We often speak of America as “unknown,” except to its own inhabitants, in the Middle Ages. But so, in a sense, was Europe, which hardly figured on the...

Millions of years ago, continental drift carried the Old World and New Worlds apart, splitting North and South America...

At the end of the first millennium, most people in the Eastern Hemisphere had a firm sense of how the world was arranged, who occupied it, and how they had come to be where they were. Various sacred texts as well as long-standing folk beliefs suggested a virtually eternal order of things, instilling a sort of...

African American life in the United States has been framed by migrations, forced and...