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Although the twentieth century produced many great athletes, there is no one who stood out more than Jim Thorpe. That is not just my opinion. When Jim Thorpe won two gold medals at the 1912 Olympic Games, the king of Sweden said to...
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Arturo Alfonso Schomburg: Archivist, Institution Builder, and Advocate of Global Black History
“The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” So begins one of the most well-known essays of the Harlem Renaissance, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” written by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Published in the March...
Coming to America: Ellis Island and New York City
New York City is a kind of archipelago, a Philippines on the Hudson River. Only one borough—the Bronx—is actually attached to the American mainland. There are some forty islands in the city beyond Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long...
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San Francisco and the Great Earthquake of 1906
At the beginning of the twentieth century, San Francisco still reigned as the major seaport on the Pacific coast. The city traced its origins to 1776, when a Spanish expedition planted a mission and a military post at the end of the...
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Why Immigration Matters
It is difficult today to recapture the iconoclasm signaled by Oscar Handlin’s opening words to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Uprooted more than fifty years ago: "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I...
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Women of the West
Women are like water to Western history. Both have flowed through the terrain we have come to call the West, long before the inhabitants conceived of themselves as part of an expanding United States. Both have been represented as...
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The Jungle and the Progressive Era
The publication of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle produced an immediate and powerful effect on Americans and on federal policy, but Sinclair had hoped to achieve a very different result. At the time he began working on the...
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Amateurism and Jim Thorpe at the Fifth Olympiad
Thorpe’s deception and subsequent confession deals amateur sport in America the hardest blow it has ever had to take and disarranges the scheme of amateur athletics the world over. New York Times , January 28, 1913 The early years of...
New Orleans and the History of Jazz
New Orleans is a city built in a location that was by any measure a mistake. North American settlers needed a way to import and export goods via the Mississippi River, so a city was created atop swamps. By virtue of its location and...
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