History

a pile of uncooked macaroni shells on a white surface.
His plan to replace it with homegrown rice did not go well.
a painting of a city with boats in the water.
She apparently learned some valuable business skills as a former prostitute.
a woman's mouth with letters in the background.
In order to figure out how English might evolve in the future, we have to look at how it has changed in the near and distant past.
the interior of a large cathedral with chandeliers.
The cathedral is being explored as never before.
a close up of a bunch of wooden sticks.
A new discovery pushes back the origin of these technologies by about 40,000 years.
From grave robbing to giving your own body to science.
Worldwide, 15% of children are born out of wedlock, but the figure varies from less than 1% in places like China to 69% in Iceland.
impact crater
Many impact craters on Earth have been erased thanks to wind, water, and plate tectonics. But scientists have clever ways to find them.
Queen Calafia seems like she could have sprung from the pages of a modern fantasy novel.
Not even Einstein immediately knew the power of the equations he gave us.
Archaeologists turn to other scientific fields to fill in the picture of how victims lived and why they died.
Great Pyramid
A non-invasive method for looking inside structures is solving mysteries about the ancient pyramid.
The strange bronze artifact perplexed scholars for more than a century, including how it traveled so far from home.
Silhouette of human hand with open palm praying to god at sunset background
The Church of England is debating if believers should stop using gendered language when talking about God.
Democratic freedom, rapturous religion, and newspapers created a hotbed for social experimentation in 19th-century America.
Étienne-Louis Boullée, Cenotaph tomb for Isaac Newton
From the Palace of the Soviets to The Illinois, these unmade buildings would have taken the art of architecture to whole new heights.
In 1934, American Communists translated a Stalinist book about revolution into a children’s game. Curiously, it didn't catch on.
Hungarian Gypsy Girl by Amrita Sher-Gil
In the West, discussions of 20th-century painting are dominated by Warhol and Picasso, but trendsetting artists are found everywhere.
Was it the enormous magnitude of the quake, or is the problem with the buildings?
A wide-scale examination of early Neolithic human skeletons reveals the violent history of a supposedly peaceful period.
Could the prevalence of flood myths around the world tell us something about early human migration or even the way our brains work?
Socrates addresses the Athenian assembly
Most philosophers merely contemplate the world, but what about the ones who actually tried to change it?
A physical map of the Earth showing Alaska, Siberia, and the Bering Strait.
Ancient humans crossed the Bering Strait land bridge from Asia into North America. But some of them went back.
Hand-drawn treasure map, complete with a red X that "marks the spot."
X marks the spot. The Dutch town of Ommeren has been swamped by detectorists armed with shovels looking for $20-million treasure.
What we've learning from the world’s coldest, most forbidding, and most peaceful continent.
Ivan the Terrible and his son
Created in the 1880s, "Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan," which depicts a father murdering his son, divides Russians to this day.
Ancient bones reveal that domesticated felines were at home in Pre-Neolithic Poland around 8,000 years ago.
Roman Republic banquet
Studying the display of personal wealth across time can help us better understand the history of socioeconomic inequality.