Chang'an—today's Xi'an—was more than a capital; it was an engine of taste, fashion, and rumor. Laid out on a strict...

By the seventeenth century, a string of riverine towns had swelled into bustling urban centers under the Tokugawa shogunate. Edo—today's...

Born in Vienna in 1914, Hedy Lamarr first turned heads not in Hollywood but in a Czech film called Ecstasy...

In the busy wards of Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s, an obstetrics doctor named Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis noticed something...

Venice didn’t always glow. For centuries the city’s skyline was ordinary until the furnaces of its craftsmen began to throw...

On the morning of September 1, 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington was sketching sunspots when a brilliant white flash tore...

The South Sea Company began life in 1711 as a government-backed scheme to manage Britain’s mounting national debt. It offered...

Bound in a greenish vellum and filled with looping, unknown characters, the Voynich Manuscript looks like an odd herbarium for...

By the mid-19th century the river that had sustained London for centuries had become a sewer. Population growth, factories, brewery...

Salt looks ordinary to us, but across the central Sahara it was once treated like bullion. Wind-scraped pans of crystalline...