In her new column, Dorothy Berry offers an inside look at the work of the digital archivist, while highlighting forgotten figures in Black print culture and public life.

In the early days of ballooning, launches were prone to failure. When failure looked imminent, the crowd’s mood would begin to turn.

Stephen Vincent Benét’s lost epic “John Brown’s Body” envisions a nation sutured together after the Civil War, but fails to reckon with the war’s causes.

Good Housekeeping set itself up as a source of authoritative advice, but included ads for “health” products known to be harmful.