A catalogue of incidents at the world's most visited museum have placed museum bosses come under increasing scrutiny.

NOTHING in all history had ever succeeded like America, and every American in the nineteenth century knew it. Nowhere else on the globe had nature been at once so rich and so generous, and her riches ...

A stroll through the Presidential-portrait wing at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., is, among other things, a game of Now You See It, Now You Don’t. In the beginning, not a whisper ...

This mid-19th century advertising circular proposes a new idea for doing laundry. What it lacks in detailed description, it makes up for with powerful testimonials. Alexia MacClain Today the task of ...

In 18th- and 19th-century Ireland, it was common for courting couples to exchange gifts to mark their developing relationships. Many of these items are familiar gifts today: books, cards, items of ...

George Catlin's c. 1827 fusion of art and cartography, A Bird's Eye View of Niagara Falls, likely struck 19th-century viewers as highly imaginative. Private Collection / Smithsonian American Art ...

A bitter election. Social unrest and violence at home and abroad that seem to augur ruinous times. A gaping political divide fed in part by new technology and ways to communicate. Sound familiar?

More than fifty years before it was isolated as a drug, Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed up cocaine. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the poet was increasingly dependent on opium, a ...

I have what is probably a not-very-healthy fascination with 19th century crime. In addition to what are generally regarded as the first serial murders (the Whitechapel killings of 1888), the century ...

Editor’s note: This is an update of a series that ran in 2010. Read the originals here: Part 1 and Part 2. I like to go to open houses with friends who are looking to buy, or for myself, to satisfy my ...

The “Pike letter,” allegedly written in 1871, is said to predict three world wars: the first to topple empires and establish communism, the second to defeat fascism and pave the way for Israel, and a ...

There's rock music -- you know, the kind inaugurated by Chuck Berry in the 1950s -- and then there's rock music, the kind that was played on actual rocks in 19th-century England. Paul Collins has ...