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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
The history of cartography might have been very different if the Latin version of Muhammad al-Idrisi's atlas had survived instead of the Arabic one.
Ideal models of family life have been broken by societal, technological, and cultural shifts — and we need to rethink our options.
The author of Frankenstein had an obsession with the cemetery and saw love and death as connected.
As the Manhattan Project headed for completion, German attempts to build a nuclear weapon had already been dismantled.
Explore how belief shapes destiny, from Oedipus Rex to modern geopolitics.
Music is part of the human experience, which is why some philosophers have written about it. Some had wacky ideas.
In Kannauj, perfumers have been making monsoon-infused mitti attar for centuries.
Can targeted interventions save Americans?
The use of the letter x as an unknown is a relatively modern convention.
In many ways, it was worse than Chernobyl.
Researchers estimate there may be as many as ten million trillion trillion phages on Earth — that's 10 with 30 zeros after it.
Don’t argue with science. Just do it.
As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery… consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
The arsons were no accident, archaeological evidence suggests.
A brief look at the six-decade challenge to psychiatry.
The global extent of the Revolutionary War surprises many Americans today — but it was crucial to independence.
The visible Universe extends 46.1 billion light-years from us, while we've probed scales down to as small as ~10^-19 meters.
Only Caesar lived to tell the tale.
You could send your potential paramour a perfume bottle, a cigar cutter, travel plans — or maybe some cocaine.