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.

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

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.

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.

For more than a century, Americans have commonly asked how public schools could do a better job of teaching people to be good citizens. One early stab at the question came from S. E. Forman, an early ...

Boredom is a fact of everyday life. It may strike when we’re reading a dry philosophy text, watching a Disney movie with our kids for the millionth time, or filling out repetitive paperwork.

It’s quite a pretty little building—note the delicate grilles, the ornately etched glass, and the little bouquet of metal flowers bursting from the roof. There was a moment around the mid-1800s in ...

Let’s tour an Icelandic turf house. From the side, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a hill; a thick carpet of grass grows up the walls and over the roof. But look closer and you can see a ...

Recent victories for democratic socialist politicians like Zohran Mamdani in New York and Janeese Lewis George in Washington, DC have gotten a lot of people talking about the “sewer socialists” who ...