The historian Keri Leigh Merritt has an essay in The Bitter Southerner, always a good site to read, that discusses the ways that elite whites used power over poor whites to ensure that they did not un
This is the grave of John Eaton and Peggy O’Neill Eaton. Born in 1790 near Scotland Neck, North Carolina, to a landowning and political family, the Eatons had landholdings in Tennessee as well a
On May 10, 1837, New York City banks announced they were suspending specie payments. This began the Panic of 1837, the first of the nation’s many major periodic economic collapses that would cul
On February 13, 1837, the Equal Rights Party, better known as the Loco Focos although that was a pejorative from the city’s Whigs, held a rally in City Hall Park in New York City to protest the
This is super fascinating: The appeal of this kind of story, and the public prudishness we often associate with Victorian society, didn’t come out of nowhere. The era, with its widespread industrial
Rebecca Onion highlights some pages from Lewis Tappan’s anti-slavery children’s magazine that he ran in the late 1830s. Because the American Anti-Slavery Society favored complete and immed
Longreads.com was not messing around when it chose that name. Sometimes, things are now long reads primarily because the internet makes it possible, as opposed to using the most effective length to ge
My dislike for a lot of traditional Thanksgiving food, especially turkey, is fairly well known around these parts, but I always knew the holiday and its food more or less came out of colonial era New