Science

Legionnaires’ disease is more prevalent than ever. So how did we forget it?

With opioids ravaging communities, the U.S. could learn from this 1971 policy.

Our national bird isn’t what we believe it to be—but it is the perfect bird for an imperfect country.

How the father of American football taught office men to exercise.

‘Artificial’ didn't scare Americans in the 19th century. Why does it scare them now?

How did sassafras go from cure-all to carcinogen? Its history links Indigenous knowledge, colonial trade, and modern scientific debate.

The TVA had more than its share of problems: paternalism towards the South, anti-Black racism, and indifference to environmental consequences.

What the Founders would have thought about Pete Hegseth lifting the requirement that service members get the flu vaccine.

A new history of opioid addiction treatment.

A visual history.

For decades, the US seriously pursued the idea of ‘peaceful nuclear explosions.’

Lewis Mumford identified the religious language used by techno-optimists as evidence of a belief system shaping our "seemingly rational age."

We have severely undercounted the number of COVID deaths, scientists say.

In the 1970s, sensors and computers turned the US–Mexico border into a testing ground for automated control.

The story of Jasveen Sangha, facing sentencing for supplying the dose that killed Matthew Perry, echoes another — the tragic case of the heiress Marcia Moore.

The management of fetal remains has a complicated history in Western Europe and the United States.

Fifty years ago, a controversial writer taught us how to talk about sex and pleasure, selling books by the millions. Why do so few people know her name today?

What do "Works in Progress" and "Social Text" have in common?

The environmental degradation that galvanized a national movement for change, and the corporate backlash that threatens to bring it back.

Dr. Jeanne E. Abrams to discuss George Washington’s life-long interest in medicine in the wake of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

RFK’s MAHA spectacle offers an object lesson in how the left cedes fertile political territory.

Today’s anti-environmentalists are following the tracks of the ‘Phantom Duck’ and the Barstow-to-Vegas race.

The health of a nation reflects the health of a democracy.

An early attempt to visualize the broader implications of thermonuclear war.

From McCune Smith to Du Bois, Black scholars used data to debunk scientific racism and prove health inequality was social, not biological.

There is little historical information about Dr. Griggs, but what little there is, is significant.

How car-centric urbanism eclipsed the utopian transportation visions that once shaped urban imagination.

Data-driven epidemiology and the professionalization of public health.