modern-history

Selma’s long-abandoned Edistone Hotel, witness to 170 years of African American history, was recently saved by a non-profit devoted to protecting Black historical sites

London once had local pollution levels as high as some of the most polluted cities in other parts of the world today.

Is Anatoly Dyatlov to blame? Without a good safety culture, operators are bound to fail. (Spoiler warning: containers spoilers for the HBO series Chernobyl, and for history). Recently, I enjoyed watching HBO’s new series Chernobyl. Like everybody else on the internet, I have some thoughts about it. I’m not a nuclear physicist or engineer, but I do think a lot about safety and the role of operator…

A French science historian dug deep into the true story of the Stanford prison experiment – revealing ‘guards’ were actually coached to be brutal. His findings are now available in English.

New mathematical modelling shows the first smallpox epidemic among Aboriginal people in the Sydney region may have spread thousands of kilometres and lasted decades.

Many historians and other scholars say what Americans have traditionally learned about the complex period that followed the Civil War falls short of what we should know.

Montesquieu shaped how Americans understood liberty, and his warning about a ‘tyranny of opinion’ speaks to today’s polarization.

Elbridge Gerry was an important early figure in the American Revolution, but his decision to approve a "gerrymandered" state legislative map inadvertently won him lasting infamy.

John Eicher, associate professor of history, won the triennial Charles R. Bailey Memorial Prize from the New York State Association of European Historians for his article “A Provincial Pandemic: European Ignorance of the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Influenza as a Shared Event,” published in Contemporary European History.

The Spanish colony Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe, located at the southern tip of Chile, lasted less than three years due to harsh conditions.

A mid-air collision scattered four thermonuclear weapons over southern Spain, triggering a plutonium cleanup and an 80-day hunt at sea.

A 16th-century wreck found 2,567 metres below the Mediterranean stunned archaeologists with cargo that appears almost frozen in time.

Exceptionally low water levels in the Danube have exposed the remains of two German soldiers who likely died during World War II. Their remains were found beside a German military motorcycle, identification tags, anti-tank mines, and other wartime items in Budapest. The finds appeared on August 2 along the Buda side of the river, near […]

A spiked club delivered the fatal blow to some soldiers killed in the Battle of Visby in 1361, new research suggests. The finding comes from a detailed study of square-shaped holes found in skulls from the battle’s mass graves in Sweden. The Battle of Visby took place in July 1361, when Danish forces invaded the […]

Pre-atomic steel from sunken warships has become unexpectedly valuable to an industry that cannot tolerate the radioactive contamination present in every ton of metal forged after 1945.

The 1847 Battle of Buena Vista was part of the Mexican-American War. It involved hard fighting between US forces led by General Zachary Taylor and Mexican forces General Antonio López de Santa Anna. James F. Byrne Jr explains what happened in the battle. The Battle of Buena Vista. Source: Library of Congress/N. Currier, Public domain, available here . Returning from an inspection of the frontline…