Science

You’re not 28 percent Finnish, either.

A recent paper provides evidence that the Tuskegee Syphilis Study reduced the life expectancy of African-American men.

How feminists transformed Valium from a wonder drug to a symbol of medical sexism.

Smog first came to Los Angeles suddenly, like a stranded hitchhiker. It was July 8th, 1943, and we were at war.

Before the word processor, perfect copy was the domain of the typist—not the literary genius.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

A brief history of self-induced abortion.

French theorists said that American native species were inferior to European ones—the former President went to great lengths to show that they were wrong.

When academics embraced scientific racism, immigration restrictions, and the suppression of “the unfit”.

How prior generations of Americans responded to the threat of infectious disease.

A shameful part of America’s history.

After Charles Hatfield began his work to wring water from the skies, San Diego experienced its wettest period in recorded history.

How do we humanely bury the dead after a disaster?

By tracing commodities beyond the human, we can learn a great deal about how cities function as ecological and economic units.

A high-school yearbook database dating to the 1900s shows how hairstyles, clothing and smiles have changed.

How the US military figured out how to make self-stable cheese ... and helped invent Cheetos to boot.

Read an excerpt from Al Roker's book about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.

The vaccination skepticism of today is rooted in postwar social movements, prompting a new generation of parents and children to question drugs and doctors.

Nasology was a 19th century pseudoscience which claimed to explain personality traits based on the shape of a person’s nose.

When the federal government began to claim a stake in the public’s physical fitness, and the origins of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.

In the 19th Century, homeopathy was popular because of its use of small doses, its emphasis on the curative power of nature, and its holistic treatment of the body.

The cultural, political, and technological roots of a fraught piece of cotton.

The cover's design, a black-and-white data display, traces its origins to the stars.

The number of infected people, measured over 70-some years and across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, declined after vaccines were introduced.

The scandalous history of sex-ed movies.

How the St. Louis Baby Tooth Study reconciled the ritual of childhood tooth loss with the geopolitics of nuclear annihilation.

John Canaday's poems look at nuclear weapons from the intimate perspectives of its developers.

After the drug was dismissed by the pharmaceutical company that developed it, a researcher started experimenting on himself with it. Powerful hallucinations ensued.

What did the signs and the phases of the moon mean to moon farmers in the 1840s?