Linton Weeks

Wedding websites today are aswirl with inventive suggestions, including 10 Unique Wedding Venues from Burnett's Boards; 23 Unconventional But Awesome Wedding Ideas from Buzzfeed and 21 Most Unique Ceremony Ideas from Emmaline Bride.

Couples are tying the knot in a treehouse, on ...

Historically speaking, I need your help.

Davis Houck, a communications professor at Florida State University, recently pointed me toward a little-explored archive at Stanford University called Project South.

It's an intriguing trove — full of original source material. In fact, it's so rich with ...

Street View: New York City's Doors: A Special Research Project of NPR History Dept.

A door is for closing. And for opening.

From the doorkeeper-to-God in Psalms to the wild night outside the door in King Lear to Charlie Rich getting Behind ...

Inundated by YouTube clips of entertaining animals like the elephant cleaning itself with a broom and Joey the trick ferret, I can't help but think of celebrated animals in America's past: Trigger the horse, the many porpoises named Flipper and, last but not ...

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Joe King.

Joe King who?

Joking like this used to be considered a sickness by some people.

The knock-knock joke has been a staple of American humor since the early 20th century. With its repetitive set-up and wordplay punchline, the form has been invoked — and ...

This year we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution — abolishing slavery. So it's worth pointing out that the emancipation movement in 19th century America was pushed forward by many different forces: enlightened lawmakers, determined liberators of captive slaves and ...

In the opening of his new book, Gateway To Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, Eric Foner lays out the inspirational story of Frederick Bailey — a young slave in Maryland who teaches himself to read and write; plans to escape slavery by canoe, but gets ...

Immersed in silent film that depicts everyday folks in rural, 1930s North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, I realized that young people back then looked pretty much the same as the adults ... only smaller.

Take the 13-minute clip from Clayton, N.C., filmed circa 1936-1937. Like ...

Quietly watching historical film of real people doing real things can stir something powerful in us about our collective past. It's like being in a time machine with a big picture window. The images-in-action trigger real and imagined memories.

The moving pictures eerily remind us of where we came from, ...

These days we are constantly warned of scams and schemes designed to hoodwink us. The FBI sends out scam alerts from its Internet Crime Center. The Federal Trade Commission cautions against all kinds of fraudulence, from the recent Anthem Hack Attack to IRS impostors. ...

Two hundred years ago this year, in June of 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated at Waterloo by a coalition of countries — including Austria, Prussia, Russia and the United Kingdom. Though he wound up in exile on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena, he contemplated escaping to America.

Odd that Americans, long known for their short-attention spans and — oh, look, a sparkly thing ... are at the same time manic for marathonic undertakings.

Running, for example. A century ago, scores of marathoners competed before huge wintertime crowds in the 1909 Brooklyn Marathon. Flash forward and this past ...

Considered by many to be the sole purview of lumberjacks, the competitive sport of logrolling — in which participants pad about on a log in water and try to outlast one another — is hoping for new growth.

A recent film, Queens of the Roleo by David Bryant ...

Questions of gender identity are nothing new. Way before Transparent and Chaz Bono and countless other popular culture stepping stones to where we are now regarding gender identity, there were accounts of "female husbands."

Stories of women dressing and posing as men dot the journalistic landscape ...

"The line between cheating and gamesmanship is constantly blurred," observes The New York Times in a recent story. The Times, and just about everyone else, is talking about the perhaps-tampering-with-gameballs allegations levied against the New England Patriots professional football team– specifically Coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady.

As part of the back-and-forth attacks of World War II, the Imperial Japanese army launched balloon bombs — silent wind-borne devices designed to wreak havoc on the cities and woodlands of the American West.

The U.S. government discouraged news organizations from reporting on the bombs — which some ...

Those who forget the past are liable to trip over it.

Just a few months ago a couple of forestry workers in Lumby, British Columbia — about 250 miles north of the U.S. border — happened upon a 70-year-old Japanese balloon bomb.

The dastardly contraption was one of ...

1) Change is constant. After a year and a half and more than 250 posts, The Protojournalist storytelling project has reached its finish line. This will be the last Protojournalist post — under my aegis.

2) Exploration is good. The experiment began on June 14, 2013. It was my idea ...

With the spread of Christianity among some Native Americans in the early 20th century came certain Christmas rituals — trees and presents and jolly old Santa Claus — that were folded into traditional wintertime celebrations.

According to a 1909 account in the Tombstone Epitaph, members of the Gila ...

If Google can't answer your question these days, who you gonna call? A librarian, of course.

Librarians continue to be cool. On a contemporary TNT series, The Librarians are super heroes. For the past couple of years, "librarian" has popped up on the Forbes list of