What makes someone else's behavior so embarrassing? The answer lies in our expectations of how people should act.

A collection of Texas directories from 1913 to 1959 shows how phone books—and the people who used them—helped invent ...

The horror films of the 1970s captured a cultural shift from fears of institutional abuse to anxieties about psychiatric ...

Once a key site of Cold War arms production, Rocky Flats is now a wildlife refuge. What happened to its troubled past?

As London’s graveyards overflowed, a private company proposed a remarkable new way to bury the dead.

Until the early twentieth century, medical schools in the United States resembled today’s for-profit colleges, both in quality and reputation. There were no common standards for curriculum or ...

The idea that death should be merciful is not new. When a person is gravely wounded or terminally ill, when death is inevitable, and the suffering is so great that living no longer brings any joy to ...

For hundreds of years, almost all representations of ancient Greek and Roman marble statues have shown them to be clean, white marble. Today it’s clear that many of the statues were originally ...

Sir Robert Peel is popularly credited with the formation of the first modern municipal police force, founded in London, in 1829. Before him, what passed for policing was really a hodge-podge of ...

Q: What’s more than a mile deep, 400 miles long, and holds 20% of all of the Earth’s fresh surface water? A: Lake Baikal, which is a huge body of water located in a remote corner of southeastern ...