William James laid the foundation for psychology as a scientific discipline in the US

Wilhelm Wundt, the forgotten father of modern psychology

He was the first psychologist to call himself one, and he influenced a whole generation of early psychologists. Learn about the life and works of Wilhelm Wundt with this thorough entry from a philosophy encyclopedia.

What is psychology? An overview

What is psychology and why should we study it? This short video from Macat explains how the subject has developed over the years and introduces some of the key thinkers and ideas.

Many of the founding fathers were deists—believers in a God of reason

A uniquely American iteration of the Enlightenment movement thrived during the Revolution. This selection from a longer write-up on the American Enlightenment highlights six core ideas: deism, liberalism, republicanism, conservatism, toleration, and scientific progress.

See Harvard’s early history through Indigenous voices

Founded in 1636, Harvard University grew alongside English colonization in Wampanoag lands. In this online exhibit, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology highlights Indigenous voices, interpreting objects such as eel traps and grass baskets.

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

Many private schools follow Dewey's experiential learning model

John Dewey is perhaps the biggest figure in American education. He is known for emphasizing active, experiential learning and founding one of the country’s most renowned private schools: the Experimental School, which would later become the Laboratory Schools in Chicago.

Theos Bernard's book on yoga formalized the practice for many Americans

His 1943 book “Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience” was supposedly based on a 1936 trip through India and Tibet, though it’s believed many of the details were fabricated. Still, the book featured photos of Bernard in numerous postures that were some of the first published in the US, helping to popularize yoga in America.

The scientists trying to prove Jackson Pollock's symbolism

Jackson Pollock is one of the most famous American artists in history. He is well-known for his Abstract Expressionist "drip paintings," which seemed to defy interpretation. But following the artist's posthumous bipolar diagnosis, a team of scientists attempted to prove that his symptoms, including mania and psychosis, caused Pollock to embed images under his thrown paint.

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

The history of brainwashing in America

"Brainwashing" refers to a coerced shift in worldview, often associated with cults or oppressive totalitarian governments. Though such processes are not well understood on a neurological level, they hold an outsized role in public imagination, particularly in science fiction and dystopias. This article reviews the history of the term, first popularized by Edward Hunter in 1950, and the subsequent use of the approach in pop psychology, the CIA, and more.

Both British and American pop art took inspiration from US culture

Pop art emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and the late 1950s in America. American pop art focused on representational art and was directly inspired by living within American popular culture, using hard edges and distinct forms. Its British sibling, on the other hand, took a more academic approach, viewing American culture from a distance and employing irony and parody.

'Happiness depends more upon the internal frame of a persons own mind—than on the externals in the world.'

- George Washington (1732-1799)

JJ Schildkraut theorized depression is linked to brain chemical imbalances—in 1965

Schildkraut was one of the first to put forward this idea, which stemmed from lab animal research. A decade later, researchers published the first landmark paper on fluoxetine—better known by trade name Prozac—which increases serotonin levels in the brain.

The anthropological origins of modern race science

The year 1961 saw the launch of The Mankind Quarterly, a new scientific journal of anthropology that hid its political propaganda behind a veneer of academia, expecting readers to assume whatever lay in its pages was scientifically proven. This in-depth article details how this journal pushed race science in the hopes of blocking racial integration in the US and preventing the immigration of those outside of Western Europe.

Thomas Edison, eager to communicate with ghosts, tinkered with an apparatus called the 'spirit phone'

The inventor was interested in developing a scientific method for communicating with the dead. He was not interested, though, in the occult figures who believed the dead could be reached through Spiritualism, which he found childish. He believed those kinds of people "permit themselves to become, in a sense, hypnotized into thinking that their imaginings are actualities."

Some founders of quantum mechanics thought consciousness could influence phenomena

Since quantum systems exist as a superposition of states before producing a definitive outcome, some quantum pioneers wondered if the act of conscious observation was what collapsed the wave function of possibilities into one state.

Beats emphasized the importance of 'spontaneous prose'

Beat writer Jack Kerouac believed literature should aim to be more like jazz, using improvisation to burrow down to the root of the subconscious. In this video from the University of Pennsylvania’s Modern and Contemporary Poetry course, Professor Al Filreis directs a conversation of Kerouac’s manifesto, “Essential of Spontaneous Prose.”

How George Gallup changed political polling forever

Straw polls had been used in the 19th century, but it wasn't until George Gallup's use of random sampling in 1936 that the art became a science.

Early MBA curricula were influenced by a movement in ‘scientific management’

The Scientific Management movement was pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early 1900s and posited managers should take a scientific approach to work, studying each task and system in the workplace from an objective lens. It’s still considered the backbone of modern management practices.

James Madison University was named for Madison long after his death

Founded in 1908 as the State Normal and Industrial School for Women, the institution was renamed Madison College in 1938 and James Madison University in 1977, despite James Madison having no direct connection to the school's founding or development.

The term 'artificial intelligence' was coined in 1956

Dartmouth professor John McCarthy introduced the term during a summer workshop aimed at exploring how to make machines perform human-like tasks. Two years later, Perceptron Mark I became one of the first neural network machines.

Harvard drowned rats for this?

Harvard's 1950s rat study was ethically questionable, but scientifically profound. One rescue attempt made rats swim 40x longer. The finding: hope isn't poetic, it's biological.

Take Yale's free online course, 'The Science of Well-Being'

Considered Yale University's most popular free online course, this 10-module series offers insights into the science of well-being and practical ways to increase happiness and satisfaction. More than 5 million people have enrolled since its 2018 launch.

James Garfield, the first left-handed US president

Though he was assassinated only four months into his tenure, President James Garfield was a highly respected figure, a professor known for his mastery of several languages, success as a general in the Civil War, and accomplishments in Congress. He was also left-handed, the first southpaw to sit in the Oval Office. Learn more about Garfield's ambidexterity here.

Basketball was invented in 1891 by Dr. James Naismith

When Dr. James Naismith hung two peach baskets at either end of a Springfield College gymnasium, he was just looking to keep the school’s athletes occupied and safe during harsh New England winters, but the game he created would quickly turn out to be a national sensation.

Trace how the Bill of Rights, inspired by centuries of political theory, took shape between 1774 and 1789.

The Department of Justice was formally established in 1870

Passed by Congress in 1870, the Act to Establish the Department of Justice centralized federal legal work under the attorney general, bringing together US attorneys and marshals into a single department.

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

The power and influence of the American presidency have expanded significantly over time—far beyond what the founders envisioned.

The word 'jazz' evolved from 'jasm,' 19th-century American slang for 'energy'

The concept of phantom limbs, the perception that amputated limbs are still present, dates back to a French military surgeon in the 16th century.

The first horror movie is believed to be George Méliès' 1986 short 'The Haunted Castle,' which pioneered the use of special effects

Poison ivy was sent to Europe in the 1600s as an exotic, ornamental oddity, where it was purposefully grown in the English royal gardens at Kew, the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, and a few other locations.

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

About 12.5% of US adults experience a phobia in their lifetime, a diagnosis that hinges on the intense fear interfering with daily life and persisting for at least six months.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

Many legends about George Washington, including his supposed wooden teeth and the story of cutting down the cherry tree, lack evidence.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

Before humans, the Soviet Union and the United States sent animals—including apes, dogs, and cats—to space during the Space Race.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

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Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'