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The American West in the mid 19th century made profound demands on all those fated to experience it. The cost for even momentary lapses of vigilance was often death, and the people raised under the intense pressures and expectations of this time and place were a hard lot - self-sufficient almost to a fault, capable of feats of endurance and application that beggar belief today. Competence and self-reliance on that scale, however, usually comes at a steep cost. Having done so

At 10:17 in the morning on June 17, 1929, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook New Zealand’s Murchison region, causing landslides that claimed seventeen lives, and sending seismic P-waves throughout the Earth’s interior, to be picked up by seismology stations scattered across the globe, including to a handful of outposts that, according to everything everybody knew about the inner structure of the Earth, should not have been able to detect the quake. For some, these results were

When Dr. Mary Babcock first arrived in Montana in 1891 to take up her unprecedented position as company doctor to the gold miners there,...

The sub-atomic world as we learn about it in high school is a seemingly settled and staid affair - you have protons and neutrons in the...

The good wrought by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) is beyond dispute. The insight she offered on how to psychologically prepare for...

In the mid 2000s, a small patch of ground in the middle of a country torn apart by the marauding violence of warring clans and religions...

One of the greatest revolutions of the Twentieth Century in the relief of the intense pains of childbirth came under the most unassuming...

In 1991, a paper appeared in the Archives of General Psychology that held out the promise, at long last, of an effective treatment for...

Monterey Bay in the 1930s stood at the nadir of its ecological fortunes, having sustained every imaginable indignity that mankind’s...

In the late 18th century, when a crop failed, farmers and agricultural enthusiasts traded theories about what was to be done in the pages...

The story of the women’s medical movement in India is, when told at all, generally centered upon its British founding figures - Ida...

There is something instantly mesmerizing about looking into the face of a raptor, a wordless communication between two species which are...

We are never alone. From our first connections with other human beings, we start filling ourselves with them, melding not only their...

In 1941, the first patent was filed for a hot new product that stood to revolutionize the electronics field - it was a capacitor that...

Had Maria Montessori died in 1913 at age 43, at the height of her fame and insight, this would be a pretty straightforward article about...

1919 was a year of promise born of misery.  Between the ravages of influenza and the indiscriminate trench carnage of the First World...

We can be a heedless species. We daily expose ourselves to wear and tear both from the environment and our own actions that take their...

In the early 20th century, buying and consuming food of any sort in an urban center was a fraught proposition, particularly in the days...

In its externals the life of Emma Carr (1880-1972) bears many similarities to that of fellow physicist Margaret Maltby (1860-1944). Both...

Sex after menopause. Drug addiction. Abortion. In the early to mid-twentieth century, to be seen as casting an understanding eye on any...