California Gold Rush | Battlelines | 3

In the early 1850s, as people continued to flood West, California’s booming cities experienced rapid growth, but also turmoil. Fires regularly swept through hastily erected towns, and battles broke out between lawless miners and new, civic-minded residents who wanted to clean ...

News of the 1848 discovery of gold in California spread quickly, and thousands of Chinese migrants flocked to California to seek a better life in the place they called "Gold Mountain." But the reality awaiting them was a far cry from streets paved with gold. Despite facing rac ...

Searching for lost cities in the Amazon sounds like something out of a Hollywood script – unless you’re University of Florida anthropologist Mike Heckenberger. He’s been visiting the Amazon for three decades, working with local tribes and uncovering a network of ancient cities ...

China’s late Neolithic period saw the emergence of increasingly powerful groups of elites who buried themselves in lavishly decorated tombs and built palaces and public buildings at the hearts of their fortified settlements. From these political centers, the elites built and r ...

Winter storms arrived early on the Himalayan peak Nanda Devi, forcing the team of American and Indian climbers to retreat down the mountain and abandon the nuclear-powered spying device. Now in the spring of 1966, the team has to go back up to retrieve it. But they are unprepa ...

Agriculture was invented in no fewer than three, and probably four, places in the Americas. It went along with sedentary living and complex societies, but in complicated ways: fishing villages along the Andean coast grew into the cities of Norte Chico, but hunter-gatherers pro ...