The landmark event displayed competing interpretations of “the modern” in design, art, and architecture.

The 1950 establishment of a federal agency devoted to space, physics, and more belied a cross-party consensus that such disciplines were vital to national interest.

The increasing secularism of the nineteenth century helped make board games a commercial and ideological success in the United States.

A gun-toting killer seems like an unlikely heroine for a nationalist classic novel, but that’s the story of Luang Wichit Wathakan’s Huang rak haew luk.

Well-researched stories from Smithsonian Magazine, Public Books, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Allesandro Volta invented the voltaic pile, the earliest electric battery, in part because of his investigations into the torpedo, an electric ray fish.

People from working-class backgrounds in the UK bump up against a "class ceiling" analogous to the glass ceiling women face in the workplace.

In seventeenth-century Europe, architects adopted styles from the Ottoman empire to create new kinds of social spaces including public baths and coffeehouses.

Archived at Cornell University, a collection of flyers promoting dance-inspiring DJ sets in the Bronx established the visual identity of a new cultural era.

Accessible only by ship, the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha hosts a resilient human population—and heck of a lot of rock lobsters.