HeyJaredWhat's Gone Right
Stories of hope, inspiration, and innovation in American history. I'm interested in how people have worked to help our country live up to its promise.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 12
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- Sep 27, 2026
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- Jul 19, 2026
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“Be Free or Die” (opens the original)
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The national parks, filmmaker Ken Burns famously said, are “America’s best idea” — definitely something that has gone right in our past. But for more than a century, there was a glaring and (frankly) embarrassing hole in the history told in our parks: they didn’t reckon with Reconstruction, that remarkable, tumultuous, and misunderstood period following the Civil War. We have Civil War parks aplenty (more than 30!), but not until 2017 did the National Park Service establish the the first (and st
“Lighthouses in the Sky, Serving All Mankind” (opens the original)
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My kids and I spend many hours racing through the woods of Maine in search of baseball and soccer fields where their teams are scheduled to play. We weave through miles of back roads, turning at one poorly marked intersection after another. Just when we start wondering if we’ll ever see another human being again, lo — the trees part, a parking lot appears, and we arrive precisely when GPS had predicted we would. It’s really quite miraculous.GPS (Global Positioning System) is yet another transfor
“Fight like hell for the dead” (opens the original)
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“Pray for the dead,” exhorted famed labor activist Mother Jones more than a century ago. “Fight like hell for the living!”But historian Peter Wood, my undergraduate mentor and dear friend, emphasized the inverse: as historians, we can pray for the living, but we must fight like hell for the dead. “After all,” he wrote, “we are their advocates of last resort, working to restore their dignity, their complexity, and often their very presence.”1I hear Dr. Wood’s admonitio
Going Bananas for Baseball (opens the original)
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For several years, I resisted the Savannah Bananas baseball team.If you haven’t heard of the Savannah Bananas, you may need to take a few minutes to watch some of their YouTube videos. They are a baseball team, yes, but unlike anything you’ve ever imagined. Often likened to the Harlem Globetrotters, they play “Banana Ball,” a souped-up version of baseball featuring flaming bats, break-dancing base coaches, and acrobatics in the outfield. I’m part baseball purist and part curmudgeon, so I initial
The Woman Who Killed the Card Catalog (opens the original)
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Card catalogs are relics of a bygone era. Like rotary phones and teletype machines, the card catalog is obsolete in the 21st century, replaced by searchable online databases that give us instantaneous access to millions of books, photos, recordings, maps, and other materials from all over the globe. The company that used to print the trademark cream-colored cards ceased production more than a decade ago.1The nostalgist in me mourns the card catalog’s demise. I spent countless hours of
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