When Josephine Anderson, a formerly enslaved Floridian, was visited by a white government interviewer in the fall of 1937, she told him a ghost story. Anderson described to Jules Frost a “white man” ...

Atlas Obscura on Slate is a blog about the world's hidden wonders. Like us on Facebook, Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter @atlasobscura. On one of the twin hills in the Mamelles district of Dakar, ...

Marilyn Sage Meagher and her daughter Kelley Watts, 1990, about three years before Marilyn’s death. Photo courtesy Meagher's family. Kelley Watts went away to college just six weeks after her mother, ...

The Internet, we’ve been told, is the greatest library in the history of man—immediate, boundless, constantly expanding. In practice, though, many of us experience the Internet more like history’s ...

In 1996, the New Yorker published “Hating Hillary,” Henry Louis Gates’ reported piece on the widespread animosity for the then–first lady. “Like horse-racing, Hillary-hating has become one of those ...

Courtesy of V&A Museum. If you live in Europe or the Americas, you likely pick up a fork every day and give no thought to it, unless you’re selecting flatware for a wedding registry or you happen to ...

Citizen Kane’s Xanadu fell into disrepair before it was ever finished. Hogwarts is now a tourist trap in Florida. Even Eloise’s quarters at the Plaza Hotel have recently been relocated to Brooklyn. Of ...

Wikimedia Commons/White House Historical Association It’s a familiar chapter in our history, part of the triumphant narrative of westward expansion: In 1803, the United States bought a massive chunk ...

Noah Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language in 1806. His 1828 follow-up contained 70,000 entries. By 1864, the collection had 114,000 ...

This essay originally appeared in the November/December 2013 issue of Orion and also appears in the anthology Leave No Child Inside. Request a free trial issue of Orion here. One of the most ...

In the summer of 2004, Angela Duckworth, then a graduate student in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, went up to West Point to study 1,200 new cadets. The first-years were about to start ...

Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Spencer Platt/Getty Images News Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Spencer Platt/Getty Images News,Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images.