Some presidential estates and other historical sites have struggled to reconcile founding-era exceptionalism with the true story of America’s original sin.

Polish codebreakers paved the way for Alan Turing to decrypt German messages in the Second World War. Joanne Baker commends a gripping tale. Alan Turing’s crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking. From 1940 onwards, Turing and his team engineered hundreds of electronic machines, dubbed bombes, which decrypted the thousands of missives sent by enemy commanders each day to guide their soldiers.

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London recently published scans of two of the Leonardo da Vinci notebooks so website visitors can digitally zoom and flip through the drawings and musings of the Italian Renaissance painter, architect, inventor, and sculptor. Jumbled together in the delicate journals are thoughts on both science and art—detailed charts and speculations contained on the same pages as observational sketches of hats or horse hooves.

The true story of how the City of London invented offshore banking – and set the rich free

And meet the determined enthusiast bringing them back to life.

A Yale philosopher on fascism, truth, and Donald Trump.

Black markets and American wheat imports popularized ramen.

Migration and a global shipping network have flattened biodiversity worldwide.

Freya radar - Wikipedia

Built in 1874 on the site reserved for an opera house, the Old Cincinnati Library was a thing of wonder.

Alfred Brendel’s essays about Beethoven, Schubert, and many others are deeply relevant to performers and amateur listeners alike.

A Kansas archaeology professor believes he's found the lost city of Etzanoa, spurring a rethinking of traditional views on the Native Americans' early settlement of the Midwest.

Large-scale cemetery in Africa points to shared workload without social hierarchy

It's the end of the world as we know it, and Best Products is having a sale.

Three decades after her brother's brutal murder, one Oxfordshire woman found his killer - on Facebook.

The world of invention is famous for its patent disputes. But what happens when your dispute wasn’t with another inventor but whether the Patent Office saw you as a person at all? In 1864, a black man named Benjamin T. Montgomery tried to patent his new propeller for steamboats. The Patent Office said that he wasn’t allowed to patent his invention. All because he was enslaved.

Cencorship

African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather.

Today, it's a party trick, but two centuries ago, sailors tested the legitimacy of their booze by setting it aflame.

Over two years, Ed Pilkington has interviewed eight African American radicals imprisoned since the 1970s. Will they ever be freed?

My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten to twenty seconds for a basic news article.

In December 2014, Max Brown was picking through an Incline Village dumpster for a community service project when a collection of 1980s cassettes caught his eye. Fancying himself a collector, he pulled them out and inspected them. 

Apple founder Steve Jobs’ daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs tells all in new book

The time has arrived for some moderation and clarity in thinking about contemporary Russia and its relationship to the Western world. Ronald Reagan was not wrong in the 1980s to call the Soviet...

Prosperity begets prosperity: On a global level, economists and historians have shown that places that prospered 100, 500, even 1,000 years ago tend to be more economically developed today.

Build more walls!

Emperor Honorius had run away from Rome, settling in Ravenna, with ships ready to take him to safety in Byzantium if things were to get really bad. By Ugo Bardi.

The telephone swept into Americans’ lives in the first decades of the 20th century. At first, no one knew exactly how to telephone. Alexander Graham Bell wanted people to start conversations by saying, “Ahoy-hoy!” AT&T tried to prevent people from saying “hello,” arguing in Telephone Engineer magazine that it was rude. But eventually, Americans learned to say “hello.” People built a culture around the phone that worked. Etiquette magazines tried to prevent women from inviting people over for dinner via telephone, then gave in.

How did British medical worker Janet Parker become the world's last victim of smallpox? By Monica Rimmer.

The discovery is among the strongest evidence in the fossil record that the insects pollinated prehistoric cycads, a plant that preceded flowering plants.

The colour survives in the work of 17th Century Spanish colonial painters, a symbol of the wealth that ultimately doomed the Mayans, writes Devon Van Houten Maldonado.

The 155th anniversary Gettysburg re-enactment was a snapshot of a hobby with dwindling ranks.

This chart, digitized by the Library of Congress, depicts major battles, troop losses, skirmishes, and other events in the American Civil War....The “Scaife Synoptical Method,” advertised at the top of the timeline, aimed to fit as much information as possible into a single chart.

Rickets is mostly seen as a 19th-century disease, but research has revealed that the Romans also had a big problem with getting enough vitamin D. Researchers from Historic England and McMaster University in Canada examined 2,787 skeletons from 18 cemeteries across the Roman empire and discovered that rickets was a widespread phenomenon 2,000 years ago.