In May 1752 the French minister of the navy, Antoine de Rouillé, wrote to the governor of Saint-Domingue about the new problem of slaves in France. Slaves were “multiplying every day, more and more, ...

McKinley led a country defined by tariffs and colonial wars. Trump is drawn to his legacy—and determined to bring the liberal international order to an end. In June 2016, President Obama proclaimed ...

Literary criticism and the practice of law would seem to have little in common. One embraces its subjective stance, while the other appeals to a fixed code of conduct. Yet there are signs of overlap ...

In the late 1870s, the 70-year-old newspaper editor Henry Boernstein sat down to write about German immigrants’ efforts to shape the United States into a less brutal, more enlightened republic in the ...

At one time, more than 4 billion American chestnut trees spread from southern Canada all the way to Mississippi and Alabama. While it was rarely the dominant tree in the forests, this giant of the ...

Madeline Grimm is a writer and editor based in New York City. She has written for outlets including Lapham’s Quarterly, The Drift, and the Cleveland Review of Books. The Muse: History, by Camille ...

A young man named Edgar Llewellyn Simmons sailed out of Carlisle Bay, Barbados, on a Royal Mail boat in January 1908 to work on the Panama Canal. After a two-week journey, he reached Colón and ...

Submission Guidelines In December 2023, HNN transitioned to a new editorial model that centers on its weekly email newsletter. Each week, the newsletter serves up short-form essays to help readers ...

Joined by a crowd of select guests, current and former members of the Supreme Court gathered at the Court’s Great Hall to honor Earl Warren’s passing on July 11, 1974. His casket rested atop the ...

The fence may not seem momentous. But its symbolism is deep. It adds dignity and definition to a small, grassy yard that is full of memories. It’s where Ramona Burton’s young son drove in his red toy ...

Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy by Charlotte Van den Broeck (trans. from the Dutch by David McKay); Other Press, 304 pp., $27.99 In the 1860s, the Austrian military engineer ...