Found

Military archives reveal the brutal history of slavery in the U.S. Army.

Powered by compressed air, the system transported millions of letters between 1897 and 1953.

And how those with few resources at their disposal found ways to navigate and negotiate even the direst of situations.

The Smithsonian museum’s collection of human remains contains dozens of brains from vulnerable Washington, D.C., residents, many taken without consent.

Marine archaeologists are beginning to understand what really happened to Captain Santa's ill-fated ship, nicknamed the Christmas Tree Boat.

On Dec. 2, 1948, evidence stashed in a hollowed-out pumpkin incriminated suspected Soviet spy Alger Hiss and boosted a young Richard Nixon’s political status.

How American Girl transformed the doll world—and why millennials love it so.

Bill Erquitt was an unforgettable character among Georgia’s many Civil War enthusiasts. After he died, his secrets came to light.

This simple technology changed the world.

No, roving bands of medieval Scandinavians did not visit West Virginia. (So far as we know.)

The Historic American Building Survey's mission to photograph important architecture before its demolition.

Disappearing foods – and why they need protecting.

The rise and fall of the Shingle Style ideal.

The history of a familiar, useful, and troublesome object.

A 1990 law was meant to “expeditiously return” such items to Native Americans, but descendants are still waiting.

The answer reveals grave robbing problems for America’s deceased leaders.

The American Museum of Natural History holds 12,000 bodies — but they don’t want you to know whose.

Earthen Indigenous burial mounds were created in the shape of birds, reptiles and mammals.

A former park ranger is on the hunt to complete a collection of posters by artists commissioned by the government celebrating national parks.

The archives of the historically Black Tuskegee University recently released recordings from 1957 to 1971, with a number by powerful civil rights leaders.

The history and legacy of a beautiful project to record thousands of new fruit varieties.

For those in later years, the bell’s value lay not in its powerful sound, but in its visual representation.

In the heart of New York City, a centuries-long hunt for Revolutionary War–era gold.

The beauty parlor became a place of sociability for women in the twentieth century, partly aided by modern technology of hair drying.

The winding story of how a trove of 8,000 of the poet’s family objects were saved.

To judge from the Concord collection, the public forum of antebellum America was no model of democratic deliberation.

When keeping cultural archives safe means stepping outside the law.

Prominent institutions, such as the Smithsonian, have historically erased or omitted US women from archival records.

Historians owe a debt of gratitude to these furry pilferers.

For centuries, the infamous Boss Tweed was blamed for destroying its dino-models—but what really happened is even weirder.