Marc Andreessen at Netscape's second Internet Developer Conference, October 1996. Netscape launched interactivity into web pages in 1995, via a new scripting language called JavaScript. This heralded the start of the multimedia era of web browsers. In March 1996, Netscape debuted its Navigator 2.0 browser, which...

This piece by Jessica Boyall about the art of whaling is equal parts remarkable and horrifying: The first European settlers arrived at Nantucket, an isolated island some thirty miles from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1659. They built homes, Quaker meeting houses, and cattle farms, swiftly and forcibly colonising the...