Fifty five years ago this month, a group of teenage girls were locked in a 19th-century stockade in the Georgia heat, imprisoned for their activism on behalf of the Civil Rights movement.

As Donald Trump arrived in the United Kingdom for his fawning Tory tour of monuments to power—tea at Windsor with the Queen, a meeting at the PM’s country residence of Chequers—a fun-house reflection was borne aloft into the London sky in the form of Baby Trump, a diaper-wearing, phone waving caricature of the…

Here is a historical blind item.

Fresh from the sands of Egypt emerges an enormous black sarcophagus, contents unknown. Okay, who wants to pop the hood? Knock, knock!

Ever feel like the world’s trapped in a terrible slide toward chaos and if you can’t fix something right now, immediately, then you might combust? Well, at least this remarkably calming video will show you how to rescue a waterlogged book.

A collection of 54 rings—Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Viking, and medieval in origin—is coming up for auction. They look great and I need to own all of them.

One might think that after the global reaction to the infamous “Ecco Homo Monkey Christ” fresco restoration, nobody but a professional would ever attempt—much less be invited to attempt—restoration of centuries-old church artwork. One would be wrong!

The Association for Library Service to Children—part of the American Library Association—has decided to take Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name off a prize for children’s literature, citing “stereotypical attitudes” in her work.

If you have shopped for books for kids and young adults lately—particularly for girls—you may have noticed a theme: a proliferation of books about “badass,” “rebel,” and otherwise extraordinary women. What do they actually teach about history and social change, though?

The city of Charleston—whose history is intimately entwined with that of America’s slave trade and which owes a good deal of its longstanding prosperity to the practice—has decided to offer an official apology for its crucial role.

There’s still a lingering perception that Victorians were stuffy to the point of being wholly out of touch with their own bodies—as though they were like porcelain dolls from the era, just cloth stuffed with horsehair south of the neck. The recently released history book Victorians Undone makes a fascinating…

Good news for the legacy of a saintly woman: On Thursday, the 100th anniversary of her death (June 7, 1918), Julia Greeley will be the first person entombed at Denver’s Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.

It’s 2018 and people are still (understandably) obsessed with Frida Kahlo. Google knows this, and has worked with 33 museums from seven countries to arrange an insane collection of hundreds of pieces of her art, including some that had never been digitized before, and made them available online.

Several never-before-seen love letters between Marcel Proust and the Venezuelan-French composer Reynaldo Hahn will be up for auction in Paris this week.

The Duchess of Sussex (!!!) made feminist waves this weekend by walking herself down the aisle at a royal wedding, a feat that should not be particularly newsworthy in 2018, but in Royal Family years it’s still approximately 1903, so. Decades before #AisleGate, though, tween Meghan Markle fought a slightly smaller,…

Anne Frank’s diary was particularly powerful in that she wrote about the mundanities of her life as a typical teenager—crushes and all—even as the encroaching threat of Jewish genocide loomed over her family. And now researchers have uncovered that this typical teenager wasn’t beyond a good dirty joke.

It’s official: Coney Island, the 2.7 mile stretch of Brooklyn broadwalk beloved by New Yorkers and tourists alike, is now a NYC landmark. On it’s 95th anniversary Tuesday morning (it opened on May 15, 1923), the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously voted for the iconic site to be granted landmark…

The spectacle of a royal wedding may seem archaic, even to those who aren’t dyed-in-the-wool anti-monarchists. But many aspects of the show we know today are a relatively recent invention. If we lived in the 15th century, say, the marital prospects of the monarch and their children really would have mattered to our…

One of the cardinal rules of writing is never to read the comments. For every thoughtful critic, there are three more who didn’t read past the headline; for every valid call-out, there are five more calling the writer an “evil, bitter, barren, ugly, POS Liberal hag.” But it appears no one warned young Truman Capote…

Join me in a slow clap for olden time literality—according to a new report from Atlas Obscura, in 1846, an entire century before rock and roll was even a twinkle in Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s eye—The Original Monstre Rock Band made headlines in England for their musicianship crafted with actual rocks “hewn from a…