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Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Other Obsession

Known as a master of horror, he also understood the power—and the limits—of science.
President Joe Biden behind the wheel of an electric car.
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Stagecoaches Could Fix Our Electric Car Problem

One solution to climate change may come from our pre-automotive past.
A graphic featuring art and archival storage.

NFTs and AI Are Unsettling the Very Concept of History

Non-fungible tokens and artificial intelligence make tracing the origins of a digital object more fragile. What are the world’s archivists to do?
Coffee table with books

A Brief History of Coffee Table Books: Origin, Precursors, and Popularity

Ever look at the tome on a coffee table and wonder why coffee table books are a thing? Consider this brief history of coffee table books.
Henry Adams and his wife, Clover Adams at Wenlock Abbey, England, 1873

A Posthumous Life

Family blessings are a curse, or they can be. The life of Henry Adams explained in his book Education.
2020 time capsule with a roll of toilet paper, mask, hourglass, and syringe

The Things They Buried: Masks, Vials, Social-Distancing Signage — And, of Course, Toilet Paper

Most Americans are eager to forget 2020. But some are making time capsules to make sure future generations remember it.

‘Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance’

An excerpt from a new book that explores the intertwined history of travel segregation and African American struggles for freedom of movement.
A boy surfs on a computer keyboard surrounded by details from earlier internet eras.

You Probably Don’t Remember the Internet

How do we memorialize life online when it’s constantly disappearing?
A shoe stepping on money.

Islands in the Stream

Musicians are in peril, at the mercy of giant monopolies that profit off their work.
Image of plastic human figurine hunched over at a desk and computer.

How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body

Decades before 'Zoom fatigue' broke our spirits, the so-called computer revolution brought with it a world of pain previously unknown to humankind.
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
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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.

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