History Staff

A Civil War hero named Abner Doubleday is often credited with developing the game in 1839, but the real history is older.

The game has ancient origins, but in the late 19th century, Walter Camp helped shape football—the American kind—into the sport we know today.

Nero had many enemies and is remembered as one of history’s most sadistic and cruelest leaders. But there are a couple of problems with the story.

Theories run the gamut, casting Stonehenge as anything from an ancient healing center to an alien landing site.

In early 1923, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his financier friend George Herbert, Lord Carnarvon, ceremoniously opened the long-obscured burial chamber of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Two months later, Carnarvon was dead, killed by blood poisoning from an infected mosquito bite on his cheek.  Newspapers speculated that he was […]

Trace the milestones of a scandal that rocked the nation.

From Karl Marx to Joseph Stalin to Mao Zedong, the label of communism has been attached to these figures—and their often ruthless governments—through history.

Get the grisly details.

This year's most compelling cultural fare looked to the past. Here are our top picks.

This multimedia journey tells the story of June 6, 1944, and the unlikely triumph at Normandy that would go down in history.

For several centuries, people have debated whether human beings can spontaneously combust, or burst into flames without being ignited by an external source. Though the first known accounts of spontaneous human combustion (SHC) date all the way back to 1641, the phenomenon gained wider exposure in the 19th century after popular author Charles Dickens used […]

A history of nothingness.

Rex Tillerson is out. Here’s who left more quickly—and who stayed a lot longer.

If you're wondering where the dollar sign ($) came from, you're in good company.