Photos from the American Library in Paris reveal how librarians brought books to US troops during World War I.

Impressionism has made, well, an impression on art historians and art lovers alike since the late nineteenth century, and Edgar Degas is one of the genre’s icons. But the French painter had a secret ...

Around 2008, the Anglophone media noticed something interesting happening in Moscow. Dogs were taking the metro, purposefully riding up and down escalators, taking their place in train cars alongside ...

What did Hadrian’s Wall actually do? Its history challenges the idea that walls simply separate one side from another.

With actual samurai sidelined as Japan modernized in the nineteenth century, Italians were able to cherry-pick the aspects of the samurai’s image that they found most relevant. Some Fascists admired ...

Three nineteenth-century memoirs reveal the risks and rewards of life on the road as a traveling bookseller.

The AP reports that there are no more union coal mines left in Kentucky. That’s a symbolic milestone in the decline of organized labor, because the mines of Harlan County, Kentucky were the sites of ...

In 1829, hundreds of spinners and weavers had gathered at the Norfolk Arms Hotel when the floor collapsed under them. In the tumble, the crowd fell two stories, all the way into the cellar. Thirty ...

After genocide decimated the country’s musicians, old recordings helped a new generation reconnect with Cambodia’s musical past.

Laser guns have long been a staple of science fiction. Now Chinese researchers claim to have developed a portable laser rifle. It sounds truly horrific; it does not kill, but can set fire to clothes ...

Women have mined for centuries, but laws barring them from the industry helped cement the idea that mining was men’s work.

The Continental Divide is the hydrological boundary between watersheds that drain into the Pacific and those that drain into the Atlantic. It runs from the Bering Strait in Alaska to the Strait of ...