Boom, Bust, and the “World’s Littlest Skyscraper”
The discovery of oil near Wichita Falls in 1911 not only brought money to the Texas town, it brought a swindler who promised the sky(scraper).
The Riches of Poverty Point
Earthworks built around 3,700 years ago in Louisiana centered an exchange system that stretched up the Mississippi and into the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys.
Israel and Gaza: A Syllabus of Background Readings
How can we help students begin to make sense of the current and recurring violence in Israel and Gaza?
Parents’ Rights, Sex, and Race in 1970s Florida
Save Our Children is remembered as an effort to keep gay people out of public life. But it was also rooted in the movement against school integration.
Urban Planning, Then and Now
Humans have been designing cities for millennia. California Forever is just the newest entry in a long list of planned communities around the world.
Peshtigo: The Nation’s Deadliest Fire
On the same night as Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871, some 2,400 square miles of Wisconsin and Michigan burned in a firestorm that took more than 1,000 lives.
The End of Asian Exclusion, the Beginning of Caribbean Exclusion
The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act allowed first-generation Japanese American immigrants to become US citizens while keeping African Caribbean immigrants out.
Building Community and Urban Tree Canopy
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, Black communities and other reformers in New York City recognized the ameliorative social effects of greening urban spaces.
Genocide in California
The extermination campaigns against the Yuki people, sparked by the California Gold Rush and statehood, weren’t termed genocide until the mid 1970s.
Tuskegee University’s Audio Collections
The archives of the historically Black Tuskegee University recently released recordings from 1957 to 1971, with a number by powerful civil rights leaders.