The horror films of the 1970s captured a cultural shift from fears of institutional abuse to anxieties about psychiatric ...

Until the early twentieth century, medical schools in the United States resembled today’s for-profit colleges, both in quality and reputation. There were no common standards for curriculum or ...

Sir Robert Peel is popularly credited with the formation of the first modern municipal police force, founded in London, in 1829. Before him, what passed for policing was really a hodge-podge of ...

While most common in the nineteenth century, the practice of “telling the bees” about significant life events endures, albeit in a different form, to the present day. The most pervasive and affecting ...

Middle-aged performers are taking on roles once reserved for men, challenging expectations about age and gender in Bali.

Western political and legal systems are founded on human exceptionalism: the idea that we stand apart from, with dominion over, the rest of nature. This has facilitated rampant environmental ...

What happened when the Beat Generation bumped up against the popular culture they were rebelling against? Historian Stephen Petrus writes about how the youth subculture was turned into a commodity.

Do you thrift? If so, you’re not alone—according to the Association of Retail Professionals, about 16 to 18 percent of Americans shop at thrift stores in any given year. But how did the thrift store ...

A Pennsylvania couple spotted one of the world’s most unusual birds in their backyard feeder. The northern cardinal looked like it was painted down the middle: one half was the brown of a female ...

In the middle of a green Irish field stands a bizarre structure: not so much a building as a collection of holes, a series of gaping arches framing the sky. This is Conolly’s Folly, built in 1740 at ...

In the early- to mid-nineteenth century, Americans heard different things depending on their ideological predispositions, and perhaps to some extent we still do. After all, this summer many of us will ...

Frances Benjamin Johnston looked beyond grand estates to document the ordinary buildings that defined American life.