How the Brothers Grimm went hunting for fairytales, accidentally changed the course of historical linguistics, and kickstarted a new field of scholarship in folklore.

The door to spring is guarded by fools, but that's ok, because they're not all that serious. And everybody knows the password: April Fools!

Between 1996 and 2003, a folklorist studied the connection between handlooms (technology), sari makers (producers), and sari wearers (consumers) in the ancient city of Banaras.

Remember those spiral-bound cookbooks from your church group or your mom’s favorite charity? Those amateur recipe collections are history books, too.

Nintendo's Mario and Homer's Odysseus have more in common than you might think.

She developed an immensely popular, if questionably effective, herbal remedy for “female complaints.” Pioneer in alternative medicine or...?

What makes Star Trek essential for any contemporary tech user is its role in helping us understand our relationship to technology.

Why were cowboys and pioneers so obsessed with their baked goods? A look at the birth of sourdough culture (har har) in the United States.

People have long told stories about wildmen, creatures who straddled the line between human and animal. But Bigfoot himself first appeared in the 1950s.

Everyone knows the potato chip was invented in Saratoga Springs, NY in 1853. Except it wasn’t.