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The ornamentation of medieval churches is often associated with the elite, but carved right into the structure of the building are less visible traces of the lower and middle class: graffiti.
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Miniature meditating skeletons, snarling cats, eerie ghosts, and gods of fortune carved in ivory, wood, and horn adorned the sashes of Japanese men throughout the Edo period.
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Once upon a time, there was but One Cat Photographer to Rule Them All.
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In the thousands of propaganda posters produced in China between the birth of the People's Republic in 1949 and the early 1980s, the beaming face of Chairman Mao Zedong watches over a surreal utopia.
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The Latin alphabet's letter A can be traced back to an Egyptian hieroglyph of an ox head; the letter M is believed to have its origins in a hieroglyph representing water.
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Hypnosis straddles the line between science and entertainment, encompassing both the therapeutic practice of hypnotherapy and performative stage acts.
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In 1967, Chicago-based photojournalist Steve Schapiro became famous for chronicling The Hippie in the Haight.
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Almost every US town has one: that mysterious Masonic lodge with its borrowed Egyptian or Greek details, arcane symbols, and windows and doors that rarely open.
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Long before the ubiquity of Google Maps, these colorful engravings, produced between 1572 and 1617, comprised the world's most accurate and elaborate collection of urban cartography ever made.
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Railroad Station Stamp Designs captures the scope and evolution of these unique tokens, capturing the uniqueness of place through single small pictures.
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Long before it became a cultural juggernaut, MoMA was helmed by a young intellectual named Alfred H. Barr Jr. who, from 1929 to 1934, worked in close collaboration with architect Philip Johnson to make the museum an influential platform for modernism.
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In 1811, nearly four decades before the advent of anesthesia, the English novelist Fanny Burney underwent a mastectomy for breast cancer.