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Photograph: Mary Malone records Henry Higgs for the Woman's Club oral history project from a Miami Herald article of June 19, 1975. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/keyslibraries/48986557233/
Arts & Culture

How to Gather the Oral Histories of COVID-19

The Federal Writers’ Project offers vital lessons for capturing the oral histories of ordinary Americans living through the coronavirus pandemic.

Take Two

Johnny Cash poses for a portrait for a publicity shot for his movie debut in "Door-to-Door Maniac" aka "Five Minutes To Live" on Auust 3, 1960 in Los Angeles, California.

The Complications of “Outlaw Country”

Johnny Cash grappled with the many facets of the outlaw archetype in his feature acting debut, Five Minutes to Live.

Suggested Readings

An ad for Tab from 1975

Tab Cola, Advent, and Conspiracy Theories

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

Cabinet of Curiosities

Yellow Jacobins

Our Long-Running Love Affair with Pigeons

Through crazes of pigeon-fancying, these birds have been reshaped into a dizzying variety of forms.

Verbatim

A devil shaking hands with a student

Rare 1969 Story from The Queen’s Gambit Author Walter Tevis

In this short story a graduate student makes a deal with the devil: Write my dissertation and my soul is yours.

Most Recent

A barefoot pedestrian is overtaken by the Royal Caledonian Basket on a road near Glasgow.
Politics & History

The Forgotten Craze of Women’s Endurance Walking

Hardy athletes called pedestriennes wowed the sporting world of the nineteenth century. They also shocked guardians of propriety.
A chef with the turtle he is going to use for a special soup for Independence day celebrations.
Education & Society

Turtle Soup: From Class to Mass to Aghast

During the days of the British Empire, soup made from sea turtles was a delicacy. Now it's almost unheard of. What explains the change?
A woman in a soviet house
Politics & History

Early Television in the Soviet Union

Communist Party officials saw potential in the new technology in the 1950s. So did ordinary people, but not always in the same way.
classroom with Two children Doing Arithmetic. The teacher is colored red.
Politics & History

Did Communists Really Infiltrate American Schools?

Fears that teachers were indoctrinating kids were rampant in the 1950s. But the reality was more complicated.

More Stories

Take Two

Johnny Cash poses for a portrait for a publicity shot for his movie debut in "Door-to-Door Maniac" aka "Five Minutes To Live" on Auust 3, 1960 in Los Angeles, California.

The Complications of “Outlaw Country”

Johnny Cash grappled with the many facets of the outlaw archetype in his feature acting debut, Five Minutes to Live.

Suggested Readings

An ad for Tab from 1975

Tab Cola, Advent, and Conspiracy Theories

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

Cabinet of Curiosities

Yellow Jacobins

Our Long-Running Love Affair with Pigeons

Through crazes of pigeon-fancying, these birds have been reshaped into a dizzying variety of forms.

Verbatim

A devil shaking hands with a student

Rare 1969 Story from The Queen’s Gambit Author Walter Tevis

In this short story a graduate student makes a deal with the devil: Write my dissertation and my soul is yours.

Trending

A graph of the early onset of AIDS from the alleged index case of Gaëtan Dugas aka "Patient Zero".
Politics & History

AIDS, from the Perspective of “Patient Zero”

We now know a great deal about how the man who's often blamed for the AIDS epidemic saw himself and his community. That's important.
Smoke billowing over Tulsa, Oklahoma during 1921 race riots
Politics & History

The Devastation of Black Wall Street

Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1921. A wave of racial violence destroys an affluent African-American community, seen as a threat to white-dominated American capitalism.
Declaration of Independence
Politics & Government

Who Wrote the Declaration of Independence?

The Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Thomas Jefferson was not then credited with its authorship.

Long Reads

A photograph of Terry Southern and a still from Dr. Strangelove
Arts & Culture

Terry Southern’s Lucid Absurdities

From his novels Candy and The Magic Christian to his work on Dr. Strangelove and Barbarella, Terry Southern sought to expose madness.
Alpine Pennycress - Noccaea caerulescens
Science & Technology

In Phytoremediation, Plants Extract Toxins from Soils

Researchers have a cheap, easy way for cleaning up oil spills: letting plants do the work. Why isn’t it used more often?
Politics & History

Cottagecore Debuted 2,300 Years Ago

Keeping cozy in a countryside escape, through the ages.
An Ayahuasca visual
Health

The Colonization of the Ayahuasca Experience

“If someone is from the Amazon,” says Evgenia Fotiou, an anthropologist who studies Western ayahuasca usage, “they bring some legitimacy” to an ayahuasca ritual.

Editors' Picks

Education & Society

Project Implicit Reveals Your Hidden Prejudice

Professor Anthony Greenwald invented the Implicit Association Test that can tap into our implicit feelings about race. What happens when people take it?
Science & Technology

Teaching Pandemics Syllabus

Readings on the history of quarantine, contagious disease, viruses, infections, and epidemics offer important context for the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Science & Technology

How the Public Health Community Prepares for Pandemics

Public healthcare experts have been anticipating and planning for a pandemic like COVID-19 for years. These research reports and scholarly articles explain how.
Education & Society

Institutionalized Racism: A Syllabus

How can we help students understand George Floyd's death in the context of institutionalized racism?
Arts & Culture

10 Classic Christmas Stories

We've gathered up some of our favorite literary takes on Christmas.

U.S. History

classroom with Two children Doing Arithmetic. The teacher is colored red.

Did Communists Really Infiltrate American Schools?

Fears that teachers were indoctrinating kids were rampant in the 1950s. But the reality was more complicated.
A graph of the early onset of AIDS from the alleged index case of Gaëtan Dugas aka "Patient Zero".

AIDS, from the Perspective of “Patient Zero”

We now know a great deal about how the man who's often blamed for the AIDS epidemic saw himself and his community. That's important.
A seminole town

The History of the Black Seminoles

The community's resilient history speaks of repeated invasions and resistance to enslavement.

"Write my dissertation and my soul is yours."

Rare 1969 Story from The Queen’s Gambit Author Walter Tevis

Syllabus

"I Voted" stickers

The Role of Voting in American Politics

From battles to expand the franchise to the mysteries of turnout, voting is one of the most important things to understand about U.S. politics.
A forest fire reflected in Okanagan Lake, British Columbia, Canada

Wildfires and Climate Change

Scholarly research offers insight into the ways climate change and other factors are contributing to the wildfire crisis.
A woman reading a newspaper

Media Literacy & Fake News: A Syllabus

Ten lessons from the past and steps we can take now to educate ourselves and our students about how to be a thoughtful consumer of information.

Open Community Collections

Anti-War Posters from City College of New York

A collection of flyers and other material circulated at The City College of New York (CCNY) between 1934 and 1936.
A teacher teaches her young pupils how to spell, 1930.

The Woman Teacher Documents a Feminist Labor Union’s Victory

The UK’s National Union of Women Teachers went from splinter group to union in its own right, winning on equal pay—as The Woman Teacher shows first-hand.

Nine Black Cat Stickers

They crossed our path and we lived to tell the tale. Check them out in the Street Arts Graphics Collection!

Roundup

Mario hat Odysseus

Statues

The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Leaves stacked against a black background

Eight Poems of Gratitude

Let us pause now and give thanks.
An illustration of a thanksgiving table

Thanksgiving Stories

Turkey or Tofurkey? Stuffing or dressing? Whatever the controversy, these Thanksgiving stories will slake your appetite!

Verbatim

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Intersectional Feminism

Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw broke new ground by showing how women of color were left out of feminist and anti-racist discourse.
Shirley Chisholm

Shirley Chisholm: Sisterhood Is Complicated

A 1974 interview on feminism and politics with the first Black major-party candidate for president.
Young protestors take to the street to protest against police brutality on June 14, 2020 in St. Louis, Missouri.

Five Decades of Black Activism in St. Louis

Elizabeth Hinton, Percy Green II, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tef Poe, George Lipsitz, and Jamala Rogers trace the history from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter.

Pedagogies

A person typing on a computer

How to Use Zotero and Scrivener for Research-Driven Writing

This month, I’m doing something a little different with my column: I’m sharing the system I use to write it, so that you can use or adapt my system.
A person's hand drawing a Big Mac hamburger on a sheet of lined paper

Are Students Just Telling Us What We Want to Hear?

Students tend to fill out end-of-year evaluations so as to describe a “narrative of progress.” For teachers, this is fast food of the mind.
Two students using text analyzer

How to Teach with JSTOR Text Analyzer

JSTOR Text Analyzer provides students with an additional resource for finding scholarly material.

Education

An illustration from America's story for America's children, 1900

How (Not) to Teach Kids about Native Cultures

Even well-intentioned books for children can romanticize (or demonize) Native Americans. But better materials exist.
Illustration: An arithmetic class at a school in London, England. Published in the Illustrated London News, October 3, 1891 Source: Getty

Why Would Parents Oppose Compulsory Education?

In Victorian England, reformers thought all children should go to school. That didn't sit well with everyone—and not just kids.
Smokey Robinson and The Miracles Clockwise from left: Smokey Robinson, Pete Moore, Bobby Rogers, Ronnie White.

Music Education and the Birth of Motown

Music teachers in the Detroit public schools paved the way for the success of future Motown artists like Smokey Robinson and Mary Wilson of the Supremes.

Arts & Culture

A black light poster

The Forgotten Radicalism of Black Light Posters

Fluorescents have fascinated artists for millennia, but the 1960s and '70s saw a generation of revolutionaries experiment with black light.
Mario hat Odysseus

Statues

The good, the bad, and the ugly.
A photograph of Terry Southern and a still from Dr. Strangelove

Terry Southern’s Lucid Absurdities

From his novels Candy and The Magic Christian to his work on Dr. Strangelove and Barbarella, Terry Southern sought to expose madness.

Health

A hand holding coarse dry ice pellets

Dry Ice Will Help Keep COVID-19 Vaccines Cold

A brief history of dry ice, aka solid carbon dioxide, shows why some coronavirus vaccines will benefit from its use.
Babies from the City Maternity Hospital being held by the nurses and doctors who had delivered them.

How Scientists Became Advocates for Birth Control

The fight to gain scientists' support for the birth control movement proved a turning point in contraceptive science—and led to a research revolution.
Pensive Caucasian man sitting on sofa near window

How the Internet Changed Chronic Illness

Online communities show that isolation doesn't have to define the experience of having a chronic disease.

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