Search results for

"Tsunami" has been all over the news since a powerful earthquake sent a wall of water into northeastern Japan on March 11. It's a word that comes from Japan and dates from more than 1,000 years ago.

NPR's Jennifer Ludden reviews the troubled history of Fallujah with Annas Shallal, a Sunni Muslim who is founder of the group Iraqi-Americans for Peaceful Alternatives.

Scientists have been watching with alarm as the world's glaciers and arctic regions are showing more and more signs of melting. They suspect that global climate change -- fueled by industrial and vehicle emissions -- are to blame. But as NPR's Eric Niiler reports, this arctic thaw is also revealing a trove of ancient artifacts from people who dropped them thousands of years ago.

Reporter Alex van Oss remembers the days of his youth when he used to roam the hallways of the American History Museum, one of the museums that make up the Smithsonian Institution. The museum received a generous gift of $80 million this past week from California developer Kenneth E. Behring.

Laurence Rees' Auschwitz: A New History provides details about the inner workings of the camp: techniques of mass murder, the politics, the gossip mill between guards and prisoners, and the camp brothel.

The electric chair is on its way out as an instrument of death in the United States. Nebraska is the last state to offer no alternative method of execution. A book by Richard Moran chronicles the history of the electric chair. Moran speaks with NPR's Scott Simon.

Fallujah, the site of gruesome attacks on four U.S. civilian contractors Wednesday, has a long and bloody history. Experts on the area say they are not surprised by the violence of this week's attacks. Hear NPR's Bob Edwards and Rashid Khalidi, director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University.

Author Mark Kurlansky wrote Cod and Salt. Now he moves on to the tasty bi-valve with The Big Oyster. He explores a time in New York history when oyster was king. He debunks some oyster myths for Liane Hansen.

Fentanyl is one of the biggest killers in the opioid epidemic. NPR's Leila Fadel talks to Ben Westhoff, author of the new book Fentanyl, Inc., which tracks the rise of the synthetic drug.

Scott Simon talks to John Crockett, who just translated from Italian a 19th Century book about British colonialism in New Zealand, which the British government suppressed, and then destroyed, when it was first published. The book, called History of New Zealand and Its Inhabitants is a scathing critique of the effects of British colonialism on the native Maori people. It was written by an Italian missionary named Dom Felice Vaggioli.