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 human selective breeding programme took place in a North American bible communist community, Oneida, between 1869 and 1879. It was probably the first such breeding experiment of the modern era, and ...

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?

Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon. Mary Prince's story is, in some ways, a familiar narrative. Born a slave around 1788, she was abused by a mistress, Mrs. Wood — beaten, forced to work when ...

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 ...

George Bryan “Beau” Brummel, described as the most famous and influential man in early 19th-century London, was the center of a revolution. He sparked change not with rhetoric or military might, but ...

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.

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, ...

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: ...

Editor’s note: This is an update of a series that ran in 2010. Read the originals here: Part 1 and Part 2. I like to go to open houses with friends who are looking to buy, or for myself, to satisfy my ...