Category: Social and Cultural History

Why history instruction is critical for combating online misinformation

Why history instruction is critical for combating online misinformation

by | Sep 3, 2025 | , , | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Can you tell fact from fiction online? In a digital world, few questions are more important or more challenging. For years, some commentators have called for K-12 teachers to take on fake news, media literacy, or online misinformation by doubling down on critical thinking. This push for schools to do a better job preparing young people to differentiate between low- and high-quality information often focuses on social studies classes.

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Changing the Eurocentric narrative about the history of science – why multiculturalism matters

Changing the Eurocentric narrative about the history of science – why multiculturalism matters

by | Aug 20, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes

There is nothing more intimately personal than the thoughts in your head, and yet you did not conceive them. They are a continuation of knowledge and ideas that for thousands of years have travelled the globe, shaped by countless minds from all civilizations. In a time of seemingly growing division, that is a thought that ought to bring us all together.

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The world’s first museum was curated by a princess. A tour reveals the origins of the zodiac, calculus and writing

The world’s first museum was curated by a princess. A tour reveals the origins of the zodiac, calculus and writing

by | Aug 18, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes

Around 2,500 years ago, a princess living in what is now modern-day Iraq collected a number of artefacts, including a statue, a boundary stone and a mace head. The items, which show signs of preservation, date from around 2100 BCE to 600 BCE. This collection, it is generally thought, was the world’s first known “museum”.

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A Belgian farmer moved a rock and accidentally annexed France: the weird and wonderful history of man-made borders

A Belgian farmer moved a rock and accidentally annexed France: the weird and wonderful history of man-made borders

by | Jul 23, 2025 | , | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
Nations establish their borders through treaties. Rivers are sometimes relied on to set boundaries, but even here tensions rise when there are disputes about interpretation. Is the boundary on the river banks, the deepest part of the river, or the very centre of the flow?

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Talking heads: what toilets and sewers tell us about ancient Roman sanitation

Talking heads: what toilets and sewers tell us about ancient Roman sanitation

by | Jul 21, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 9 minutes
Focusing on life in ancient Rome, Pompeii, Herculaneum and Ostia, I’m deeply impressed by the brilliant engineers who designed these underground marvels and the magnificent architecture that masks their functional purpose. Sewer galleries didn’t run under every street, nor service every area. But in some cities, including Rome itself, the length and breadth of the main sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, rivals the extent of the main sewer lines in many of today’s cities. We shouldn’t assume, though, that Roman toilets, sewers and water systems were constructed with our same modern sanitary goals in mind.

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Our stone tool discovery pushes back the archaeological record by 700,000 years

Our stone tool discovery pushes back the archaeological record by 700,000 years

by | Jul 14, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes
We, and the West Turkana Archaeological Project which we co-lead, had discovered the earliest stone artifacts yet found, dating to 3.3 million years ago. The discovery of the site, named Lomekwi 3, instantly pushed back the beginning of the archaeological record by 700,000 years. That’s over a quarter of humanity’s previously known material cultural history. These tools were made as much as a million years before the earliest known fossils attributed to our own genus, Homo.

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Five Conspiracies that shaped our world

Five Conspiracies that shaped our world

by | Jul 2, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
The world is a complicated place, and there are a lot of things out of our control. No wonder, then, that conspiracy theories abound, tales where shadowy forces control what happens, when it happens, and to whom. However, not all of these theories are all that theoretical, and there are plenty of examples of conspiracies that went far beyond the drawing board.

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