MCLEAN, Texas–Most people don’t think twice about barbed wire, unless they happen to be cattle ranchers, farmers, or junkyard owners. You don’t have to be any of those to step into the Devil’s Rope ...

American troops without much to do are on the U.S.-Mexico border stringing concertina wire, a type of barbed wire manufactured in coils and often used to create an obstacle in war, to stop a caravan ...

Roman Mars’ podcast 99% Invisible covers design questions large and small, from his fascination with rebar to the history of slot machines to the great Los Angeles Red Car conspiracy. Here at The Eye, ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. The United States has been fortifying its southern border against the “caravan” of migrants from Central American nations ...

Glidden was an American farmer originally from Charlestown, New Hampshire. After growing up in Clarendon, New York, and finishing school, he returned to his father’s farm to work, according to ...

In the mid 1800s, not many (non-native) Americans had ever been west of the Mississippi. When Frederick Law Olmstead visited the west in the 1850s, he remarked that the plains looked like a sea of ...

At the height of Manifest Destiny, when the United States was pushing into the West, the frontiersmen of the late 1800s needed a cheap way to contain livestock and keep grazing animals out of farm ...

Before Ma Bell came to town, and long before DSL, it was barbed wire, of all things, that brought rural communities together. A Sears telephone hooked up to barbed wire—miles of which were already ...