Before Leo XIV, the weird, century-long history of Americans claiming to be pope.

How a local prosecutor protected white supremacists and went on to a career in Washington, DC.

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.

Underground communities, in real life, are usually short-term and provisional. For the most part, people live underground much in the same way children can be said to live in treehouses: It can be ...

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

Drowning rates were abysmally high in early 20th-century America, with as many as ten thousand adults and children meeting watery graves each year. Beaches and swimming holes were unguarded, and ...

Will Teague is an instructor in the Department of History at the University of Arkansas. Students demonstrating against the Shah of Iran, Washington, DC, 1979. Photograph by Marion S. Trikosko.

Stephen Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. His most recent book is Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico. Photo of 1908 fire in New Hampshire. The 1908 fires ranged along 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 ...

Alan J. Singer is a historian and professor of secondary education at Hofstra University, author of New York and Slavery: Time to Teach the Truth (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), and editor of the ...

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

Ronald L. Feinman is the author of “Assassinations, Threats, and the American Presidency: From Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama” (Rowman Littlefield Publishers, 2015). A paperback edition is now ...