There's an old saying, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." It means the law applies whether or not you know the law exists. It's based on the idea that you have an obligation to know the law, and assumes that the law makes itself known....

The Cold War was described as a "balance of terror" maintained by the opposing nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union....

When President Jefferson Keel referred to the "trust relationship" in his State of Indian Nations address to the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), he fell into a common trap...

International Science Times reports that a Harvard Medical School professor, George Church, has reconstructed Neanderthal DNA and is looking for "an adventurous female...

People say "history" is stories about the past, events before our time, considered to be "over and done with." This ignores the continuing effects of past events, the ways history is operative in the present....

Two Worlds: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects is a new book about the campaign to break indigenous social structures by removing the children: "Governments…paid agencies and churches to remov...

Civilization, in a standard dictionary, is "the stage of human social development and organization that is considered most advanced." The dictionary equates "advanced" with "the comfort and convenience of modern life." A thesaurus adds "progress, enlightenment, culture, refinement, sophistication...

Edward Curtis was a star at the start of his monumental work, "The North American Indian." At the halfway point, his fame had vanished, though his stupendous effort to record the "vanishing Indians" continued. By the time he finished, he lived in obscurity, his work almost forgotten....

People have mined gold for centuries. Archeological evidence points to gold mining at least 7,000 years ago. Stories of Aztec gold drove 16th century Spaniards to invade the continent, where they found products of a rich mining and smelting history....