Ask a Professor offers an insider’s view of life in academia. Up this month: Ruth Mazo Karmas, Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.

In Europe between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, fireworks displays were performances that told a story or symbolized real-world battles.

On July 2, 1881, less than a year after President James Garfield was elected the 20th president of the United States, he was shot by Charles Guiteau.

More than two centuries after the invention of ballooning, Steve Fossett became the first person to solo circumnavigate the world in a balloon.

Acute Art is a kind virtual reality marketed directly to artists. Marina Abramović, Olafur Eliasson, and Jeff Koons have been the first to try it out.

A mild winter and abundant mice have led to a bumper crop of ticks this year, and with them tick-transmitted diseases including Lyme disease.

Betty Crocker, the woman who would become America’s most beloved baker, sprang to life in 1921 in an all-male advertising department.

Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods has drawn the ire of a new antitrust movement, which argues against the dangers of industry monopoly.

Same-sex crushes and romantic friendships between college-age women were common throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The works of the Canadian painter Caroline Louisa Daly were for years incorrectly attributed to Charles Daly, a municipal bureaucrat turned artist.