Historian Eric Cline argues the Bronze Age collapse wasn't the work of one invading force or one bad harvest, but something far harder to stop: An overly interdependent system that had no way to absorb multiple shocks at once.

When Jesus was crucified, it led to even more followers. When books are banned, people flock to read them. Humans are fascinated by the forbidden, which is why censorship – especially in the digital age – doesn’t work. Jacob Mchangama explains.

We don't learn from history because we can't learn from history.

An extraordinary haberdasher obsessed with buttons, lace collars, and death pioneered modern statistical analysis during the Age of Reason.

"I was stunned. Here in front of me was the original apparatus through which a new vision of the world was slowly and painfully brought to light."

Whenever something goes wrong — in business as in life — we tend to get cause and effect totally muddled up.

A new method of mapping migration factors in erratic movements and changing climate.

New DNA analyses raise questions over the theory that Christopher Columbus and his men brought syphilis to Europe.

With the invention of the leap year, the Julian calendar was used worldwide for over 1500 years. Over time, it led only to catastrophe.

Perhaps it’s not just an oddly shaped hill, after all.

Exile is a kind of death of who you once were.

The young and healthy were not just as likely to die as the old and frail, according to a new analysis.

Explore how belief shapes destiny, from Oedipus Rex to modern geopolitics.

The answer largely centers on crops and cows.

Even the French got upset.

We don't know what causes Miyake events, but these great surges of energy can help us understand the past — while posing a threat to our future.

"The Man in the High Castle" may be the most beloved alternate history book, but it is not the most historically accurate.

When Mongol traders came knocking, Sultan Muhammad II shaved off their beards. Three years later, his whole empire was annihilated.

Without Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré, the genius of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer would have been lost to time.

Is history decided by discernible laws or does it unfold based on random, unpredictable occurrences?

The game of Plinko perfectly illustrates chaos theory. Even with indistinguishable initial conditions, the outcome is always uncertain.

Hint: It wasn't always an asteroid.

Commodus lived the anti-Stoic life, pursuing lust, narcissism, and self-indulgence.

Using data collected from ancient civilizations across the world, researchers identified the most significant factors in human development. War came out on top. 

New research finds that dinosaurs were already adapted to living in cold climates before the end-Triassic mass extinction. But how?

Scientists across a range of disciplines have helped solve Darwin's dilemma.

One particular revolution was so important, that at least one historian thinks the 20th century officially began in 1914 and ended in 1991.

Although equal parts Hollywood blockbuster and Putinist propaganda, "Trotsky" still manages to capture the good, the bad, and the ugly of Russia’s revolutionary past.

You might think that we live in a three dimensional Universe based on space alone. But you cannot leave time out of it. If you were asked to describe how you […]