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History / U.S. History

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

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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

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What Are America’s Most Iconic Homes?

According to the National Building Museum, these houses, more than most, have impacted the way we live

Cover to the April 1938 issue of Popular Science magazine

Rocket to the Stars at the 1939 New York World’s Fair

A trip into space without leaving Earth—or even going outdoors

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Theodore Roosevelt’s Life-Saving Speech

When a would-be assassin shot, the 50-page manuscript and metal eyeglasses case tucked against Roosevelt’s chest absorbed the blow

Robot server at the Two Panda Deli in Pasadena, California

The Disco-Blasting Robot Waiters of 1980s Pasadena

In 1983, a Chinese fast-food restaurant hired a curious-looking pair of servers: Tanbo R-1 and Tanbo R-2

Frank Costello testifying before the Kefauver Committee in March 1951

The Senator and the Gangsters

The radio-delivered newspaper machine of 1938

Print the News, Right In Your Home!

Decades before the Internet, radio-delivered newspaper machines pioneered the business of electronic publishing.

Flying ambulance of the future (1927)

The Flying Ambulance of Tomorrow

In the 1920s, a French inventor devised an ingenious way to provide emergency medical assistance

1928 article about astrologers predicting that 1929 will be a year of prosperity

Astrologers Predict 1929 Will Be Year of Prosperity

The world without the Great Depression looks a lot rosier in hindsight

Clarke has seen the future of war and says it will be fought by hackers.

Richard Clarke on Who Was Behind the Stuxnet Attack

America’s longtime counterterrorism czar warns that the cyberwars have already begun—and that we might be losing

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Foreseen Consequences

The art and science of looking ahead

The milkman's robot helper of the future as imagined by illustrator Arthur Radebaugh (1961)

The Milkman’s Robot Helper

Could futuristic technology have saved the milkman from extinction?

Storyville. Seated woman wearing striped stockings, drinking "Raleigh" Rye.

The Portrait of Sensitivity: A Photographer in Storyville, New Orleans’ Forgotten Burlesque Quarter

The Big Easy’s red light district had plenty of tawdriness going on—except when Ernest J. Bellocq was taking photographs of prostitutes

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Document Deep Dive

Document Deep Dive: What Does the Magna Carta Really Say?

A curator from the National Archives takes us through what the governing charter means

Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel's expertise in the realm of neuroscience is unsurpassed.

Austria

The Art and Science of Embarrassing Art

Neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel explores the flourishing of culture in Vienna

Edward S. Curtis' Canon de Chelly—Navajo (1904).

Edward Curtis’ Epic Project to Photograph Native Americans

His 20-volume masterwork was hailed as “the most ambitious enterprise in publishing since the production of the King James Bible”

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