How New York City's tabloids sensationalized the murder case that inspired the classic film noir Double Indemnity.

American often gets credit for having the first written constitution. But the constitution of the short-lived republic of Corsica preceded it by 30+ years.

A strange initiation ritual involving a toad was required for members of a secret caste of nineteenth-century horse mystics.

With President Trump calling for a “Space Force” and private enterprise increasingly invested in space, what of the dream of international peace?

Examining the 18th-century social contract of Captain Bartholomew Roberts and his men shows just how organized and codified pirate societies could be.

The feared gang MS-13 was born out of conditions resulting from U.S. policies in El Salvador in the early 1980s.

Many abolitionists seeking to end slavery in the British West Indies were concerned less with human rights, more with the preponderance of what they saw as "interracial sex."

The Book of Stones, a central alchemical text, contained formulae with the power to create living tissue from ordinary matter, supposedly.

Pushing New Deal legislation, FDR proposed that extra justices should be added to the Supreme Court, one for every sitting justice over the age of seventy.

Black intellectuals in the U.S.—from W. E. B. Du Bois to Marcus Garvey—had strong and divergent opinions on Japanese Empire.