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

Carolyn Barske Crawford is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Alabama. Chestnut Trees in Bloom, by William Henry Holmes. [Smithsonian American Art Museum] At one time, more ...

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 ...

Conservatives in South Carolina first attempted to defeat the state’s new post-Civil War constitution by appealing to the federal government they had fought three years prior. A petition was ...

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 ...