These posters, created between 1920 and 1990, are from "An Iconography of Contagion: An Exhibition of 20th Century Health Posters". They reflect fears and prejudices around the infectious diseases of ...

Lee de Forest's father was a minister and hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps. In order to be trained for this calling, de Forest left Alabama for prep school in Massachusetts. His life ...

QUESTION: What are the most surprising things you find in studying the Great Depression? DAVID KENNEDY: One of the most surprising things that I discovered about the Depression was the degree of ...

Rachel Carson grew up on a small Pennsylvania farm, where she spent hours exploring the outdoors. She always loved books, and when she was young thought she would be a writer. Her first publication ...

Alfred Wegener was born in Berlin in 1880, where his father was a minister who ran an orphanage. From an early age he took an interest in Greenland, and always walked, skated, and hiked as though ...

Ernest Rutherford's family emigrated from England to New Zealand before he was born. They ran a successful farm near Nelson, where Ernest was born. One of 12 children, he liked the hard work and open ...

Note: You'll need the free RealOne Player (www.real.com) to see the video clips below. Learning their ABCs... You know, it seems almost too trite to say, but one of the very important things that you ...

When Louis Leakey and Mary Nicol first met, he asked her to help with illustrations for his upcoming (1934) book Adam's Ancestors: An Up-to-Date Outline of What is Known about the Origin of Man.

Nazi ideology did not explicitly prescribe the system of camps that has become emblematic of Nazi terror, but the way the camps functioned reflected some key points in Nazi thinking. Central to Hitler ...

Neil Ieremia began dancing after years of rheumatic fever left him weak and homebound. Studying dance while growing up in a time when second-generation Samoans were raised with “a rugby ball in one ...

In 1915, he conducted experiments on inmates at a Mississippi prison, who volunteered for the study in exchange for a pardon. Because it was a farm prison, its inmates had a fairly balanced diet.

The delights of observing the night sky long have inspired artists, composers, and poets. Occasionally, people even share a career between astronomy and the humanities: The musician and composer ...