The Electric Typewriter - History

How the story of the dinosaurs’ demise was uncovered.

New research shows they shared many behaviors that we long believed to be uniquely human. Why did science get them so wrong?

Once upon a time, all the fruits, nuts, and berries our gathering ancestors ate were wild. Someone, at some time, had to come up with the bright idea of crops.

Where did the ancestors of the modern Japanese come from? The answers is shrouded in a mystery not everyone wants solved.

What really happends when a society is forced to go it alone?

To journey here is to roam through almost six thousand years of civilization, to one of the places where the human enterprise began

Elif Batuman writes about the historical relics that held up the construction of the Yenikapı station, and about President Erdoğan’s frustration.

A meditation on history, science, and AI

It's also important to poke the heart of a dead pigeon

Climate change is a huge and urgent problem. It is natural to suppose that it is therefore a terrible mistake. I disagree. We cannot regret climate change without regretting the vastly better world for most people that the fossil-fuel powered technological revolutions of the last 250 years have achieved.

When Columbus and his successors invaded the Americas, the most potent weapon they carried was their germs. But why didn't deadly disease flow in the other direction, from the New World to the Old?

The Indians who first feasted with the English colonists were far more sophisticated than you were taught in school. But that wasn't enough to save them

The forgotten story of three “contrabands,” a pragmatic general and a shrug that made history.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

In an exclusive excerpt from his new book, Empire of the Summer Moon, special correspondent S. C. Gwynne re-creates in thrilling detail the bloody 1871 battle that marked the beginning of the end for the most fearsome tribe to ever ride the plains and its mysterious, magnificent chief, Quanah Parker.

The long read: The United States likes to think of itself as a republic, but it holds territories all over the world – the map you always see doesn’t tell the whole story

In early 20th-century America, political bombings became a constant menace — but then helped give rise to law enforcement as we know it.

Invention alone can’t change the world; what matters is what happens next.

When the novelist first read Gretchen Gerzina’s 1995 book Black England, she discovered the complex and unexpected lives of black people in England before the abolition of slavery. Two decades on, the stories still have the power to astonish

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, nobody expected Germany to be reunified less than a year later. New documents released by the Foreign Ministry in Berlin shed new light on the dramatic negotiations that led to East and West Germany becoming one.