As “Mad Men” depicts, history reshapes people’s lives, perspectives, and interactions, often without them fully realizing that things have changed.

Harlow Giles Unger is author of 27 books, including a dozen biographies of the Founding Fathers. His latest book is Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence, published by Hachette.

Marina Manoukian is a writer and artist. She received her Masters in English Philology at Freie Universität Berlin. A Ford truck is loaded with ivory tusks in Essex, Connecticut, 19th century.

Mr. Hughes is the Nixon tapes editor for the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. It wasn’t the crime, but it wasn’t the cover-up, either. Something more ...

Laurel Leff is an associate professor in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University and author of Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper published by ...

Ludovic Rembert has had a career as a network security engineer working in both industry and academia, and currently writes on technology issues. The 20th-century futurists were susceptible to making ...

Edwin Black is the author of "IBM and the Holocaust" and "War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race," from which the following article is drawn. Hitler and his ...

Drowning rates were abysmally high in early 20th-century America, with as many as ten thousand adults and children meeting watery graves each year. Beaches and swimming holes were unguarded, and those ...

Donne Levy is a retired community college history instructor. In the mid-1970s, the religious right became heavily involved in electoral politics and a driving force within the Republican Party. By ...

Mr. Stern taught African American history at the college level for a decade before becoming historian at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum (1977–1999)—where he designed the museum’s first civil ...

Eric Jager is Professor of English at UCLA and author of several books including The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France. People today often have a hard ...