The brevity of the Fifteenth Amendment of the US Constitution belies its impact on American voting rights.

The Heinz Gaube Lebanese Architectural Photographs Collection, supported by an innovative mapping project, details threatened buildings across Lebanon.

The largest fish, Rhincodon typus, is obviously not a whale, but it’s also unusual for a shark.

By exposing his skin on a sunny day, King Edward VIII offered a reminder that a monarch is, after all, nothing but a person.

Shakespeare's tragedy offers a telling parable about the administration of justice--and rife mishandling thereof--in our day.

In the 1880s, Los Angeles began a large-scale project of incarcerating unemployed men whom they viewed as a threat to the vigor of white America.

At university and in the field, Darwin trained his scientific thinking as would a geologist, seeking causal explanations for observed natural phenomena.

Moose Javians’ confidence and reputation are rooted in a unique, if fanciful, story, developed after the economic downturn of the 1980s and 1990s.

In many restaurants, front and back of house workers are divided by language and culture in ways that affect the careers of both groups.

Often considered the first Canadian novel, The History of Emily Montague revealed its author’s true feelings about colonial Quebec.

New York’s Long Island has long served as a backdrop for social and political conflicts between the newly arrived and the established residents.

Kurt Weill and his musical collaborators used utopian fantasies to explore the social and political conditions of a fading Weimar Republic. In the twilight of the Weimar era, Der Silbersee and The Ris...

Toys, even ones marketed as tools for the imagination, are never value neutral.

Johns Hopkins University’s Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection of Literary and Historical Forgery shows that humans have been creating fan fiction and fake news for millennia.

Well-researched stories from Mongabay, Ars Technica, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Piet Mondrian, co-founder of De Stijl, argued that the art movement wasn’t ready for architecture. Theo van Doesburg and others believed it was. Who was right?

How to learn the songs of nature’s symphony with some simple techniques.

A new book from historian Mateo Jarquín seeks to decouple Nicaragua’s unique socialist uprising from reductive Cold War clichés.

Occultism was widely embraced under the Third Reich, complicating Nazi attempts to wield it as a weapon against internationalism and other undesirable ideologies. Not all occult practices are alike: d...

The Arts and Crafts and Slow Food movements twinned pleasure and democracy though supporters of these artisanal crusades developed a reputation for elitism.

Landscape paintings show how quickly American forests changed in the early nineteenth century—and the mixed feelings people had about that change.

Orville and Wilbur Wright wanted to create a practical machine—not a novelty or a gimmick—and they accomplished that at Ohio’s Huffman Prairie on October 5, 1905.

Soviet dissident memoirs, like their authors, had to cross the Iron Curtain—an iron curtain of meaning and interpretation.

As one family’s story reveals, labor organizing and the development of a co-op for waste collection has improved conditions for precariously employed workers in India.

An intellectual powerhouse and dedicated conservationist, Goodall showed generations of humans how to engage with—and take care of—the natural world.

More than curiosities, college papers are unique pedagogical tools that help undergraduates achieve media literacy.

Can insects communicate? In the middle of the twentieth century, scientists disagreed on whether bees could possess a “language” expressed through motion.

Swift’s savage animosity towards the Irish Protestant elites is front and center in his biting (perhaps literally) critique of the landlord class.

Well-researched stories from Literary Hub, Aeon, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Clarke's interest in oceanic exploration in the 1950s was, like his undersea fiction, often neglected by an audience focused on the race for outer space.

The document that came out of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention extended the long-lived and hard-fought movement for women’s rights in the United States.

Well-researched stories from Nautilus, The Conversation, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Christine used her pen to make a living at the French court, but even more pointedly, she used it to argue the value of educated women.

Poems that reflect and reinterpret the pastoral tradition, by Louise Glück, Alex Dimitrov, Rebecca Lehmann, Sam Sax, Natasha Trethewey, and more.

An interview with writer and poet Rebecca Lehmann, who finds splendid things can follow when she stretches the rules of craft.

The algorithms that promise to predict wildfires and optimize energy grids are powered by servers that drink up rivers and belch out more carbon than cars.

The English thinker whose name is synonymous with doom and gloom has lessons for today.

Labeling the undead figures in non-European mythology, popular culture, and academia as “vampires” doesn’t make sense.

Well-researched stories from Sapiens, Smithsonian Magazine, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Raised in a family of storytellers, Augusta Baker continued that tradition, imparting a love of books to readers of all ages.

Markers of both environmental change and periods of stability, trees have a lot to tell us about nature—but also about humanity.

As cave exploration became more popular and speleology developed as an academic discipline, cave explorers were drawn into a problematic European nationalism.

Jane Austen uses Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows to explore the social boundaries, both public and private, of Regency England.

Reengineered, the powdery stuff could become a range of eco-friendly objects.

Speculative fiction, from Afrofuturism to Star Wars, offers students tools and methods for analyzing social movements, power structures, and utopian thinking.

The classroom is a place to equip students to better understand the world as it was and is. Speculative fiction can help.

This month’s crossword puzzle kindly requests your attention.

The neoliberal politics that developed in the 1970s created financial instability and fragmented cultural markets, helping to pave the way for Trumpism.

The pandemic’s transformation of daily lives around the world led to a loss of the bodily feeling of social trust across entire communities at once.