Well-researched stories from The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, and other publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

The most radical faction of the French Revolution was hated by everyone in the United States from reactionaries to abolitionists.

No matter how hard you work on a story, especially this year, it might get overlooked. Here are 20 that deserve more love.

Beef barons needed cowboys less and bookkeepers more as the nineteenth century wore on.

"M.T.A." is a humorous ditty about a never-ending subway ride. But it began in Boston's progressive political circles.

The United States threw off the yoke of a king more than two centuries ago. Funny how we can't get enough of our erstwhile sovereigns today.

From debtors' prison to student loan debt, six stories from the archive.

In the 17th century, Nathaniel Giles had the right to conscript young singers into the British royal children’s choir. He and a business partner went a step further.

The early socialist Charles Fourier had grand ideas about food. The pleasure of eating was right up there with sex.

Puzzles, or “dissected maps,” were invented in Georgian-era England, probably by a mapmaker named John Spilsbury in the early 1760s.