Photos from the American Library in Paris reveal how librarians brought books to US troops during World War I.

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.

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.

Laser guns have long been a staple of science fiction. Now Chinese researchers claim to have developed a portable laser rifle. It sounds truly horrific; it does not kill, but can set fire to clothes ...

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

The Continental Divide is the hydrological boundary between watersheds that drain into the Pacific and those that drain into the Atlantic. It runs from the Bering Strait in Alaska to the Strait of ...

On the Scottish island of Iona, two saints were trying to found a monastery. Every day, the workmen would lay the stones of the foundation. Every morning, they would return to find the last day’s work ...

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

There just aren’t that many mibsters shooting taws for keeps as well as funs anymore. Where have all the miggles—the aggies, cabbage leafs, commies, crockies, glassies, peewees, snot-agates, and ...

“American Buddhism” can mean a lot of different things, from silent retreats geared toward tech CEOs to longstanding congregations embedded in Asian immigrant communities. And ’twas ever thus: ...