History

Humans are the only animal species that bury their dead, and this practice is preserved in Paleolithic sites as early as 120,000 years ago. The emergence of burial traditions in this time period implies that both Neanderthals and early humans had already...

A rigged election and a political crisis among competing elites, middle classes, and rural workers: What could go wrong? The Mexican Revolution of 1910 began as a multilocal revolt against the 35-year regime of dictator Porfirio Díaz and evolved into a...

Ancient Maya civilization—known for its cities, monumental architecture, ceramics, hieroglyphic writing, and advanced understanding of mathematics and astronomy—suffered a major demise between the tenth and eleventh centuries. The causes continue to be...

Harvard University's 1650 charter founded a multicultural educational setting when it committed the new institution "to the education of the English and Indian Youth of this Country in knowledge and godliness." The Harvard Yard Archaeology Project...

Robert Gardner Photography Fellow 2021 Wendel White, Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University, New Jersey, will use the 2021 Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography to work on Manifest: Thirteen Colonies, an ongoing photographic project of...

The Peabody Museum was founded at a time of epistemological and political turmoil, seven years after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and one year after the end of the Civil War. The chaotic decades following the war proved to be an...

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was the first American fair to feature anthropology. The new discipline had its own building, supervised by Frederic Putnam, then director of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum.It competed, however, with...

How do we confront the history and legacy of Louis Agassiz’s extensive archive of images of African and Indigenous Brazilians made in Manaus, Brazil in 1865 and housed at Harvard’s Peabody Museum? Four distinguished panelists reflect on the historical...

“What is a Polynesian?” This is a question with a long and troubling history embedded in settler colonialism. From Europeans’ earliest encounters with the Pacific, White Europeans expressed a fascination and partial identification with the racial origins...

For seven seasons, award-winning Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has uncovered the ancestral stories of celebrity guests on his hit-television series, Finding Your Roots. In this program, Gates Jr. is joined by Dr. Gregg Hecimovich to discuss the...