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A collage including Betty Boop.

The Mixed-Up Masters of Early Animation

Pioneering cartoonists were experimental, satiric, erotic, and artistically ambitious.
The Milky Way above Lanyon Quoit, a neolithic burial chamber in Cornwall, England.

What Big History Overlooks In Its Myth

Sweeping the human story into a cosmic tale is a thrill but we should be wary about what is overlooked in the grandeur.
A newsboy holding a bag of papers.

Popular Journalism’s Day in ‘The Sun’

The penny press of the nineteenth century was a revolution in newspapers—and is a salutary reminder of lost ties between reporters and readers.
A social gathering in 1862

The 19th-Century Roots of Instagram

Social networks existed long before the invention of social media.
light

The Historical Cost of Light

How difficult was it to obtain artificial light before the 19th century? Well...
Person with a microphone next to newsprint

Peak Newsletter? That Was 80 Years Ago

In the 1940s, journalists fled traditional news outlets to write directly for subscribers. What happened next may be a warning.
Christopher Columbus statue being removed from Grant Park in Chicago.
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Americans Put Up Statues During the Gilded Age. Today We’re Tearing Them Down.

Why the Gilded Age was the era of statues.
A painting of two people

Dispatches from 1918

Thinking about our future, we look back on the aftermath of a century-old pandemic.

All the World’s a Page

Paper was never simply a writing surface, but a complicated substance that folded itself into the fabric of culture and consciousness.
Cover of the book These Truths by Jill Lepore.

Only Dead Metaphors Can Be Resurrected

Historical narratives of the United States have never not been shaped by an anxiety about the end of it all. Are we a new Rome or a new Zion?

Bowling For Suburbia

By adopting middle-class aesthetics, the bar-basement bowling alley became the "poor man's country club."
Abstract image of a wedge whose shading does not align with the shading in its context.

A Brief History of the Gig

The gig economy wasn’t built in a day.

The Trouble with Triscuits

Though the "electricity biscuit" thesis is plausible, killjoy historians need more evidence.
An illustration from a book of homes published by a Pennsylvania lumber company in 1920

The Latent Racism of the Better Homes in America Program

How Better Homes in America—a collaboration between Herbert Hoover and the editor of a conservative women’s magazine—promoted idealized whiteness.

The Noise of Time

What does the past sound like – and can listening to it help us understand history better?

How New York’s Bagel Union Fought — and Beat — a Mafia Takeover

The mob saw an opportunity. Local 338 had other ideas.
Four people looking at a latrine

The Paradise of the Latrine

American toilet-building and the continuities of colonial and postcolonial development.
Picture of the Challenger Tragedy.
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Lessons From the Challenger Tragedy

Normalization of deviance is a useful concept that was developed to explain how the Challenger disaster happened.

A Brief History of American Pharma: From Snake Oil to Big Money

The dark side of the medical industrial complex.

Bitcoin Dreams

The pitfalls and the potential of cryptocurrency are explored in three recent publications.
Dutch paintings of man writing letter and woman reading letter.

How Personal Letters Built the Possibility of a Modern Public

The first newspapers contained not high-minded journalism, but hundreds of readers’ letters exchanging news with one another.

With Plans for Cities in Space, Jeff Bezos Looks Back to the Future

The Amazon CEO's vision of space settlements draws on 1970s thinking, without adding anything new.

Why Disco Made Pop Songs Longer

Disco, DJs, and the impact of the 12-inch single.

We Built a Broken Internet. Now We Need to Burn It to the Ground.

Silicon Valley veteran Mike Monteiro explains how designers destroyed the world.

A Map of the Internet from May 1973

The modern internet has come a long way.

Debunking the Capitalist Cowboy

Business schools fetishize innovation, but their heroes succeeded due to manipulation of corporate law, not personal brilliance.
Abraham Lincoln visiting soldiers encamped at the Civil War battlefield of Antietam in October, 1982.

Abraham Lincoln’s Foreign Policy Helped Win the Civil War

Why Lincoln’s "one war at a time" doctrine saved the Union.
Landscape shot of Los Angeles, with Hollywoodland sign in the background.

True West: Searching for the Familiar in Early Photos of L.A. and San Francisco

A look at early photography reveals the nuances of California's early development.
Artistic photo of factory pollution

Endless Combustion

Three new books examine how the rise of coal, oil, and gas have permanently remade our world.

Finding Lena, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

In 1972, a photo of a Swedish Playboy model was used to create the JPEG. The model herself was mostly a mystery—until now.

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