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History

Hedy Lamarr in a 1942 publicity photo

Team Hollywood’s Secret Weapons System

1966-67 AAA map of New York

Maps of the Future

A 1989 prediction about portable GPS devices was right on the money

The original lifeboat, the James Caird, built in 1914, had an open top, exposing its inhabitants to the elements.

Reliving Shackleton’s Epic Endurance Expedition

Tim Jarvis’s Plan to Cross the Antarctic in an Exact Replica of the James Caird

A lithograph of the Battle of New Orleans, circa 1890

The 10 Things You Didn’t Know About the War of 1812

Why did the country really go to war against the British? Which American icon came out of the forgotten war?

1981 vision of future chemical warfare, causing soldiers to hallucinate

Tripping Through the Cold War: Drug Warfare in the Retrofuture

Was LSD the Soviet Union’s secret weapon?

Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels makes a point.

Hitler’s Very Own Hot Jazz Band

Captain Lawrence "Titus" Oates with ponies

Sacrifice Amid the Ice: Facing Facts on the Scott Expedition

Captain Lawrence Oates wrote that if Robert Scott’s team didn’t win the race to the South Pole, “we shall come home with our tails between our legs”

Careers of the future as illustrated by Cy DeCosse for the 1982 book, The Kids Whole Future Catalog

Jobs of the Future: How Accurate Were the Soothsayers of 1982 At Predicting Today’s Top Careers?

College graduates take note: Your dream career as a robot psychologist or nasal technologist is just around the corner

Carl Mays, pitcher for the 1920 New York Yankees

A Death at Home Plate

Egyptians embalming a corpse.

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine

The question was not “Should you eat human flesh?” says one historian, but, “What sort of flesh should you eat?”

Khrushchev and Mao meet in Beijing, July 1958. Khrushchev would find himself less formally dressed at their swimming-pool talks a week later.

Khrushchev in Water Wings: On Mao, Humiliation and the Sino-Soviet Split

Hugo Gernsback's vision for a monument devoted to electricity (1922)

The Monument to Electricity That Never Was

The Bureau of Air Commerce's inquiry board was tasked with investigating the cause of the accident.

Document Deep Dive

Document Deep Dive: A Firsthand Account of the Hindenburg Disaster

Frank Ward was a 17-year-old crewman when he saw the infamous disaster, but his memories of that day are still strong, 75 years later

Few aspects of American life have been documented for as long and as precisely as Major League Baseball, which began playing games in 1876.

This Baseball Fan Digs the Small Ball

Last year major-leaguers scored the fewest runs per game in 19 seasons. A top statistician says that’s something to root, root, root for

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Going Places

Travel pushes us. Home pulls

On May 6, 1937, the hydrogen-filled zeppelin burst into flames, shown here in a colorized photo, above a New Jersey field, killing 35 of 97 riders.

Found: Letters from the Hindenburg

A new addition to the Smithsonian collections tells a new story about the legendary disaster

Caro’s hunt for the soul of LBJ has become a thrilling race against time.

Should LBJ Be Ranked Alongside Lincoln?

Robert Caro, the esteemed biographer of Lyndon Baines Johnson, talks on the Shakespearean life of the 36th president

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A By-The-Numbers Look at American Real Estate

An index to houses great and small over the centuries

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The Civil War

Document Deep Dive: How the Homestead Act Transformed America

Compare documents filed by the first and last homesteaders in the United States

Marilyn Monroe getting ready for her close-up in a movie of the future

Resurrecting the Dead With Computer Graphics

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