old line that “Montana is really just a small town with a very long Main Street.” It’s a state with 147,000 square miles and just over a million people, yet everyone seems to know everyone, or at least everyone knows someone who knows someone you know. The six degrees of separation in Montana are rarely more than two degrees.

Montana’s small-town dynamic, combined with sprawling geography and a rich and often-rough history, have shaped a political culture …

Why Living in College Dorms Is an American Rite of Passage

Since the 17th Century, Educators Have Designed Housing to Create ‘Morally Conscious Citizens’

by Carla Yanni
September 8, 2019

The residence hall in the United States has come to mark the threshold between childhood and adulthood, housing young people during a transformational time in their lives. When parents drop their kids off at college, do they pose in front of a classroom building or the library? Maybe. But it’s the unloading of clothes, computers, and comforters at the dorms that defines the break between childhood and adulthood.

This rite of passage is taken much more seriously by Americans than by …

The Hard-Drinking 19th-Century Naturalists Who Aspired to Find and Classify Everything on Earth

At the Smithsonian, William Stimpson Created a New American Scientific Culture Around the Megatherium Club

by Ron Vasile
September 4, 2019

In some respects, Washington, D.C., in the 1850s was an unlikely place to usher in a golden age of American natural history. Philadelphia and Boston had long been the traditional centers of American science, with the founding of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1812 and the Boston Society of Natural History in 1830. The nation’s capital was still viewed as a provincial Southern town. The Smithsonian Institution, founded in 1846 after a bequest by British chemist and …

When Police Clamped Down on Southern California’s Japanese-American Bicycling Craze

In 1905, Cycling Brought Riverside Together but a Backlash Quickly Followed

by Genevieve Carpio
August 26, 2019

In 1905, cyclists gathered in Riverside, California, for an inaugural meet on a new racing track. About 60 miles inland from Los Angeles, Riverside was a heralded cycling center, home to one of the largest leagues of bicyclists in the state and to frequent regional cycling competitions, but this race looked unlike any other previously promoted in the region because the new track had been funded by the Riverside Japanese Association.

The association’s brand-new Adam’s Track was supposed to promote commerce …

Why Americans Love Andy Griffith’s Toothy Grin

In the Post-Civil Rights Era, Images of Southerners as ‘Slow-Witted Rubes’ Soothed White Anxieties

by Sara K. Eskridge
August 22, 2019

Today, when many Americans think of the “good old days”—when neighbors knew each other and the world seemed safer and simpler—they often conjure visions of the 1950s and early 1960s, as expressed in old TV comedies like The Andy Griffith Show.

But those times were not really simple: Americans were then gripped by Cold War fears and the Red Scare, and buffeted by new economic pressures. The entertainers who most successfully created sunny visions for anxious Americans of that era—our …

The Oxen Were the Unheralded Heroes of America’s Overland Trails

Over Long Journeys, Westward Migrants Came to Love the 'Noble' Animals They Depended on

by Diana L. Ahmad
August 11, 2019

Between 1840 and 1869, approximately 300,000 people crossed the United States on their way to settle in Oregon, find gold in California, or practice religion as they desired in Utah. The story of these emigrants, who were soon known as “overlanders,” is well known, taught in every school in the United States. Despite the popularity of Hollywood films on the experience, and even a now-classic 1985 video game, The Oregon Trail, we rarely talk about the animals that took the …

When Americans Feared an Invasion From Their Northern Border

In the Late 19th century, the French Canadians Who Came to Work in Cotton Mills Were Treated as ‘Pawns in a Catholic Plot’

by David Vermette
August 7, 2019

In 1893, Clare de Graffenried, special agent of the United States Department of Labor, published an article in The Forum describing an invasion of America’s northeastern border. For 30 years, Graffenreid observed, hundreds of thousands of French Canadians had been pouring into states like Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, finding work in the region’s burgeoning industries. “Manufacturing New England, Puritan and homogeneous no longer, speaks a French patois,” she wrote.

Furthermore, Graffenreid continued, French Canadian workers huddled in …

Eliza Hamilton’s Excellent Five-Month Steamboat Ride From New York to Wisconsin

In 1837, the 80-Year-Old Widow of the Late Treasury Secretary Was Delighted by the Beauty of the Nation

by Tilar J. Mazzeo
August 1, 2019

The musical Hamilton introduced theatergoers to Eliza Schuyler, the wife of Alexander Hamilton, and her sisters Angelica and Peggy. But there is much more to Eliza’s American life than we can see in the musical. When her distant cousin, James Fenimore Cooper, wrote about life on the Hudson River frontier in The Last of the Mohicans, he might as well as have been describing her girlhood. Later, as part of that generation who fought for, and won, American independence, Eliza …

How Did 19th-Century Ax Murderer Lizzie Borden Become a Household Name?

The Wealthy Yankee’s Brutal Crime Went Unpunished, Infuriating an Increasingly Diverse and Egalitarian Public

by Joseph Conforti
July 22, 2019

The Lizzie Borden murder case abides as one of the most famous in American criminal history. New England’s crime of the Gilded Age, its seeming senselessness captivated the national press. And the horrible identity of the murderer was immortalized by the children’s rhyme passed down across generations.

Lizzie Borden took an ax, / And gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done, / She gave her father forty-one.

While there is no doubt that Lizzie Borden …

In Colonial Virginia It Was the Kids Who Mixed the Cultures That Became American

Both the English and the Native Americans Used Children to Learn the Mysterious Ways of Their New Neighbors

July 18, 2019

In 1608, Thomas Savage, age 13, arrived on the first ship from England bringing supplies to the newly founded Jamestown colony. He had been in Virginia just a few weeks when he was presented as a gift to Wahunsenaca, the great Powhatan who ruled over most of the people along the rivers leading into the lower Chesapeake Bay area. In return, Powhatan gave the English a young man named Namontack.

Such exchanges of young people were considered normal. As English …

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