What makes someone else's behavior so embarrassing? The answer lies in our expectations of how people should act.

A collection of Texas directories from 1913 to 1959 shows how phone books—and the people who used them—helped invent ...

American gallows literature before 1800 provides a wild ride through the Puritan mind. These sermons, final confessions, dying speeches, narratives, and even poems, include such titles as Impenitent ...

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

Once a key site of Cold War arms production, Rocky Flats is now a wildlife refuge. What happened to its troubled past?

As London’s graveyards overflowed, a private company proposed a remarkable new way to bury the dead.

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 ...

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 ...

For hundreds of years, almost all representations of ancient Greek and Roman marble statues have shown them to be clean, white marble. Today it’s clear that many of the statues were originally ...

European immigrants to North America found a snake unknown in the lands of their birth. The new Garden of Eden had its own serpent, named after the rattle at the end of its tail. Rattlesnakes were ...