NOTHING in all history had ever succeeded like America, and every American in the nineteenth century knew it. Nowhere else on the globe had nature been at once so rich and so generous, and her riches ...

A stroll through the Presidential-portrait wing at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., is, among other things, a game of Now You See It, Now You Don’t. In the beginning, not a whisper ...

A bitter election. Social unrest and violence at home and abroad that seem to augur ruinous times. A gaping political divide fed in part by new technology and ways to communicate. Sound familiar?

From the farm to the battlefield, 19th-century shotguns put food on the table, kept enemies at bay, and became widely available during a post-Industrial Revolution economy. The Civil War had made the ...

A human selective breeding programme took place in a North American bible communist community, Oneida, between 1869 and 1879. It was probably the first such breeding experiment of the modern era, and ...

The old light fixtures we see so often in Brooklyn townhouses that we think are original to the building are quite often early electric lights or mid 20th century chandeliers. “It is rare to find ...

More than fifty years before it was isolated as a drug, Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed up cocaine. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the poet was increasingly dependent on opium, a ...

When we geeks talk about popular music, we break it down into decades. If I say "the '50s," an image springs to mind: leather jackets, poodle skirts and neon jukeboxes full of Elvis and Buddy Holly.

There's rock music -- you know, the kind inaugurated by Chuck Berry in the 1950s -- and then there's rock music, the kind that was played on actual rocks in 19th-century England. Paul Collins has ...

Many Victorians struggled to understand and explain poverty. Was this because of circumstances beyond the individual's control or the direct result of their indolence? To discourage dependency, ...

The identification of geographical patterns in microbial distributions has begun to challenge purely ecological explanations of biogeography and the underlying principle of “everything is everywhere: ...

Editor’s note: This is an update of a series that ran in 2010. Read the originals here: Part 1 and Part 2. I like to go to open houses with friends who are looking to buy, or for myself, to satisfy my ...