An aerial view of the shore of Praia de Santiago and the Praia lighthouse on a sunny day

Cape Verde’s Dilemma(s)

While increased tourism may be a boon to the economy, increasing numbers of visitors may harm the environmental wonders that draw outsiders to the islands.
Fundraising card used by Anita Bryant to support Save Our Children

Parents’ Rights, Sex, and Race in 1970s Florida

Save Our Children is remembered as an effort to keep gay people out of public life. But it was also rooted in the movement against school integration.
How Mars may have looked about four billion years ago

How Mars Lost Its Magnetic Field—and Then Its Oceans

Chemical changes inside Mars's core caused it to lose its magnetic field. This, in turn, caused it to lose its oceans. But how?
The cover of "First They Killed My Father" by Loung Ung

Should Readers Trust “Inaccuracy” in Memoirs about Genocide?

To what extent do errors undermine life writing? The question is an urgent one when that writing is testimony to the genocidal actions of the Khmer Rouge.
Coal mining, Anthracite Region of Pa. Loaded cars being placed on cage to be raised to surface. Post card from between circa 1930 and circa 1945.

When Did Americans Start Using Fossil Fuel?

The nineteenth-century establishment of mid-Atlantic coal mines and canals gave America its first taste of abundant fossil fuel energy.
Postcard-like welcome sign in Branson, Missouri

Spectacle, Early Deaths, and Printing Brain Cells

Well-researched stories from The Conversation, Knowable Magazine, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
A diagram for Ebenezer Howard’s To-morrow, 1898

Urban Planning, Then and Now

Humans have been designing cities for millennia. California Forever is just the newest entry in a long list of planned communities around the world.
Giovanni da Udine, detail of border surrounding Raphael’s Cupid and Psyche, Villa Farnesina, Rome.

Fruit and Veg: The Sexual Metaphors of the Renaissance

Using peach and eggplant emojis as shorthand for sex may seem like a new thing, but Renaissance painters were experts at using produce to imply intercourse.
The Peshtigo Fire on October 8, 1871, Wood engraving, published in 1872.

Peshtigo: The Nation’s Deadliest Fire

On the same night as Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871, some 2,400 square miles of Wisconsin and Michigan burned in a firestorm that took more than 1,000 lives.
Pat McCarran

The End of Asian Exclusion, the Beginning of Caribbean Exclusion

The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act allowed first-generation Japanese American immigrants to become US citizens while keeping African Caribbean immigrants out.