The two world wars brought an end to a long-standing system of international commerce based on the gold standard. After the First World War, the weaknesses in the gold standard contributed to hyperinflation, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism,...

Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, over 100,000 commercial content mo...

Widely praised in the Arab world, renowned author Sinan Antoon's fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his Ph.D. at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion...

In the cold winter months that followed Franklin Roosevelt's election in November 1940 to an unprecedented third term in the White House, he confronted a worldwide military and moral catastrophe. Almost all the European democracies had fallen under t...

Eminent ecologist Jeremy B. C. Jackson and award-winning journalist Steve Chapple traveled the length of the Mississippi River interviewing farmers, fishermen, scientists, and policymakers to better understand the mounting environmental problems rava...

Painted in 1468, "Saint Michael Triumphant over the Devil" is the first documented work by Bartolome Bermejo (c. 1440 - c. 1501), a 15th-century Spanish artist by whom only about 20 paintings are known. Acquired by the National Gallery in 1995, the p...

Since the secret of Bletchley Park was revealed in the 1970s, the work of its codebreakers has become one of the most famous stories of the Second World War. But cracking the Nazis' codes was only the start of the process. Thousands of secret intelli...

The civil rights movement was one of the most searing developments in modern American history. It abounded with noble visions, resounded with magnificent rhetoric, and ended in nightmarish despair. It won a few legislative victories and had a profoun...

He was, according to Pauline Kael, "the greatest American screenwriter". Jean-Luc Godard called him "a genius" who "invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today". Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts – including "Scarfac...

In a long career that spanned the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, and the Bourbon Restoration, Louis-Leopold Boilly (1761-1845) created innovative and daring paintings in the midst of the most turbulent times. Bringing together two...