With actual samurai sidelined as Japan modernized in the nineteenth century, Italians were able to cherry-pick the aspects of the samurai’s image that they found most relevant. Some Fascists admired ...

What did Hadrian’s Wall actually do? Its history challenges the idea that walls simply separate one side from another.

Because the media can frame public events, it has played a large role in shaping how people think of Indigenous peoples’ fight for sovereignty and the integrity of their land. The movie Beans, which ...

Happy holidays! It’s that special time of year to gather with cousins, nephews, and in-laws, as we wear ironic sweaters, drink mulled wine, and reinforce traditional gender roles. “You could call it ...

In 1829, hundreds of spinners and weavers had gathered at the Norfolk Arms Hotel when the floor collapsed under them. In the tumble, the crowd fell two stories, all the way into the cellar. Thirty ...

After genocide decimated the country’s musicians, old recordings helped a new generation reconnect with Cambodia’s musical past.

If learning promotes rationality and wards off superstition, then it stands to reason that Britain’s educated classes gradually lost faith in witches, ghosts, and fairies while the masses took longer ...

Peanut butter and jelly. Milk and cookies. Andrew Jackson and … duels? That’s right—the seventh president of the United States had a predilection for old-fashioned fights of honor. Bertram Wyatt-Brown ...

Women have mined for centuries, but laws barring them from the industry helped cement the idea that mining was men’s work.

Hofstra University’s historic photographs capture Hempstead’s shops and streets before postwar development transformed Long Island.

Trees of the genus Pisonia are not your average tree. They seem like something that would be at home in Middle Earth, or maybe Harry Potter’s wizarding world. The genus is not fully understood, even ...

Three nineteenth-century memoirs reveal the risks and rewards of life on the road as a traveling bookseller.