Told

The term “miscegenation” was coined in an 1864 pamphlet by an anonymous author. It turned out to be an anti-abolition hoax.

On Facebook's 15th anniversary, Harvard students and faculty reflect on being the first users of Earth's largest social network.

In modern democracies, who gets to determine what counts as truth—an elite of experts or the people as a whole?

Brothel guides’ descriptions of brothelgoers asked that if respectable men could enjoy sexual pleasure for sale in American cities, why couldn’t their readers?

Decades before WikiLeaks, Philip Agee’s magazine blew the cover of more than 2,000 CIA officers.

How we went from “racist” to “racially tinged.”

Or better put, why is it something so many outside of the South have recently adopted?

Commentators compared the Nazi leader to Napoleon, Philip of Macedon, and Nebuchadnezzar.

30 years ago, it was a huge fire in Yellowstone National Park that stoked media attention and political controversy.

The call to “speak English” in America has a long history that often drowns out our even longer history of diverse language use.

Pundits can't seem to define what exactly the term refers to. Turns out it was developed for a very particular historical moment.

"American journalism is younger than American baseball."

What's the real history behind Trump's 'witch hunt' tweets?

Leslie Gelb supervised the team that compiled the Pentagon Papers. He explains what Steven Spielberg's new film gets wrong.

The battle between "Happy Holidays" and "Merry Christmas" goes way deeper than you think.

The untold story of the double agent who attacked the paper from within.

A conversation with the man behind World AIDS Day.

The disclosure of Billy Graham's recommendation of war crimes did not exicte any commotion.

How printers in the 1770s assembled the news for their papers, how they used the postal system, and how they may have approached Twitter.

Japanese-American internment camp newspapers.

Here's how they were able to do their jobs long before the Internet.

An interactive feature that displays the new words that were used in print each year, going back centuries.

By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, did colonial Americans still sound like their British counterparts?

On July 2, 1881, less than a year after President James Garfield was elected the 20th president of the United States, he was shot by Charles Guiteau.

Noah Webster, author of An American Dictionary of the English Language published in 1828, invented the word "immigration."

A network of "morale wardens" tracked down the latest scuttlebutt.

Before the German zeppelin met its fiery demise, it was an object of fascination for U.S. radio listeners.

In 1985, Neil Postman observed an America imprisoned by its own need for amusement. He was, it turns out, extremely prescient.

The government's suppression of press freedom was a major component of its attempts to build support for the war effort

All climate change deniers needed was one article to cast doubt on the science of global warming.