An 18” piece of barbed wire that’s worth $600 (it features barbs in the shape of cockleburs). A Raven’s nest built primarily of barbed wire.

Barbed wire is a critical innovation that shaped the High Plains. Field Editor Lacey Vilhauer takes a look at its origins.

“Barbed wire” showed up around 1874, the OED says, though it is also spelled “barbwire,” “barb wire,” and “barb-wire.” The inventor is unclear; both the Devil’s Rope Museum in McLean, Texas, and the ...

The first commercially successful barbed wire was patented by an American farmer on Nov. 24, 1874. Joseph Farwell Glidden invented the effective product. Fox News Media ...

This week's edition—about barbed wire—can be played below. Or keep reading to learn more. In the mid-1800s, not many (non-native) Americans had ever been west of the Mississippi.

Some historians say that barbed wire was almost as important as railroads in settling 19th Century America–out west and in Lake County. The first commercially successful barbed wire was invented ...

Barbed wire continued to be used across the country at farmsteads and homesteads for containing livestock. Many of these former places now comprise the area we know today as Fort McCoy.