The southbound Underground Railroad: finding freedom in Mexico

Markers along the Underground Railroad

An interactive map of all National Park Service designated sites that were part of the Underground Railroad, helping shuttle escaped enslaved people to freedom.

Learn how Mexico’s anti-slavery stance shaped the US–Texas conflict

Historian Alice Baumgartner explores how Mexico’s abolition of slavery clashed with Anglo settlers' ambitions in Texas. The episode reveals how enslaved people fled south to freedom, reshaping the politics that led to Texas independence and the Mexican-American War.

Niagara Falls was a key Underground Railroad crossing point

In the mid-1800s, the Suspension Bridge near Niagara Falls connected the US to Canada and served as a frequent crossing location for people escaping slavery via the Underground Railroad.

Read Truth's account of escaping slavery in 1826

After her enslaver broke his promise to free her, Truth left before dawn, carrying her infant daughter and a bundle of clothes. She later found refuge with the Van Wagener family, who paid her master $20 for her freedom and $5 for her infant daughter.

Investigating 'the city that kills women'

For nearly three decades, thousands of women have disappeared near Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Some were mutilated in ways that led authorities to suggest it the work of a serial killer, some were trafficked into slavery, and others have never been found. Opening with a hail of bullets, this 10-part podcast series hopes to uncover those responsible for the femicides.

Hikers can walk through Maya routes on Mexico’s first long-distance trail

The Camino del Mayab is a 68-mile trail west of Cancún that follows ancient Maya paths and modern railways. Built in collaboration with local Maya communities, it promotes Indigenous culture, preserves heritage, and supports community-based tourism along the route.

An interactive investigation into drugs and migration in San Francisco

This interactive article investigates the connection between the boom in US migration from Honduras and drug dealing in San Francisco. A high concentration of Hondurans are fleeing Siria Valley, where poverty and national murder rates run high...

US immigrants shifted from primarily originating in Ireland and Germany to Mexico and India

This visualization tracks the top country of birth among US immigrants by state from 1850 to the present, revealing a dramatic shift from European-dominated immigration to today's prominence of Mexican and Indian immigrants.

One graffiti artist turned a train tunnel into his gallery

Chris Pape, also known as Freedom, began exploring a tunnel under Manhattan's Riverside Park when he was a kid. As he grew more involved with graffiti, he turned its walls into a massive art project, one that reflected both the history of graffiti and the people who made the tunnel their home.

The history behind the country's first Black-owned bookstore

In 1834, the first Black-owned book store was opened in New York City by abolitionist David Ruggles. Ruggles founded an antislavery newspaper and was an organizer for what eventually became the Underground Railroad. His bookstore was dedicated to abolitionist literature but was also a meeting place and lending library for Black people, including those who had escaped slavery.

In June 2025, apprehensions of illegal border crossings at the US-Mexico border reached an all-time low

Total US-Mexico border encounters fell to just 25,228—the lowest monthly figure ever recorded by Customs and Border Patrol—with only 8,024 Border Patrol apprehensions and a single-day low of 136 detentions on June 28.

The 13th Amendment's criminal exception enabled new forms of forced labor

Southern states exploited the amendment's clause allowing slavery "as punishment for crime" to arrest thousands of Black Americans on minor charges, leasing them to private employers through convict labor systems that persisted for decades.

Integration of Latino players in MLB

The Senators’ spectacular losing record obscures one of the most important stories in baseball history: the club’s role in integrating Latino players into the major leagues

Pompeii’s ruins expose the brutal realities of Rome’s sex trade

Drawing on graffiti, slave collars, brothel art, and the story of “Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways,” this piece reconstructs the violent, coercive world of Pompeii’s enslaved prostitutes—and how their owners controlled, renamed, and exploited them.

Read a complete history of urban mass transit in the United States

Explore the rise and fall of American mass transit, from the horse-drawn omnibus era through the streetcar age to the automobile's dominance. In the 1920s, streetcars carried 12 to 13 billion riders per year. By 1963, that number had shrunken to 300,000.

Here's how humans migrated across the world

From our deepest origins in Africa all the way to the Americas, by looking at the fossils and archaeological materials we have been able to trace the path our ancestors took during thee short window of time when we took over the world.

Searching for a hate crime's unknown victim

In 2004, two federal agents heard a rumor: two white men, one under investigation for an unrelated crime, had gotten away with killing a Black man 15 years earlier as a requirement to join a white supremacist group. One of the men confessed to the crime, though he didn't know who was killed. This series dives into the search for the slain man and the justice he deserved.

A Chinese-Mexican alliance marked one of history's largest nonviolent money laundering schemes

In 2019, Chinese-American gangster Xizhi Li was arrested for an expansive money laundering scheme spanning four continents. Li reportedly laundered hundreds of millions of dollars for cartel members, wealthy Chinese Americans, and other foreign countries.

How a worm helped give the southern US its reputation

"The germ of laziness" that blanketed the southern US for centuries with unshakable fatigue, brain fog, and distended bellies paired with emaciated frames was actually a worm. This parasitic worm lives in the gut, where it can stay up to five years, laying up to 10,000 eggs daily. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide continue to suffer from hookworm infections, often obtained by walking barefoot across infected soil.

A riveting retelling of the 1846 Donner Party, the doomed western pioneers

Eighty-one people went with the Donner Party into the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846 via what they thought would be a shortcut to the West. Only 41 came out. The infamous episode of Western travel is captured in narrative detail in this four-part podcast series. This first episode reveals the motivations that pushed the party on this specific route.

Hundreds of women secretly joined the Union and Confederate armies during the war

Hear the story of women who disguised themselves as men to enlist in both Union and Confederate armies—serving as soldiers, medics, and spies.

New Mexico is home to a 'breakfast burrito byway'

Santa Fe's Tía Sophia's was the first restaurant to offer breakfast burritos in the 1970s, a heritage New Mexico has fully embraced. Look no further than its "breakfast burrito byway," a state-sanctioned trail that allows visitors to check out some of the best morning bites in the country.

Japan's mysterious disappearance industry

Tens of thousands of Japanese people reportedly choose to leave their lives behind and vanish, according to a 2016 book by Lena Mauger. This long read dives into some of the book's claims via interviews with some of the individuals opting to vanish,...

22 fascinating discoveries of massive gold coin hoards

The gallery highlights major gold coin treasures from ancient to modern times, from the Saddle Ridge hoard in California in the 1800s (now worth $10M) to finds in Baltimore, Kentucky, and more. Each discovery reveals something about the period, with some buried and others left in vaults.

'The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ introduced a teenage Hughes to the literary world

While traveling to Mexico to visit his father, Hughes began scrawling “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” as he crossed the Mississippi River, using the river as a metaphor for the Black experience. The poem was published in 1921 in the Crisis, an NAACP magazine edited by WEB DuBois, kickstarting Hughes’ literary career.

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.

In 1963, a basement renovation in Turkey revealed a passageway to a hidden, multilevel underground city that once housed as many as 20,000 people

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

In 1915, workers recovered a submarine-like vessel from the Chicago River, prompting fears of German espionage

Abraham Lincoln was almost assassinated weeks before his inauguration as he traveled from Illinois to DC through Baltimore in 1861; it took two independent claims for Lincoln to be convinced the threat was real

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon, until it was revealed that he was at home the whole time.

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

The Great Salt Lake's distinct dual coloration results from high-salinity organisms that only live in the northern portion and produce a purple protein.

Human-to-human transmission of hantavirus remains extremely rare, so the 2026 hantavirus cruise ship outbreak doesn't mean we're facing a COVID-style pandemic risk.

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

The United States has had a tumultuous relationship with Cuba since its 1959 revolution, highlighted by a nuclear crisis and a decades-long trade embargo.

While El Niño moves warm Pacific Ocean waters east along the equator, La Niña moves them west, shifting where rainfall will become more common for months.

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

Lesser-known phobias include turophobia, or the fear of cheese, and nomophobia, the fear of being without your cell phone.

Recent research found that the brain doesn't seem to massively rewire following amputation—upending earlier beliefs about the cause of phantom limb pain.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, but became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US

Play the role of a student in a game where you try to navigate college and remain debt-free, selecting different income levels, high school experience, race, ethnicity, and more.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley' is infamous for having some of the highest industrial pollution, toxic air emissions, and cancer risks in the US.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict is the largest ground war in Europe since World War II in casualties, forces mobilized, and displacement of civilians.