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 ...

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

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

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

When the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was born in 1884, in rural Illinois, movies barely existed. Micheaux was the son of former slaves. By the time he left home, at the age of 17, movies had progressed ...

The plague of lynchings of Mexican-Americans in the American West has long been excluded from history books. For the Journal of Social History, historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb analyzed ...

In last month’s “Learning to Look” column we explored color, a delightfully complex element of art and design. Like shape, value, space, form, line, and texture, color is considered a structural ...