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The History Place has a long and informative article about the Irish Potato Famine and the associated exodus from Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century. Depressing reading. My own direct ancestors did not emigrate then; they mostly left Ireland in the 1890s.

This 2002 New Yorker article by Gay Talese on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge is an excellent sociological look at how the bridge affected the lives of ordinary people. I live practically under this bridge, and I got this apartment from a Kennedy fifth cousin, so I'm stretching just a bit to post the article link here. But neighborhood history is important too.

I've been watching repeats of the series Quest for the Sea on PBS (Long Island). Quest for the Sea is a "reality show" like Frontier House, only it's set in a 1930s Newfoundland outport. The women do housework. The men fish. Last week they didn't salt the cod properly and it got maggoty, which was kind of like a horror show. One of the participants is a professor at Memorial University, which profiled him.