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When 19th-century trappers and explorers returned from the Yellowstone region of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, they told incredible tales of boiling mud, geysers, steaming rivers, and petrified trees.

You don't forget meeting a man like John Svenson. I got a brief opportunity in 2011 when he came to The Huntington for a photo shoot in the galleries housing the exhibition "The House that Sam Built: Sam Maloof and Art in the Pomona Valley, 1945–1985"

Archival research involves thousands of tiny discoveries, while writing history requires putting those fragments together into a coherent whole. The process, often tedious, can occasionally be exhilarating.

If you're one of the millions of people who watched the British period drama "Downton Abbey," you might be craving a juicy story about a lord or lady right about now. "Downton" led viewers on a rollercoaster ride as the titled Crawley family

Asked to name the most famous European naturalists of the 18th century, most scholars would probably choose Sweden's Carl Linnaeus and France's Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon. One figure often overshadowed by these contemporaries

As part of my project "City on the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Beyond the Screen," I've been researching the aerospace industry in Southern California. I've been looking at its impact on everything from revolutions in the shape of surfboards to high-tech art movements

How important is historical literacy in today's world, where popular culture focuses on the here and now and the milestone events in our nation's past often get short shrift? Two Pulitzer Prize-winning historians recently weighed in on that question

You've heard the dire news about California's drought. And you've been thinking about swapping out your lawn for water-wise plants. But if you're used to traditional grass and ornamental plants, where do you begin?