In the late 19th century, Brooklynites had many ways to celebrate the New Year, but the ability to participate depended on ...

A stroll through the Presidential-portrait wing at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., is, among other things, a game of Now You See It, Now You Don’t. In the beginning, not a whisper ...

NOTHING in all history had ever succeeded like America, and every American in the nineteenth century knew it. Nowhere else on the globe had nature been at once so rich and so generous, and her riches ...

A bitter election. Social unrest and violence at home and abroad that seem to augur ruinous times. A gaping political divide fed in part by new technology and ways to communicate. Sound familiar?

From the farm to the battlefield, 19th-century shotguns put food on the table, kept enemies at bay, and became widely available during a post-Industrial Revolution economy. The Civil War had made the ...

The old light fixtures we see so often in Brooklyn townhouses that we think are original to the building are quite often early electric lights or mid 20th century chandeliers. “It is rare to find ...

Fort Darnet, a 19th-century fort on the River Medway, was auctioned for more than double its initial price after 40 years ...

When we geeks talk about popular music, we break it down into decades. If I say "the '50s," an image springs to mind: leather jackets, poodle skirts and neon jukeboxes full of Elvis and Buddy Holly.

More than fifty years before it was isolated as a drug, Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed up cocaine. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the poet was increasingly dependent on opium, a ...

The identification of geographical patterns in microbial distributions has begun to challenge purely ecological explanations of biogeography and the underlying principle of “everything is everywhere: ...

I have what is probably a not-very-healthy fascination with 19th century crime. In addition to what are generally regarded as the first serial murders (the Whitechapel killings of 1888), the century ...

Many Victorians struggled to understand and explain poverty. Was this because of circumstances beyond the individual's control or the direct result of their indolence? To discourage dependency, ...