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History

The mistletoe plant has white berries, not red like the fake ones have.

How Mistletoe Became a Christmas Kissing Tradition

The thorny origins of the yuletide canoodling ritual

Two ivory-billed woodpeckers in one of the historic photographs that Arthur Allen captured in the field in 1935.

The Hero Who Convinced His Fellow Ornithologists of the Obvious: Stop Shooting Rare Birds and Watch Them Instead

Too late to save the ivory-billed woodpecker, Arthur Allen changed science forever with his seemingly simple idea

Alice Beatrice Rhinelander, née Jones (seated at center), looks at her father, George Jones, as they await the verdict in the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander case.

How an Interracial Marriage Sparked One of the Most Scandalous Trials of the Roaring Twenties

Under pressure from his wealthy family, real estate heir Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander claimed that his new wife, Alice Beatrice Jones, had tricked him into believing she was white

The proudly jutting—and sometimes-imperiled—terraces above the cataract that gave the world-famous house its name.

How Fallingwater Gave Frank Lloyd Wright a Second Wind

The architectural wonder re-established the designer as a titan of his generation and shifted the public’s view of Modernism from a foreign movement to a part of the American character

Archaeologists believe this area on Smith’s Island, in Bermuda, is where an early British colony flourished and helped sustain the settlers in Jamestown, Virginia.

The Hidden History of Bermuda Is Reshaping the Way We Think About Colonial America

New archaeological finds on the islands have revealed secrets about one of Britain’s first settlements in the Americas—and the surprising ways it changed the New World

Twenty-five years after Angel Island Immigration Station was named to the endangered list, the detention barracks have been restored and an immigration museum has opened in the former hospital building.

These Historic Sites in the U.S. Were Once Endangered. Now They’re Thriving

Since 1988, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has been naming America’s most endangered historic places, attracting much-needed awareness and funding

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The Feminist Who Inspired the Witches of Oz

The untold story of suffragist Matilda Gage, the woman behind the curtain whose life story captivated her son-in-law L. Frank Baum as he wrote his classic novel

A dried sample of the original Penicillium mold that Fleming discovered in 1928.

The ‘Penicillin Girls’ Made One of the World’s Most Life-Saving Discoveries Possible

The true, forgotten and sometimes-stinky history of the cohort who took Alexander Fleming’s innovation and forever changed the face of modern medicine

On September 4, 1967, six identical silver disks appeared at equidistant locations along a plumb-straight line that bisected southern England.

How British College Students Convinced Authorities That Flying Saucers Were Invading the U.K.

To raise awareness for a charity event, aspiring engineers planted six UFOs across southern England on a single day in 1967

A nuclear-powered car lined with lead and other materials to protect its passengers from radiation would weigh at least 50 tons—more than 25 times as heavy as the average vehicle.

Visions of Nuclear-Powered Cars Captivated Cold War America, but the Technology Never Really Worked

From the Ford Nucleon to the Studebaker-Packard Astral, these vehicles failed to progress past the prototype stage in the 1950s and 1960s

Reflecting on Romare Bearden's art, playwright August Wilson wrote, “What I saw was Black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness.”

Based on a True Story

The Surprising Artwork That Inspired Netflix’s ‘The Piano Lesson,’ a New Movie Based on August Wilson’s Award-Winning Play

A Romare Bearden print served as a starting point for the American playwright’s 1987 drama, which follows a Black family’s struggle to decide the fate of an ancestral heirloom

A white mob poses outside of the razed office of the Daily Record, a Black-owned newspaper in Wilmington, North Carolina, on November 10, 1898.

When White Supremacists Staged the Only Successful Coup in U.S. History

The 1898 Wilmington massacre left dozens of Black North Carolinians dead. Conspirators also forced the city’s multiracial government to resign at gunpoint

Cyclists pass a preserved section of the Berlin Wall.

How the Berlin Wall Became a 100-Mile Bike and Pedestrian Trail

Once one of the world’s most dangerous border crossings, Berlin’s symbol of death and division has been turned into a tangible way to experience history

Just like today's fitness influencers, the celebrities of pedestrianism used their platforms to monetize, popularize and diversify walking. Edward Payson Weston attempted to walk 500 miles in six days.

One of America’s First Spectator Sports Was Professional Walking

Before fitness influencers made getting your steps in a trend, pedestrianism had the nation on their feet

Relatives of James Chaney, a Black man killed for his voting rights activism, at his funeral in 1964

These Black Americans Were Killed for Exercising Their Political Right to Vote

In the Jim Crow South, activists became martyrs at the hands of white racists, all for the just cause of using the vote to fight for equality and freedom

“Cité Mémoire” is a digital multimedia installation illustrating the moments that have shaped Montreal’s last 400 years.

Cities Are Projecting Their History Onto Streets and Buildings After Dark

Pedestrians in Montreal, Grand Rapids and other locations can time-travel thanks to installations that map historical scenes directly onto the cityscapes

Users of the Sortes Astrampsychi chose a specific question from a list of 92. Then, they randomly picked a number between one and ten, which, when added to the number of the chosen question, directed them to one of 1,030 possible answers.

To Divine the Future, the Ancients Relied on These Chance-Based Fortune-Telling Tools

Texts like the “Sortes Astrampsychi” promised insights on clients’ love lives, career prospects, financial woes and families

As the story goes, the makers of the first talking board asked the board what they should call it; the name “Ouija” came through.

The Ouija Board Can’t Connect Us to Paranormal Forces—but It Can Tell Us a Lot About Psychology, Grief and Uncertainty

The game was born from Americans’ obsession with Spiritualism in the 19th century. Since then, it’s functioned as a reflection of their deep-seated beliefs and anxieties for more than a century

If a reader stared at one of Spectropia’s illustrations under a strong light source for about 20 seconds and then gazed at a blank wall in a darkened room, a version of that image in inverted colors appeared.

This 19th-Century ‘Toy Book’ Used Science to Prove That Ghosts Were Simply an Illusion

“Spectropia” demystified the techniques used by mediums who claimed they could speak to the dead, revealing the “absurd follies of Spiritualism”

James J. Walker Park consists of soccer fields, pickleball courts, playground equipment and a community garden.

This New York City Park Was Built on Top of a Cemetery

In the late 19th century, city officials turned the final resting place for 10,000 souls into what’s now Greenwich Village’s James J. Walker Park

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