Before Disneyland, Fantasia brought imagineering to life through an ambitious experiment in animation. Fantasia is an early ...

Over the past 50 years, the portion of Americans who smoke dropped has dropped from 42 to 15 percent. The precipitous decline could mean the end of the fascinating story of tobacco in the United ...

What makes someone else's behavior so embarrassing? The answer lies in our expectations of how people should act.

Many people don’t realize cricket was ever widely played in North America, let alone that it was very popular in the nineteenth century. The first international cricket match on record was between the ...

A collection of Texas directories from 1913 to 1959 shows how phone books—and the people who used them—helped invent ...

The horror films of the 1970s captured a cultural shift from fears of institutional abuse to anxieties about psychiatric ...

As London’s graveyards overflowed, a private company proposed a remarkable new way to bury the dead.

Q: What’s more than a mile deep, 400 miles long, and holds 20% of all of the Earth’s fresh surface water? A: Lake Baikal, which is a huge body of water located in a remote corner of southeastern ...

Once a key site of Cold War arms production, Rocky Flats is now a wildlife refuge. What happened to its troubled past?

Sir Robert Peel is popularly credited with the formation of the first modern municipal police force, founded in London, in 1829. Before him, what passed for policing was really a hodge-podge of ...

What do spinning on a merry-go-round, dancing by a campfire, and being hit with a paddle as part of a fraternity initiation have in common? Folklorist Jay Mechling argues that they’re forms of play ...