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

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 ...

Western political and legal systems are founded on human exceptionalism: the idea that we stand apart from, with dominion over, the rest of nature. This has facilitated rampant environmental ...

While most common in the nineteenth century, the practice of “telling the bees” about significant life events endures, albeit in a different form, to the present day. The most pervasive and affecting ...

Middle-aged performers are taking on roles once reserved for men, challenging expectations about age and gender in Bali.

Revisiting the iconic work of Barbara Kruger (“Your Body is a Battleground”) that has just as much resonance today as it did a quarter century ago. In a 1991 interview, W. J. T. Mitchell and Kruger ...

What happened when the Beat Generation bumped up against the popular culture they were rebelling against? Historian Stephen Petrus writes about how the youth subculture was turned into a commodity.

A Pennsylvania couple spotted one of the world’s most unusual birds in their backyard feeder. The northern cardinal looked like it was painted down the middle: one half was the brown of a female ...

In the middle of a green Irish field stands a bizarre structure: not so much a building as a collection of holes, a series of gaping arches framing the sky. This is Conolly’s Folly, built in 1740 at ...

In the early- to mid-nineteenth century, Americans heard different things depending on their ideological predispositions, and perhaps to some extent we still do. After all, this summer many of us will ...

Frances Benjamin Johnston looked beyond grand estates to document the ordinary buildings that defined American life.

Forty years ago, a baby was stolen from her imprisoned mother in Argentina. The military junta ruling the country tortured and murdered both her parents. Then they gave the baby to loyal supporters of ...