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A false colored scanning electron micrograph of a flour beetle
Plants & Animals

Bugging Out

The complicated, ever-changing, millennia-long relationship between insects and humans.

Unfolding AI

Young woman holding a cell phone

We Got Social Media Wrong. Can We Get AI Right?

How to be agents who use new AI tools, rather than subjects manipulated by them.

American Prison Newspapers 1880-2020

From Paahao Press, November 1943

How Prisoners Contributed During World War II

Prisoners not only supported the war effort in surprising ways during World War II, they fought and died in it.

Cabinet of Curiosities

Antique illustration: Sleeping at sea

The Women Who Preached in Their Sleep

Was sleep-preaching an ingenious way for oppressed women to subvert the social order through somniloquy?

Suggested Readings

Potato Pancakes "Latke's" with Sour Cream and Apple Sauce

Jewish Food, Brain Tech, and Mourning a Forest

Well-researched stories from Public Books, Perspectives on History, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Most Recent

Self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh, 1889
Art & Art History

Why We Connect with Vincent van Gogh’s Paintings

Van Gogh was a troubled soul and master painter who relied on his emotions and color to create art that continues to attract millions of viewers.
A uniformed member of the Nazi SA and a student of the Academy of Physical Exercise examine materials plundered from the library of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, director of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin on May 6, 1933.
Politics & History

90 Years On: The Destruction of the Institute of Sexual Science

In May 1933, Nazi-led student groups organized public burnings of "un-German" books, including those held in the library of the Institute for Sexual Science.
Patients stand in the Red Cross building in Walter Reed Hospital, c. WWI
Health

The Birth of the Modern American Military Hospital

The founding of Walter Reed General Hospital at the beginning of the twentieth century marked a shift in medical care for military personnel and veterans.
A cartoon of a woman's hand holding a microphone
Arts & Culture

Honey Cocaine’s Unexpected Cambodian Canadian Life Story

The Toronto rapper embraces a patois-inflected “bad gal” image to tell a deeply personal story about historical violence.

More Stories

Unfolding AI

Young woman holding a cell phone

We Got Social Media Wrong. Can We Get AI Right?

How to be agents who use new AI tools, rather than subjects manipulated by them.

American Prison Newspapers 1880-2020

From Paahao Press, November 1943

How Prisoners Contributed During World War II

Prisoners not only supported the war effort in surprising ways during World War II, they fought and died in it.

Cabinet of Curiosities

Antique illustration: Sleeping at sea

The Women Who Preached in Their Sleep

Was sleep-preaching an ingenious way for oppressed women to subvert the social order through somniloquy?

Suggested Readings

Potato Pancakes "Latke's" with Sour Cream and Apple Sauce

Jewish Food, Brain Tech, and Mourning a Forest

Well-researched stories from Public Books, Perspectives on History, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Trending

From the cover of The Black Mask magazine, June 1, 1923
Politics & History

The Gumshoes Who Took On the Klan

In the pages of Black Mask magazine, the Continental Op and Race Williams fought the KKK even as they shared its love of vigilante justice.
Marie Stopes in her laboratory, 1904
Education & Society

Counting Orgasms With Marie Stopes

Before gall wasp expert Alfred Kinsey turned to the study of human sexuality, another biologist made her move.
Two arms with tattoos
Education & Society

Why Does the Bible Forbid Tattoos?

And have we been misinterpreting Leviticus?

Long Reads

From the cover of The Black Mask magazine, June 1, 1923
Politics & History

The Gumshoes Who Took On the Klan

In the pages of Black Mask magazine, the Continental Op and Race Williams fought the KKK even as they shared its love of vigilante justice.
From the cover of Paahao Press, Summer 1960
American Prison Newspapers 1880-2020

A Century of History in Five Hawaiian Prison Newspapers

Hawaiian language and culture are emphasized throughout, ranging from before statehood and during martial law to modern day women's prisons.
American actors Cindy Williams (right) and Ron Howard as Laurie and Steve on the set of the Lucasfilm production 'American Graffiti',
Arts & Culture

The Sonic Triumph of American Graffiti

In 1973, George Lucas joined forces with sound designer Walter Murch to celebrate a bygone era. They ended up revolutionizing the role music plays in film.
Edward Jenner vaccinating a young child
Health

Moving the Needle

Anti-vaxxers have been around as long as there have been vaccines.

Editors' Picks

Business & Economics

How We All Got in Debt

Consumer debt shapes American lives so thoroughly that it seems eternal and immortal, but it’s actually relatively new to the financial world.
Education & Society

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: Annotated

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.
Politics & History

Guns in America: Foundations and Key Concepts

This non-exhaustive list of readings on the role of guns in US history and society introduces the field as a subject of scholarly inquiry.
Politics & History

How Stovemakers Helped Invent Modern Marketing

Most people in the United States have a stove in their kitchen. But how did this “must-have” come to be?
Politics & History

The Swedish-American Coffee Tradition

For many Swedish immigrants to the United States, coffee was a key to hospitality and a way to signal prosperity.

Science & Technology

Patients stand in the Red Cross building in Walter Reed Hospital, c. WWI

The Birth of the Modern American Military Hospital

The founding of Walter Reed General Hospital at the beginning of the twentieth century marked a shift in medical care for military personnel and veterans.
Older woman praying in an almost empty church.

Can Religion Be Helpful for People With Chronic Pain?

A group of researchers asked this question of a group of patients in secularized Western Europe.
La Rue Catinat, Saigon, Vietnam, 1920s

Neurasthenia, Vietnamese Style

To self-diagnose with neurasthenia was to identify with modernity and civilization while also recognizing the harms caused by colonial structures.

Open Community Collections on JSTOR

Eastern Kentucky University American Slavery Collection

Sixteen documents, including slave bills of sale, tell the cruel story of the enslaved lives that were listed in ledgers.
Central High School Annual Yearbook, Cleveland, Ohio,1920. Langston Hughes’s senior portrait is on the far right.

Class Production

A collection of high school yearbooks from Cleveland captures the rise, fall, and uncertain future of the American middle class.
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/saoa.crl.29887514

South Asia Open Archives Hits a Million

The open-access South Asia Open Archives on JSTOR now offers more than one million pages of digitized primary source material.

Syllabus

A series of newspaper covers

Studying Women’s Prison Newspapers

Reveal Digital's American Prison Newspapers Collection offers first-person perspectives about what matters to women in prison, from pregnancy to recovery.
L'Envoûteuse (The Sorceress) by Georges Merle, 1883

Radical Theology: A Syllabus

Radical theology aims to construct revolutionary understandings of myth, ritual, and scripture that speak to the dearth of meaning in our contemporary moment.
Mothers' Crusade for Victory over Communism

Moral Panics: A Syllabus

Research-backed stories that consider how and why moral panics begin and spread, who they serve, and what becomes of them in the end.

Reading Lists

AI generates images, text and videos, cute robot reaching out computer screen, holding file icons, artificial intelligence creates visual content provides it to user, vector illustration isolated

Artificial Intelligence: An AI-Generated Reading List

ChatGPT generated this annotated bibliography for us. Don't worry, we'll ask (and pay) a human to write one too.
From the poster for Black Girl by Ousmane Sembène, 1966

Ousmane Sembène: Feminism in African Francophone Cinema

Known as “the grandfather of African cinema,” Sembène created powerful female characters who challenged Western notions of gender and sexuality.
Lee Krasner: Living Colour exhibition at Barbican Art Gallery on May 29, 2019 in London, England.

Feminist Art History: An Introductory Reading List

Beginning with texts written in the 1970s, this reading list shows how the major questions, critiques, and debates developed in the field of feminist art history.

Fragments follows three scholars attempting to decipher Euripides’ Cresphontes from a few damaged scraps of text.

Pieces and Bits

American Prison Newspapers 1880-2020

From the cover of Paahao Press, Summer 1960

A Century of History in Five Hawaiian Prison Newspapers

Hawaiian language and culture are emphasized throughout, ranging from before statehood and during martial law to modern day women's prisons.
A series of newspaper covers

Studying Women’s Prison Newspapers

Reveal Digital's American Prison Newspapers Collection offers first-person perspectives about what matters to women in prison, from pregnancy to recovery.
Eugene Debs in prison at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, overlaid with his 1920 presidential campaign button

A Million Americans Once Voted for an Incarcerated Socialist

Eugene Debs campaigned for both president and prison reform from a federal penitentiary. His critiques of the prison system still resonate.

Annotations

Linda Brown Smith, Ethel Louise Belton Brown, Harry Briggs, Jr., and Spottswood Bolling, Jr. during press conference at Hotel Americana, 1964

Brown v. Board of Education: Annotated

The 1954 Supreme Court decision, based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, declared that “separate but equal” has no place in education.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry addresses delegates before he signed the COP21 Climate Change Agreement on Earth Day, April 22, 2016, at the United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York, N.Y.

The Paris Agreement: Annotated

Adopted by almost 200 parties at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference, the Paris Agreement captures international ambitions for cooperative climate action.
Lyndon B. Johnson addresses the Nation March 31, 1968

Lyndon B. Johnson’s Decision Speech: Annotated

United States President Lyndon B. Johnson’s televised announcement that he would not run for re-election shocked a nation divided by the Vietnam War.

Quirky History

Jack Parsons

Sex-Cult Rocket Man

Jack Parsons, one of the “suicide squad” trio of young rocket-boy founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had an improbable extracurricular life.
Albert Einstein, 1921

In Search of Einstein’s Brain

After Albert Einstein’s death in 1955, a pathologist—searching for the secret of genius—removed, dissected, and ultimately stole the mathematician’s brain.
A chemist examining a flask of urine

Early Doctors Diagnosed Disease by Looking at Urine

When uroscopy became trendy, it caused a minor scandal within the early medical profession.

Religion

Older woman praying in an almost empty church.

Can Religion Be Helpful for People With Chronic Pain?

A group of researchers asked this question of a group of patients in secularized Western Europe.
Degradation of William Sawtrey

Unmaking a Priest: The Rite of Degradation

The defrocking ceremony was meant to humiliate a disgraced member of the clergy while discouraging laypeople from viewing him as a martyr.
A Trappist monk in the cloisters of a monastery in County Waterford, Ireland, 1935

The Irish Fasting Tradition

Particularly before the Second Vatican Council (a.k.a. Vatican II), fasting was part of the Catholic calendar. No one took it more seriously than the Irish.

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