Some animalslike beavers, nesting ants, bees, and humansactively reshape their environments to make them more favorable for their own species. My guest today believes that the same is also true of

This is the first of my interviews with historians touching on questions of intellectual humility and historical thinking. Today conversation is with Jonathan Zimmerman. He is the Judy and Howard Berk

Were going to do something a little differently in todays episode of Historically Thinking, in that it's not an episode ofHistorically Thinking. - Instead I wanted to share with you a teaser of a p

Founders is a term that we typically use to refer to just a few menusually the first four Presidents of the United States, plus Ben Franklin andnowadaysAlexander Hamilton. We think of them as typ

In his Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1755, Samuel Johnson did not define the words Saxon, Angle, or Anglo-Saxon. But Noah Webster in his 1828 American Dictionary defines Angl

From its opening in 1822, the Fulton Market was an essential part of life in old New York, selling vegetables grown on Long Island, fruit harvested in Cuba, lobsters taken from the waters of Maine, ch

Beginning in 1940 a group of Polish diplomats based in Bern, Switzerland, orchestrated a program of forging passports and identity documents from Latin American countries. These were then smuggled int

We live in a world that feels as though it is in the grip of rapid and capricious change. To rescue ourselves from the distress and dismay that change can induce, we tell ourselves that flux is the s

The plays of William Shakespeare contain within them a whole world of human action and purpose. They are, said Samuel Johnson, "a faithful mirror of manners and of life." We seem to watch over Shakesp

The scientific community is by any measure a very strange kind of community, writes my guest. For starters, no one knows who exactly belongs to it... Its members are a miscellany of individuals bu