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Pilgrims going to church armed with guns.

God and Guns

Patrick Blanchfield tracks the long-standing entanglement of guns and religion in the United States. Part 1 of 2.
by Patrick Blanchfield via The Revealer on September 25, 2015

How the US Military Helped Invent Cheetos

How the US military figured out how to make self-stable cheese ... and helped invent Cheetos to boot.
by Anastacia Marx De Salcedo via Wired on August 7, 2015
partner

How a Standoff with the Black Panthers Fueled the Rise of SWAT

SWAT teams were created in the 1960s to combat violent events. Since then, the specialized teams have morphed into something very different.
via Retro Report on August 5, 2015

The Battle Ship in Union Square

In 1917, the U.S. Navy built a full-size battleship in the heart of New York City.
by Amanda Uren via Mashable on April 30, 2015
Text overlay over a photograph of a WW1 soldier aiming a machine gun over a pile of sandbags.

40 Maps That Explain World War I

Why the war started, how the Allies won, and why the world has never been the same.
by Matthew Yglesias, Zack Beauchamp, Timothy B. Lee via Vox on August 14, 2014
Black-and-white still image from the film "Dr. Strangelove," in which a man is shouting and waving his hat in the air while riding a missile in flight.

Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was True

How Stanley Kubrick’s film “Dr. Strangelove” exposed dangers inherent in nuclear command-and-control systems.
by Eric Schlosser via The New Yorker on January 17, 2014

The International Chemical Weapons Taboo

Our horror of chemical agents is one of the great success stories of modern diplomacy.
by Richard Price via Boston Globe on September 8, 2013
Nuclear weapon mushroom cloud

Mythologizing the Bomb

The beauty of the atomic scientists' calculations hid from them the truly Faustian contract they scratched their names to.
by E. L. Doctorow via The Nation on August 14, 1995
Zbigniew Brzezinski

The Coldest Cold Warrior

How a sharp-elbowed Polish academic with an unpronounceable name helped defeat the Soviet Union.
by Eric Edelman via The Bulwark on May 23, 2025
American Flag with Stars replaced with atoms and stripes replaced by syringes and graduated cylinders

The Rise (and Fall?) of the National Science Foundation

In the ’50s, America declared science an ‘endless frontier.’ We may be reaching the end of it.
by Carly Anne York via The Chronicle of Higher Education on February 21, 2025
A collage of a Teflon pan frying an egg, surrounded by nuclear bombs and the molecular structure of Teflon.

The Long, Strange History of Teflon

First discovered in 1938, Teflon has been used for everything from helping to create the first atomic bomb to keeping your eggs from sticking to the pan.
by Rudy Molinek via Smithsonian on August 20, 2024
A soldier walking an old woman through a destroyed city.

D-Day’s Forgotten Victims Speak Out

Eighty years after D-Day, few know one of its darkest stories: the thousands of civilians killed by a carpet-bombing campaign of little military purpose.
by Ed Vulliamy via New York Review of Books on June 10, 2024
A Mexican family stands next to the border wall between Mexico and the United States, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on May 23, 2017.
partner

America’s Border Wall Is Bipartisan

Biden continues a tradition of building fences at the US-Mexico border that long precedes Donald Trump.
by Mary Mendoza via Made By History on October 30, 2023
AR-15 with the American flag attatched.

The Curse of the AR-15

How the gun became a cultural icon—and unmade America.
by Colin Dickey via The New Republic on October 23, 2023
Oppenheimer and other scientists at the site of the Trinity Test.

What “Oppenheimer” Misses About The Decision to Drop the Bomb

The Truman administration launched a PR campaign to inflate casualty numbers to justify the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
by John R. Emery, Anna Pluff via Inkstick on August 10, 2023
Illustration of a soldier in a tank battering through a fiery wooden structure.

A Fire Started in Waco. Thirty Years Later, It’s Still Burning.

Behind the Oklahoma City bombing and even the January 6th attack was a military-style assault in Texas that galvanized the far right.
by Daniel Immerwahr via The New Yorker on May 1, 2023
Cover of "Gravity's Rainbow," depicting a orange-red sky over a small city.

History Is Hard to Decode

On 50 years of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.”
by M. Keith Booker via Los Angeles Review of Books on February 28, 2023
Drawing of a fighter plane.

The Real Developmental Engine

Throughout its history, the technology sector has been dependent on the federal budget.
by Jeannette Estruth via The Drift on February 22, 2023
German observation balloon launched near the Somme, September 1916.
partner

Why a Spy Balloon Inspires Such Fear and Fascination

When it comes to protecting our personal privacy, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
by Alison Byerly via HNN on February 19, 2023
Technology and California graphic.

Blame Palo Alto

From Stanford to Silicon Valley, a small town in California spread tech’s gospel of data and control.
by Scott Wasserman Stern via The New Republic on February 6, 2023
Vannevar Bush portrait

The Atlantic Writers Project: Vannevar Bush

A contemporary Atlantic writer reflects on one of the voices from the magazine's archives who helped shape the publication—and the nation.
by Ian Bogost via The Atlantic on July 11, 2022
Black and white photo of D-Day Normandy Landings

For the Anniversary of D-Day - Blitzkrieg Manquée? Or, a New Mode of "Firepower War"?

Why and how did D-Day succeed? The question has given postwar historians no peace.
by Adam Tooze via Chartbook on June 6, 2022
Ray Walston, Eileen Brennan and Paul Newman in the 1973 movie ‘The Sting,’ in which con artists use wiretapping to gamble on a horse race.

The Wiretappers Who Invented a High-Tech Crime

Before Americans worried about government or corporate surveillance, 19th-century criminals took advantage of a new technology to steal valuable information.
by Brian Hochman via The Wall Street Journal on March 31, 2022
A picture of armed militias

What the Term “Gun Culture” Misses About White Supremacy

The rise of tactical gun culture among civilians reveals a new front in the U.S. battle against nativist authoritarianism.
by Chad Kautzer via Boston Review on December 17, 2021
Cover of Moyne's book, with the subtitle "How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War," in front of a desert landscape.

Not Humane, Just Invisible

A counter-narrative to Samuel Moyn’s "Humane": drone warfare and the long history of liberal empire blurring the line between policing and endless war.
by Priya Satia via Los Angeles Review of Books on December 3, 2021
Bottles of WD-40 on a shelf

How WD-40 Became Rust’s Worst Enemy

The history of WD-40, a chemical substance with an unusual origin story and a rust-fighting ability that has become a standby of workbenches the world over.
by David Buck via Tedium on November 26, 2021
George W. Bush speaking to marines

Why Did We Invade Iraq?

The most complete account we are likely to get of the deceptions and duplicities that led to war leaves some crucial mysteries unsolved.
by Fred Kaplan via New York Review of Books on July 6, 2021
Roger Payne and Scott McVay's aural spectrograph rendering the whale sequences

Minor Listening, Major Influence: Revisiting Songs of the Humpback

Recorded accidentally by the Navy during the Cold War, "Songs of the Humpback Whale" became a hit album that changed perceptions about the natural world.
by Alaina Claire Feldman via E-Flux on May 1, 2021
Background photo shows secret deployment of Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. On the right is a photo of Juanita Moody.

The Once-Classified Tale of Juanita Moody: The Woman Who Helped Avert a Nuclear War

America’s bold response to the Soviet Union depended on an unknown spy agency operative whose story can at last be told.
by David Wolman, Susan Seubert via Smithsonian on February 23, 2021
Subject in sensory deprivation in 1957 isolation study

American Solitude

Notes toward a history of isolation.
by Jeffrey Mathias via Perspectives on History on February 17, 2021
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