Robert Smalls was born into slavery along South Carolina’s Sea Islands and learned the water the way others learned the...

Hedy Lamarr was one of Hollywood's most photographed faces in the 1930s and 1940s, but her life off screen was...

Every so often between the late medieval period and the early 1800s, winter in London did something extraordinary: the Thames...

London in July 1858 smelled awful in a way that stopped people in their tracks. Weeks of unseasonably hot weather...

On a January morning in 1863, carriages full of Londoners rolled out from Paddington beneath the city. The Metropolitan Railway—often...

What began as a conversation among French intellectuals turned, over two decades, into one of the world's most recognizable monuments....

South of the Tigris and Euphrates, a lacework of canals, reedbeds and shallow lakes once made a landscape unlike any...

Stretching across eastern England, the Fens long looked less like countryside than like a waterworld: shallow tidal creeks, reed beds,...

By the 1600s the low countries had turned ocean trade into a machine. Amsterdam’s merchants sailed to the Baltic for...

The Little Ice Age refers to a stretch of cooler, often stormier weather that affected much of the North Atlantic...