Weather towers like this one in a park in Vienna were a popular way for the 19th-century public to track the influence of weather on their lives.
Source: Wikimedia
Climate science in the computer age is the pursuit of elite scientists. A historian of science sees an upside to the popular, participatory approach of studying changes to the climate from the 19th century.
A tank on its way to port for the Normandy landings in 1944.
PA Archive
A lesser known aspect of bogs is their remarkable potential to preserve both environmental and archaeological records.
It’s been more than 70 years since an atomic weapon was used in warfare, but the global nuclear weapons stockpile still stands at more than 14,000 warheads.
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
When the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it unleashed one of the most devastating events in history, which still has implications today.
Understanding the first world war is an exercise in comprehending the depth of human commitment to destruction, violence and resilience at a scale never experienced before 1914.
BNF France
A podcast all about nothing. From the importance of doing nothing to the ill-effects of time spent in solitary confinement and what nothing means in space.
Connecticut members of the Ku Klux Klan, escorted by Meriden, Conn. police, run for shelter as protesters pelt them in March 1981.
AP Photo
In 1979, David Duke told the media he had launched a wildly successful recruiting drive in Connecticut. A local reporter wanted to test Duke’s claims – so he filled out an application to join the KKK.
Detail from Julie Shiels’ 1954 poster White on black: The annihilation of Aboriginal people and their culture cannot be separated from the destruction of nature.
State Library of Victoria
It is 50 years since anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner gave the Boyer Lectures in which he coined the phrase ‘the great Australian silence’. How far have we come since?
New prime minister Pedro Sánchez wants to move the remains from a national memorial site. But not everyone agrees.
Melburnians admire the first primrose to arrive in the colony, transported by a Wardian case, in Edward Hopley’s A Primrose from England, circa 1855.
Bendigo Art Gallery, Gift of Mr and Mrs Leonard Lansell 1964.
A wood and glass case invented in the early 19th-century transformed the movement of plants around the world. In Melbourne, several thousand people greeted a primrose on its arrival from England.
Heinz is why ketchup seemed to become distinctly American.
Reuters/Mike Blake
Canada recently slapped a tariff on US exports of the tomato-based condiment, and the EU plans to do the same, perhaps on the notion that it’s distinctly American. In fact, ketchup’s origins are global, as are its fans.
Gin Lane, a scene of urban desolation with gin-crazed Londoners; a woman lets her child fall to its death and an emaciated ballad-seller.
William Hogarth
When the U.S. broke away from the “mother country,” the dream was to let the common good overruled selfish and private interests. Yet the federal government is arranged so this can never occur.
In 2016, the Ontario government promised the province’s schools would teach all students about residential schools and add more Indigenous perspectives into the provincial curriculum. The newly elected Conservative government has scrapped those plans.
Library and Archives Canada
Ontario’s move to ignore the calls of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to add Indigenous content to its history and social studies curriculum is foolish and dangerous.
The British foreign secretary, Francis Osborne, tried to negotiate free trade deals with eight European rivals in the late 18th century. Guess how many bit the dust.
An 1894 image of Lambton fighting the worm from the book More English Fairy Tales.
Wikimedia Commons