Linton Weeks

Under the 1871 Morning Oregonian newspaper headline, "Reform Needed," is this sentence, which tells you a lot about American social life at the time: "A practice which is becoming more prevalent among our boys and girls, more especially our girls, is that of flirting."

Never mind that humans have been ...

College history majors used to study The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Today perhaps they should also be studying the decline and fall of history majors.

Since 2010, the number of history majors at Ohio State University has dropped by more than 30 percent, according to a May ...

Phrases phase in and out of everyday usage. Especially in the global hodgepodge that is American English. Sometimes, however, there are phrases forgotten that perhaps should be sayings salvaged.

Informal words and expressions that popped up in popular parlance, especially in the 19th century, says Lynne Murphy — ...

Fedoras, flat caps, baseball caps — hats are prevalent among certain American men these days. Perhaps the hats tell us more about the hat wearer than we realize.

In fact, the National American History Museum points out in its intro to an online hat exhibit that "a hat ...

The battle over the commercial trade in bird feathers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries "was one of the first times we saw a popular movement coalesce in defense of the environment, and not surprisingly it was to save birds," says Brigid McCormack, executive director of

As our nation prepares for the annual MLB All-Star Game on July 14, let us pause and refresh our memories of women's baseball in 19th-century America — and what it represented.

From the very early days of baseball in America, women were involved. First, as spectators, as reported in the ...

Under the headline "Signs of Summer" in 1916, the New Castle, Del., Herald listed: lollipops, robins, bare feet and street pianos.

Yes, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, street pianos were everywhere. Their perky, plinky, preset music — playing the same songs over and over — filled the air ...

Looking back at the nationwide support for American troops in the two world wars, we see Americans of all stripes making patriotic contributions and sacrifices — including farmers, factory workers and librarians.

Wait. What? How did librarians fit in to national security in the 20th century? ...

What do we talk about when we talk about sex? Usually, well, um, uh, sex.

But over the past couple of centuries, American attitudes toward sex — and the language that surrounds it — have shifted.

"Historically," says Stef Woods, who teaches history at American University and focuses ...

In the early 20th century, the Cherry Sisters — a family of performers from Marion, Iowa — were like a meme.

Simply invoking the name — the Cherry Sisters — was shorthand for anything awful. As Anthony Slide wrote in the Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, the onstage siblings became "synonymous with ...

Nothing says history like a retrospective exhibit.

Moving very fast, the New York Public Library responded to the Supreme Court's monumental same-sex marriage decision on June 26 by mounting a flash display of photos and documents featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history, in the Astor Hall exhibit room ...

Unlike fanatics, fad-atics move from craze to craze. And America, with its short national attention span, is the perfect place for fadatics to flourish.

But when does a fad begin to fade? When does a fad become a fixture?

"How long does the typical fad last?" asks Adrian Furnham in ...

On July 4, America will celebrate 239 years of independence.

Later in the month, our country will mark another historic moment: the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a law passed on July 26, 1990, that guarantees certain rights — and increased independence — to our compatriots ...

The flowery month of June and the whiff of wedlock is in the air.

Definitions of marriage in America keep expanding, but for most of the country's history, the word "wedding" has called to mind images of a woman in a white dress and a man in a black tuxedo. ...

To watch them being performed today, the Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear and other so-called "animal dances" of the early 1900s seem tame, tame, tame.

But for a few decades, beginning in the 19-teens, those ragtime rug-cutters shocked America and had ...

When J.R. Hardman, 28, asked to join a group of Civil War re-enactors in a military drill a few years ago, the unit commander said no dice.

Hardman was willing to wear the wool uniform, carry the gear, load the muskets, eat the hardtack, but the brass still said no.

Bomba Estéreo has always been associated with fiery, trance-inducing dance songs like "Fuego." But one of their lesser-known sweet spots is in the more mellow, breezy songs, the kind you want to listen to after a full night of hard-partying, while recovering on a beach, watching ...

When thinking about Chinese basketball players in early 20th-century America, keep in mind these two events:

• In 1882: President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which severely restricted Chinese immigration to this country. Versions of restrictive legislation remained in place until World War II, when the ...

The American wing of the Young Men's Christian Association — a worldwide organization founded in London in 1844 — launched the first basketball teams and group swim lessons in the U.S., popularized exercise classes and created the oldest summer camp still in operation, the YMCA's historians tell us.

The nationwide weirdness that was the Windshield-Pitting Mystery began in the spring of 1954. Looking back at the events today may give us a window — OK, a windshield — on the makeup and the mindset of mid-20th-century America.

The epidemic's epicenter, according to HistoryLink — an online ...