Science

When academics embraced scientific racism, immigration restrictions, and the suppression of “the unfit”.

How prior generations of Americans responded to the threat of infectious disease.

How disease devastated populations of escaped slaves in contraband camps behind Union lines during and after the Civil War.

How soldiers returning from World War I brought the Spanish flu back with them.

A shameful part of America’s history.

After Charles Hatfield began his work to wring water from the skies, San Diego experienced its wettest period in recorded history.

How do we humanely bury the dead after a disaster?

By tracing commodities beyond the human, we can learn a great deal about how cities function as ecological and economic units.

A high-school yearbook database dating to the 1900s shows how hairstyles, clothing and smiles have changed.

How the US military figured out how to make self-stable cheese ... and helped invent Cheetos to boot.

Read an excerpt from Al Roker's book about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.

The vaccination skepticism of today is rooted in postwar social movements, prompting a new generation of parents and children to question drugs and doctors.

Nasology was a 19th century pseudoscience which claimed to explain personality traits based on the shape of a person’s nose.

When the federal government began to claim a stake in the public’s physical fitness, and the origins of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.

In the 19th Century, homeopathy was popular because of its use of small doses, its emphasis on the curative power of nature, and its holistic treatment of the body.

The cultural, political, and technological roots of a fraught piece of cotton.

The cover's design, a black-and-white data display, traces its origins to the stars.

Explore visualizations of a disease nearly every child was expected to contract.

The scandalous history of sex-ed movies.

How the St. Louis Baby Tooth Study reconciled the ritual of childhood tooth loss with the geopolitics of nuclear annihilation.

How a disease often portrayed as harmlessly humorous became the target of one of the most effective vaccination campaigns in U.S. history.

John Canaday's poems look at nuclear weapons from the intimate perspectives of its developers.

After the drug was dismissed by the pharmaceutical company that developed it, a researcher started experimenting on himself with it. Powerful hallucinations ensued.

What did the signs and the phases of the moon mean to moon farmers in the 1840s?

According to John Wesley Powell, outside of the Pacific Northwest, the arid lands of the west could not be farmed without irrigation.

Each generation revises his myth. Here’s the true story.

Perhaps, in ethical terms, it doesn’t matter whether overhunting was or was not the cause of the passenger pigeon’s extinction. Practically speaking, it matters a good deal.

While researching the history of racism in Silicon Valley, Lisa Nakamura is surprised to discover the Navajo Nation's role in the creation of the tech industry.

Our infrastructure showed its age and its vulnerabilities when the lights went out.

From iceboxes to stainless steel behemoths: An Object Lesson.