The Vandals were buried beneath the awful weight of metaphor. Dr Case It might seem a stretch to...
History
With the addition of minarets, Hagia Sophia was converted from a Christian basilica to an Islamic mosque. Candace...
A particularly fruitful moment for technological innovation? Viktor M Vasnetsov Not all technologies are created equal. Researchers devised...
10th century CE Greek copy of Aristarchus of Samos’s calculations of the relative sizes of the sun, moon and the...
Wikimedia Commons What would have happened if the Patriots had been defeated in the War of Independence?...
Portuguese Fort Aguada, Goa, India / Photo by Abhijit Nandi, Creative Commons Beginning in the early modern age, European...
Video by Kai-Jae Wang/Harvard Staff Guided by Semitic Museum curator, students create ‘Dream Stela’ replica. By Jill...
The Plimpton 322 tablet. UNSW/Andrew Kelly, Creative Commons A 3,700-year old Babylonian clay tablet reveals an ancient method of constructing right-angled triangles that...
Marble statue of Roman Ceres or Greek Demeter. The Romans inherited their idea of human nature from...
New research using ancient DNA finds that a population split after people first arrived in North America...
UNESCO-listed heritage site Machu Picchu attracts around 1,000 tourists a day. Rodrigo Argenton/Wikipedia, Creative Commons Is UNESCO’s prestigious lists of tangible...
Detail, Phidias(?), Parthenon Frieze, c. 438-32 B.C.E., pentelic marble (420 linear feet of the 525 that complete...
Fresco showing a woman called Sappho holding writing implements from Pompeii Naples National Archaeological Museum. Wikimedia Commons Sappho...
Teeming with secrets… edella/Shutterstock European scientists had pioneered a technique for reading papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum without unrolling...
The world’s biggest desert used to be green, lush and full of hippos. A new theory suggests humans could have tipped the environment over the edge. By Dr. David K. Wright / 03.16.2017...
Lucy, born 3.2m years ago. Pat Sullivan/AP It should not be a surprise that East Africa was a...
Japanese soldiers of the Sino-Japanese War. Wikimedia Commons As Japanese imperialism rose and fell, its leaders interpreted and re-interpreted a single distinctive concept: “bushido”....
A landing craft from the U.S. Coast Guard-manned USS Samuel Chase disembarks troops of Company E onto...
Ötzi the Iceman has come to life. Simon Claessen/Flickr, CC BY-SA Here’s what one man from around 3,300 BCE...
The Mummy, in its 2017 rendition, rehashes an 80-year-old franchise focused on revived Egyptian corpses. AlloCine Mummies are scary...
Aaron Douglas. “Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction.” Oil on canvas, 1934. The New York...
Detail from The BEGGARS Delight, EBBA 34937. As explored later in the essay, this woodcut would be reused...
Josiah Dennis House, Dennis, Massachusetts / Photo by Thomas Kelley, Wikimedia Commons Was Puritan New England the “cradle”...
William Lloyd’s Coffee House in London specialized in being the first in getting marine news, such as...
By Matthew Merighi / 06.17.2014 Assistant Director, Fletcher Maritime Studies Program Tufts University They poured gold down...
An Aboriginal rock painting in Kakadu National Park of an early European ship. Wikimedia Commons, Google Art &...
Leo Frank, 1884-1915. Library of Congress Online Catalog, Prints and Photographs Division Fake news has been used in the past to feed into...
Scenes of July 1830, a painting by Léon Cogniet alluding to the July revolution of 1830 / Wikimedia Commons...
Contemporary woodcut depicting the Old Town Square execution of Protestant aristocrats in Prague, 1621 / Wikimedia Commons The Thirty...
Painting depicting the first victory at sea by USS Constitution over HMS Guerriere, by Anton Otto Fischer / Department...