Search
History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
Books to expand your perspective on history, philosophy, space exploration, and more this year.
From Viking tales to modern anthropology, the idea of the "savage" has shaped how outsiders viewed Indigenous societies — and justified attempts to dominate them.
Scientists are livid over the OSTP director's official report to the President. Will it lead to a new golden age for US science, or end it?
200 years ago, we hardly knew anything about our Universe on cosmic scales. Today, there's so much that we know. Here's how we arrived.
From Stephen King’s Maine to Steinbeck’s California, Big Think's “A Literary Map of the United States” charts the stories that changed how we see a nation.
The philosopher Svetlana Boym argues that "nostos" encourages people to reject the world as it is and seek to return to a better time — real or imagined.
Neither a victory nor a defeat, the Korean War lingers in a stalemate that remains unresolved.
People are almost always different to how we imagine them
Mathematics is our language for quantitatively describing reality, but it can also take us to worlds that never were. Physics needs more.
Astrophysicist Adam Frank used to think the consequences of rejecting science would play out on the individual level. He's since changed his mind.
Today's surveillance economy is not inevitable. Data can become a public resource instead of a tool of control.
The movie gestures at one of humanity's biggest questions yet chooses to look away, writes Big Think producer Clark Frankel.
For all we know, the cosmos could truly be infinite in scale. But the observable part of our Universe? It's finite, and its size is known.
A writer’s search for an affordable home leads to the desert — and a community building a different kind of American dream.
I’ve lived in a converted van for six years. The freedom is real — but so are the trade-offs people rarely talk about.
From Amish Country to Slab City, these are the places where Americans reject the mainstream.
The ambiguity of Bartleby shows that opting out can be a form of resistance, retreat, or something harder to judge.
A conversation with Richard Haass about reorienting the U.S. toward long-term thinking and reinstating global stability into the 22nd century.
A conversation with the Hardcore History host on executive power, political independents, and how America drifted into partisan dysfunction.
From Gilded Age space dreams to AI’s cosmic endgame, fiction reveals how the drive to shed obligations to others can escalate.