History

The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History's Biggest Mistakes

Thomas Midgley Jr. from Columbus invented both leaded gasoline and Freon. There may be no other single person in history who did as much damage to human health and the planet, all with the best of intentions.

Two Shallow Graves

A dark portrait of the final hours of a dying man's life — a brutal illustration of war in Iraq drawn out by a soldier who was there.

The Case Against Civilization

Recent archaeological evidence suggests that the invention of agriculture was a catastrophe for human health, equality, and freedom — we should never have started farming.

Death Jars Internment Laos

Thousands of mysterious containers lie scattered across northern Laos. These “death jars” may have provided a form of communal interment, archaeologists reported.

An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb as the top news story of the 20th century. Virtually everyone knows that the project built the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And most of us probably know that the bomb was built by some of the world’s best physicists, working under Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in New Mexico. But the Manhattan Project was far more than just a science project: building the bombs required an enormous industrial effort of unprecedented scale and complexity. Enormous factory complexes were built using hundreds of millions of dollars worth of never-before-constructed equipment. Scores of new machines, analytical techniques, and methods of working with completely novel substances had to be invented. Materials which had never been produced at all, or only produced in tiny amounts, suddenly had to be manufactured in vast quantities.

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

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A Brief History of the Corporation

On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company's shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock…

Were Pirates Foes of the Modern Order—or Its Secret Sharers?

Daniel Immerwahr surveys the old myths and the new scholarship about the uses of piracy amid the rise of slavery, colonialism, and empire building.

Does It Help to Know History?

One lesson of history is that even doing the right thing rarely works out.

This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write

For years, my friend’s father asked me to recount his childhood escape from the Nazis. Why did it take me this long?

Israel and the Delusions of Germany’s ‘Memory Culture’

Germany embraced Israel to atone for its wartime guilt. But was this in part a way to avoid truly confronting its past? By Pankaj Mishra

Germany's Unlikely Diplomatic Triumph

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.

The Secret History of Black England

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

How to Get Rich

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Why the Age of American Progress Ended

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

You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Be a Reenactor

Benedict Arnold’s boot wouldn’t come off, and other hardships from my weekend in the Revolutionary War.

When Dynamite Turned Terrorism Into an Everyday Threat

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

How the US Has Hidden its Empire

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

Last Days of the Comanches

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 Case for Reparations

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.