Read the best history articles from around the internet, or watch the most insightful history videos from platforms like Youtube, Vimeo or leading history publishers like The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, New Yorker and many more.
Thirty years ago, the world wide web was a way for scientists to share data. Since then, it’s become a critical force for industry, and how the world connects. But this didn’t happen all at once. The web’s evolution has been shaped by the geography of its creators and users.
It was the spring of 1992 in the small town of Martensville. Rumours were spreading that a local family were members of a secret satanic cult, abusing children at their home daycare and at a property outside of town. A horde of devil worshippers was allegedly on its way, looking to attack in the dead of night.
The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. What can we learn from the upheaval of the 1930s?
This Hotel lists hotel, hostel and bed & breakfast recommendations from trusted experts like New York Times, Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, Frommers, CNN and many more.
Leo Goldstein began capturing East Harlem in 1949 after he’d joined the New York Photo League, a photo club that originated around the beginning of the Great Depression. Having remained largely unseen for the last 70 years, his photographs are now the focus of a new book, East Harlem: The Postwar Years.
For a short time in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Donald Trump owned an airline. In 1989, Trump raised $365 million to purchase the Eastern Shuttle. Within 18 months, the airline lost over $125 million, and by 1992, Trump decided it was time to walk away.
The first thing that strikes anyone who regularly rides on the London Underground is how clean it looks in Mike Goldwater’s photographs. Homeward bound tourists keen to recapture the thrill of minding the gap and cooling their heels on overcrowded platforms are not offered a range of signature scents.
It was May 2001. And Boeing’s leaders, CEO Phil Condit and President Harry Stonecipher, had decided it was time to put some distance between themselves and the people actually making the company’s planes. How much distance? This flight—a PR stunt to end the two-month contest for Boeing’s new headquarters—would reveal the answer.
“Thrilling” is the word repeatedly used by Jan Ramqvist to describe how he felt about participating in a nationwide mission to get all Swedish motorists and cyclists to change the habits of a lifetime and begin driving on the right-hand side of the road for the first time.
On 26 April 1986 reactor number four at the power plant suffered a catastrophic explosion that exposed the core and threw clouds of radioactive material over the surrounding. Covered up by a secretive Soviet Union at the time, the true number of deaths and illnesses caused by the nuclear accident are only now becoming clear.
In the Western imagination, sugar is pleasure, temptation, and vice — and in modern history, it is original sin. How a taste for sweetness, developed for survival, became a stand-in for everything good — and evil — about our culture.
Just after midday on May 26th 1971, Australian authorities received a call from a mysterious Mr. Brown claiming that a Qantas flight from Sydney to Hong Kong was carrying a bomb. He then claimed that he would disclose the location of the onboard bomb in return for a hefty sum.
Once seen as cutting edge, many of yesterday’s gadgets are – surprisingly – still in use or are making a comeback. But why is it that we are turning to retro solutions more frequently?
In 2013, Bill Gates admitted ctrl+alt+del was a mistake and blamed IBM. With the del key across the keyboard from the other two, it seemed unlikely that all three would be accidentally pressed at the same time. Here’s the story of how the key combination became famous in the first place.
Between the end of the Korean War and the early 1990s, more than one million Korean women were caught up in a state-controlled prostitution industry that was blessed at the highest levels by the U.S. military. They worked in special zones surrounding U.S. bases—areas licensed by the South Korean government.
The story of Tupperware is a story of innovation and reinvention: how a new kind of plastic, made from industrial waste material, ended up a symbol of female empowerment. The product ushered women into the workforce, encouraging them to make their own money, better their families, and win accolades and prizes.
Around them, death was everywhere. Still, the lovers planned a life together, a future outside of Auschwitz. They knew they would be separated, but they had a plan, after the fighting was done, to reunite. It took them 72 years.
It’s practically an American pastime to blame cellphones for all sorts of societal problems, from distracted parents to faltering democracies. But the devices might have also delivered a social silver lining: a de-escalation of the gang turf wars that tore up cities in the 1980s.
Gaddafi’s 25 Years in Power (1994): A historic report filmed as Libya celebrated 25 years of Gaddafi’s rule. This short documentary challenges the West’s view of Libya and looks at Gaddafi’s struggles both at home and abroad.
Because fact-checking these days is primarily the domain of legacy print publications, it retains that sheen of legitimacy and seriousness. To fact check is to assure readers, writers, and editors that great care is being taken.
There is always that one country on America’s collective conscious. After looking at 741,681 section front headlines of The New York Times, Russell Goldenberg found out which countries around the world have preoccupied Americans the most each month since 1900.
Philip Roth’s classic novel, newly adapted by HBO, envisions a world in which Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election. Roth’s account of a celebrity-turned-politician winning the presidency on a platform of fearmongering and “othering” proved more prophetic than he could have predicted.
A documentary about two ‘conventional’ couples that swapped partners and lived in a group marriage in the early 70s, hoping to pioneer an alternative to divorce and pave the way for how people would live in the future.
This is the story of the apartment in downtown Johannesburg that, between the late 1940s and early 1960s, became a hub of resistance against apartheid.
In 1969, at the height of the First Nuclear Era, an engineer at New Jersey’s PSE&G utility company named Richard Eckert wondered, what if huge nuclear plants could be built in serial at a production facility, put on a barge, and floated to sites out at sea?
How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society?
Since his involuntary retirement, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has raised money for worthy causes, attempted to make a comeback in Russian politics, and, notoriously, made an advertisement for Pizza Hut.
The US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the Japanese finally succumbed to the threat of further nuclear bombardment and surrendered. The support for this narrative runs deep. But there are three major problems with it, and, taken together, they significantly undermine the traditional interpretation of the Japanese surrender.
After class on Tuesday 15 September 1981, the first day of the new school year, a 10-year-old girl named Ursula Herrmann returned to her house in Eching. She never arrived. So began one of Germany’s most notorious postwar criminal cases, which remains contentious to this day.
Thirty-seven years ago, New York-based APF Electronics, Inc. released The Imagination Machine. APF’s playful computer never rivaled the impact of products from Apple or Atari, but they remain historically important because of the man who co-created them: Ed Smith, one of the first African-American electronics engineers in the video game industry.
Three decades ago, Olof Palme was assassinated on Stockholm’s busiest street. The killer has never been found. Could the discovery of new evidence finally close the case?
When Portugal fell under Spanish rule, the Inquisition targeted individuals with Jewish lineage. As religious violence worsened, many Jews fled Portugal and resettled in England, bringing with them culinary treasures founded in Sephardic cuisine—including fish. Peshkado frito was one of them.
The Japanese brand might be celebrating their 100 year anniversary in 2020 but it was 60 years ago that one model, in particular, set the benchmark for Mazda and microcars at large. priced at just 300,000 ¥ (around $830 USD), the small, adorable Mazda R360 coupe was more than a city car.
Back in 1989, a guy by the name of Igor Dmitrovsky filed the paperwork to incorporate a small little business in the state of New York. This company would enter the metal cylinder organism transport business under the name Baltia Airlines. The airline was to fly from New York, US to St Petersburg, USSR.
White is also the color that the Brazilian national soccer team was wearing in the infamous “Maracanazo” match, a decisive showdown against Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup. Nearly 70 years later Brazil is ready to tempt fate.
The 14 most popular last names in Vietnam account for well over 90 percent of the population. The 14 most popular last names in the US? Fewer than 6 percent. In Vietnam, the most popular last name is Nguyen.
The limitations of color on older 1980’s computers and game consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Commodore 64 explained.
A quarter-century ago, a really big soda company attempted to subvert itself to reach Gen X. The problem? Coca-Cola’s OK Soda was a couple of decades too early. The story about The Coca Cola Company’s failed attempts to use irony, disenfranchisement, and disillusionment to sell us subpar soda.
In the water park business, Jeff Hendry was considered a genius of sorts. He often said that his goal in life was to make customers of his family’s legendary water parks happy—“to put a smile on their faces, to give them a thrill or two.” It was a beautiful vision. Until it went horribly wrong.
