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Books

What if Napoleon hadn't stopped at invading Russia and instead created a world under French control?

What if Napoleon Hadn’t Lost Europe and Other Questions of Alternate History

How the 200-year-old literary genre reflects changing notions of history and society

These Portuguese Libraries Are Infested With Bats—and They Like It That Way

They actually serve a very specific purpose

Annual forest fires blaze on the floor of Yosemite Valley, California in 2015.

What Is the Future of Fire?

Geologist Andrew C. Scott reconstructs the sites of past blazes to look at our relationship with this elusive element

At its peak in 1948, the women’s pro baseball league attracted more than 900,000 spectators.

Seventy-Five Years Ago, Women’s Baseball Players Took the Field

An Indiana slugger was one of the athletes who “hit the dirt in the skirt” and changed Americans’ view of women

Josiah Henson as a young man at left, and at right, at age 87, photographed in Boston on June 17, 1876

The Story of Josiah Henson, the Real Inspiration for ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’

Before there was the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a formerly enslaved African-American living in Canada wrote a memoir detailing his experience

Mrs. Jane Loudon’s The Ladies' Flower-Garden of Ornamental Greenhouse Plants (1848)

A Botanical Wonderland Resides in the World of Rare and Unusual Books

The Smithsonian’s librarian and antiquarian Leslie Overstreet time travels, sharing centuries of horticultural splendors

After the 1943 publication of Ayn Rand's book "The Fountainhead," she amassed a cult-like following that spread her message far and wide.

The Literary Salon That Made Ayn Rand Famous

Seventy-five years after the publishing of ‘The Fountainhead’, a look back at the public intellectuals who disseminated her Objectivist philosophy

Charles Darwin was an avid fossil collector and during his expedition on the HMS Beagle, he was one of the first to collect remains of extinct South American mammals.

How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Evolved

A new Smithsonian Book highlights firsthand accounts, diaries, letters and notebooks from aboard the HMS Beagle

Ideal Bookshelf 651: Coming of Age

How “Young Adult” Fiction Blossomed With Teenage Culture in America

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, books like The Outsiders and The Chocolate War told stories that dealt with complex emotions and social realities

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon’ Tells the Story of the Slave Trade’s Last Survivor

Published eight decades after it was written, the new book offers a first-hand account of a Middle Passage journey

Isaac Bashevis Singer by Yousuf Karsh

Trending Today

Scholar Finds New Isaac Bashevis Singer Story

“The Boarder,” which is published for the first time in the New Yorker, was discovered while going through the prominent writer’s vast archives

Official cover art for "The Fall of Gondolin"

One of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Earliest Middle-Earth Stories Will Be Published as a Novel

The author wanted to transform ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ into a book, but never finished the text before his death

A gun manufacturer in Birmingham in the 19th century.

How British Gun Manufacturers Changed the Industrial World Lock, Stock and Barrel

In ‘Empire of Guns,’ historian Priya Satia explores the microcosm of firearm manufacturing through an unlikely subject—a Quaker family

An illustration from the 1820 edition of The Governess, a popular work of children's literature written by Sarah Fielding.

Women Who Shaped History

The First Novel for Children Taught Girls the Power of Reading

Nearly three centuries before heroines like Katniss and Meg Murray, Sarah Fielding published a book on the values of female education

‘Our Bodies, Ourselves,’ the Revolutionary Feminist Health Book, Will No Longer Print New Editions

In the 1970s, the book promoted nonjudgemental discussions about women’s sexual and reproductive health

The tornado that touched down near El Reno, Oklahoma plowed through the region. The violent winds and subsequent floods injured 155 and killed 20 people, including the first known storm chasers to die in the twister's swirling path.

How a Legendary Storm Chaser Changed the Face of Tornado Science

In 2013, Tim Samaras died in one of the epic storms he’d spent decades chasing. A new book chronicles his harrowing last days

A whale with water gushing out of its blowhole would not be smiling. It would be drowning.

How Children’s Books Reveal Our Evolving Relationship With Whales

Storybooks feature a fair amount of factual errors—and those errors can be revealing

The wreckage of a Southern Airways DC-9 sits in the front yard of a home facing the road that the plane attempted an emergency landing on in New Hope, Ga., April 5, 1977. The pilot's attempt to save himself and his passengers occurred after the plane's engines failed during a heavy thunderstorm.

What Happened When a Southern Airways Flight 242 Crashed in Sadie Burkhalter’s Front Yard

Her home became a makeshift hospital when she looked out her front door to a fiery inferno

Investigators on Lookout for 314 Items Stolen From Carnegie Library’s Rare Books Room

A first edition of Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” was among the items taken

Dr. Frankenstein at work in his laboratory

What Frankenstein Can Still Teach Us 200 Years Later

An innovative annotated edition of the novel shows how the Mary Shelley classic has many lessons about the danger of unchecked innovation

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