The narrative surrounding the Ukraine war often marks its beginning on February 24, 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. But the rivalries and political decisions that brought the two countries into conflict stretch back centuries. The start of the Cold War, meanwhile, was the...

The 2026 midterm elections have been the most expensive in history, with more than $11 billion being spent on political ads. While Democratic candidates have outraised Republicans in individual donations by appealing directly to voters, Republicans have received the lion’s share of money from...

Why are we so obsessed with a group of prehistoric humans who disappeared some 40,000 years ago? Ever since the discovery of the first named Neanderthal fossils in 1856, scientists have struggled to make sense of them in tens of thousands of books and articles....

At age seven, sitting at the dinner table with my family, I prodded my fork into a thick, squishy brown shape on my plate. My grandmother, who lived with us, had cooked her traditional Lithuanian-Jewish Litvak meal, and everyone had dug in. “What is it?”...

Cultural heritage is under attack in the United States. The National Historic Preservation Act’s Section 106 regulation, which balances economic development and historic preservation, has been rewritten to leave historic places in the path of the wrecking ball at the federal government’s whim. Developers contend...

As his superyacht Boardwalk docked in Venice as part of the “Freedom 250 Coastal Diplomacy Italy initiative” in July, billionaire US Ambassador Tilman J. Fertitta was greeted by protests. Fertitta was traveling across the country to meet “with local business leaders, celebrities and...

While shooting a documentary at Göbeklitepe, I encountered strikingly different historical interpretations of the site. An international group of New Age seekers seemed to be searching for extraterrestrial connections there, but when I pointed out that the enclosures had originally been roofed, they recast...

The oldest known engravings consist of zigzag patterns and parallel lines, carved into freshwater mussel shells at Trinil on the island of Java, Indonesia. These grooves, made by Homo erectus, date to roughly half a million years ago. By around 100,000 years ago, early...

As democracies around the world face mounting challenges and pressures, discussions about autocracy often focus on personalities and ideologies or tend to link governance practices to differences among specific cultural traditions. Yet a growing body of comparative historical research has provided evidence that a more...

A nominal ceasefire reached in April 2026 has done little to halt the escalation in the Persian Gulf. After Iran’s “attempted surprise attack” against US forces on July 28, the US retaliated by launching a “heavy wave” of airstrikes on July 30, according...