Genomes debunk the idea of blonde, Nordic Vikings

Researchers sequenced the genome of 442 Viking Age bone fragments from all over Europe. The Vikings may not have been quite as Nordic as we thought.

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Tags: history genomes europe featured science-and-technology society-and-culture vikings

Bronze Age bones say lactose tolerance spread fast

The remains of Bronze Age warriors suggest lactose tolerance, or the ability to digest milk, spread rapidly throughout Central Europe.

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Tags: evolution history food genes bones science-and-technology health-and-medicine milk dairy

Europe’s first syphilis outbreak may predate Columbus’ voyage

A major hypothesis holds that Christopher Columbus and his crew brought syphilis back to Europe. But new evidence suggests it was already there.

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Tags: bacteria history featured health-and-medicine syphilis

WWI changed public attitude about women’s suffrage

An expert explains the history of how World War I gave the movement for women's suffrage more momentum and potentially paved the way for the 19th amendment.

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Tags: history gender featured society-and-culture voting

How abolitionists paved way for the 19th Amendment

100 years after the 19th Amendment's passage, an expert digs into how the intersection of gender and racial justice inspired the women's suffrage movement.

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Tags: history gender united-states slavery featured society-and-culture voting

Hagia Sophia ‘time tunnel’ linked Ottoman and Roman Empires

Hagia Sophia has been a cathedral, a mosque, a museum, and now again a mosque. But past conquests don't fully explain its legacy, a historian says.

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Tags: history art religion society-and-culture beliefs

Pandemics have sparked anti-Asian hate crimes before

The US has a long history of anti-Asian hate crimes and "othering," say researchers, including the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment camps, and other events.

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Tags: history immigration bias united-states racism society-and-culture race-and-ethnicity pandemics

Smallpox is so much older than we thought, Vikings had it

"We have found the oldest evidence of smallpox. Moreover, it seems to have been surprisingly common as early as in the Viking Age."

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Tags: history genomes viruses featured society-and-culture health-and-medicine smallpox vikings

Evidence rewrites early Indigenous-colonizer encounters

Indigenous people in Oconee Valley—now central Georgia—actively resisted European influence for nearly 150 years after the arrival of Hernando de Soto.

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Tags: history archaeology united-states indigenous-people society-and-culture

Expert: Confederate monument facts defang ‘heritage’ claims

"...historical context makes it a lot harder to claim that these monuments and memorials are simply 'heritage,' innocent of any racial meaning."

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Tags: history united-states racism society-and-culture us-civil-war race-and-ethnicity