Back in the days when only aristocrats and spiritual leaders could hold political and cultural authority, there was no pride in claiming to be self-made. Instead, an assertion of self-made success was ...

Michael Todd Landis, an Assistant Professor of History at Tarleton State University specializing in the intersection of slavery and politics in the 19th century United States, is the author of ...

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is ...

Ms. Chen is a student at the University of Washington and an intern at HNN.

Elaine G. Breslaw is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and author of "Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America." Nineteenth-century British depiction ...

John Reeves is the author of the forthcoming book The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee: the Forgotten Case Against an American Icon (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). He was accused of treason. Only the ...

W. J. Rorabaugh, professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle, is the author of American Hippies (Cambridge University Press), which offers a brief overview of the Sixties ...

Rachel Rolnick is an intern at the History News Network. Over time, the myth of the pirate has generated the image of a rugged, foul man with an elaborate hat, an eye patch, and a peg leg. The men of ...

Harlow Giles Unger is author of 27 books, including a dozen biographies of the Founding Fathers. His latest book is Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence, published by Hachette.

Aaron Leonard is a writer and journalist currently completing, “Heavy Radicals - The FBI's Secret War Against America's Maoists: The Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980,” with ...

Donald Yacovone is an Associate at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies, Harvard University and an Athenæum member. Oompa-Loompa illustration ...

Alan Singer is a historian and professor in the Hofstra University Department of Teaching, Learning and Technology. He is the author of New York’s Grand Emancipation Jubilee: Essays on Slavery, ...