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Books of imagination. Surreal art. fantasy painting. Books flying in the clouds.

Speculative Fiction: Beyond a Novel’s Entertainment Value

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

Cabinet of Curiosities

Christopher, the Dog-Headed Saint

Although the tradition has largely faded in the Western church, Saint Christopher sported a canine head through much of Christian history.

Plant of the Month

The Pomegranate in History and Myth

Used heavily in early medicine and at times for opposing aims, the pomegranate shows a marked versatility in its cultural connotations and connections.

Archive Adventures

Send in the Clowns

Lulu Adams came from a long, illustrious line of circus performers and was credited—even if wrongly—with being the world’s first female clown.

Cross Reference

Urgent Notification: It’s Time to Play Cross Reference

This month’s crossword puzzle kindly requests your attention.

Most Recent

An illustration from Mansfield Park depicting Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford rehearsing Lovers' Vows

Arts & Culture

The Scandalous Play in Mansfield Park

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

Plants & Animals

Using Pollen To Make Paper, Sponges, and More

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

Cabinet of Curiosities

Christopher, the Dog-Headed Saint

Although the tradition has largely faded in the Western church, Saint Christopher sported a canine head through much of Christian history.

Plant of the Month

The Pomegranate in History and Myth

Used heavily in early medicine and at times for opposing aims, the pomegranate shows a marked versatility in its cultural connotations and connections.

Archive Adventures

Send in the Clowns

Lulu Adams came from a long, illustrious line of circus performers and was credited—even if wrongly—with being the world’s first female clown.

Cross Reference

Urgent Notification: It’s Time to Play Cross Reference

This month’s crossword puzzle kindly requests your attention.

An Untimely Death at Sycamore Gap

The outcry over the violent felling of a beloved tree in 2023 affirms the power trees hold in our cultural memory.

Education & Society

What Did the COVID Pandemic Do to Our Minds?

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.

Scene of Three Witches from Shakespeare's Macbeth by George Cattermole, 1840

Arts & Culture

King James I and the Macbeth Witches

The ever-pragmatic Shakespeare added witches to the Scottish play to please his new patron, King James I of England.

Long Reads

In this aerial view the 'Sycamore Gap' tree on Hadrian's Wall lies on the ground leaving behind only a stump in the spot it once proudly stood, on September 28, 2023 northeast of Haltwhistle, England. The tree, which was apparently felled overnight, was one of the UK's most photographed and appeared in the 1991 Kevin Costner film "Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves."

Plants & Animals

An Untimely Death at Sycamore Gap

The outcry over the violent felling of a beloved tree in 2023 affirms the power trees hold in our cultural memory.

Plants & Animals

Taking “Stock” of Salmon and Word Choice

The long debate over spawning habits and genetics belies the problems caused by categorizing fish with a term associated with finance and breeding.

Photo taken by FBI agents in Jonestown following the Jonestown massacre of November 18, 1978.

Politics & History

One Woman’s Path to Jonestown

While the events that led to the Jonestown massacre included profound tragedy, the life—and death—of one of its residents offers lessons on community and resilience.

Plants & Animals

Dates: Civilization’s Sweetest Indulgence

Offshoots from the “Tree of Life” traveled from Mesopotamia to the Levant to the United States, beguiling everyone with their toothsome confections.

Editors' Picks

Science & Technology

Convincing Peasants to Fly in the Soviet Union

With air-minded films, poems, and demonstrations, Soviet leaders sought to lift peasants out of their “backward” lives and into the world of the modern proletariat.

Politics & History

The Trouble with Reentry

Reentry of space junk in the 1970s forced First Nations communities into a reckoning with Cold War geopolitics and a burgeoning envirotechnical disaster.

Politics & History

Iran’s Protest Culture

A succession of authoritarian regimes birthed a strong tradition of collective action.

Arts & Culture

Tyler S. Sprague on the Intersection of Structure and Design

An interview with Tyler S. Sprague, a historian of the built environment whose work depends on multidisciplinarity and a deep knowledge of structure and materials.

Politics & History

How to be a Modern Autocrat

In the twenty-first century, dictators are less likely than their predecessors to use violence to suppress dissent, cultivating instead “informational autocracies.”

Quirky History

An acrobatic water skier performs during a show at Cypress Gardens theme park in 1953 near Winterhaven, Florida.

The Wonderful World of the Water Ski

Invented in 1922, water-skiing quickly became shorthand for American ideas on beauty, athleticism, and affluence.

A caricature of the Berners Street Hoax by William Heath, 1810

Is “Swatting” Rooted in a Prank Craze from the 1800s?

Why did Georgian-era England go mad for dangerous hoaxes, and what can that mania tell us about today’s volatile, content-hungry world?

Coco De Mer: The Magical Derrière of the Sea

Once viewed as a precious item of mysterious origin, the seed of the coco do mer palm, though better understood today, remains a rare and valuable commodity.

Collections on JSTOR

A painting of The Belgic, the ship on which Ella Sheldon wrote many of her diaries.

Lonely Diarist of the High Seas

As ship stewardess, Ella Sheldon tended to upper-crust women onboard and battled a range of workplace demons. Her journals tell her story.

Shadowbox with a wedding photograph of a bride and groom, surrounded by the bride's veil

First Comes Love

A top divorce lawyer collected strangers’ marriage certificates and other wedding-related ephemera—a testament to her perhaps surprising faith in matrimony.

From Oriental Riviera to Global Asia: Hong Kong in Travel Posters

A collection of travel posters shared via JSTOR by Hong Kong Baptist University highlights Hong Kong’s unique place in the global imagination over the decades.

Reading Lists

Cute tiny people reading different books, giant textbooks. Concept of book world, readers at library, literature lovers or fans. Colorful vector illustration in flat cartoon style

Speculative Fiction: A Reading List

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

A parent and child near windmills at sunset

Black Midwestern Studies: A Reading List

This primer on Black Midwestern Studies examines the factors shaping communities of color in America’s “flyover country,” long mistaken as a place of normative whiteness.

Crowd taking photographs on mobile phones

Citizen Journalism: A Reading List

The ubiquity of smartphones has ushered in a new era for journalism—facilitating citizen journalism and changing the very nature of reporting.

Partner Posts

Using Pollen To Make Paper, Sponges, and More

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

Lite Intermediate Black Holes

Meet the supermassive black hole’s smaller, much more mysterious cousin.

At center, the cytoskeleton’s actin fibers in mouse connective tissue cells are seen in yellow; cellular DNA is stained blue

Super-Resolution Microscopes Showcase the Inner Lives of Cells

Advanced light microscopy techniques have come into their own—and are giving scientists a new understanding of human biology and what goes wrong in disease.