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

Hardly the recent innovation it’s frequently mistakened to be, deception as a path to war has been used by American presidents since the 1800s.

While Villa’s otherness created an opening for his work in the US, American critics ultimately held both his modernism and his nationality against him.

Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.

Built for Punjabi migrants brought to Africa by the British and modeled on Mughal architecture, the Jamia Masjid in Nairobi serves Kenya’s Muslim minority.

Days after a failed dam led to the drowning deaths of more than 2,200 people, the Pennsylvania industrial town was flooded again—with tourists.

In eighteenth-century France, the scarcity and price of flour was the base ingredient for what would become one of history’s bloodiest revolutions.

Common in colonial New England, bundling allowed a suitor to spend a night in bed with his sweetheart—while her parents slept in the next room.

The detection of two celestial interlopers careening through our solar system has scientists eagerly anticipating more.

The 1901 assassination of US President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo revealed the abysmal state of race relations in America.