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A selection of phone book covers from Southwestern University's Georgetown Directories collection
JSTOR Collections

How the Phone Book Taught America to Ask for Answers

A collection of Texas directories from 1913 to 1959 shows how phone books—and the people who used them—helped invent “information” as we know it.

Cabinet of Curiosities

The seal for the London Necropolis Railway over an image of the railway station of the London Necropolis Company, at Waterloo.

London’s Railway for the Dead

As London's graveyards overflowed, a private company proposed a remarkable new way to bury the dead.

Pedagogies

Teaching Students to See What They Miss

A classroom exercise in slow looking uses art to sharpen observation skills and encourage more attentive listening.

Archive Adventures

A selection of campaign buttons from Muhlenberg College's Donald Poppe '59 Political Memorabilia Collection

The Forgotten Stories Behind Presidential Campaign Buttons

The race for the White House has always inspired unusual publicity stunts. A vast collection shows just how strange they could get.

Plant of the Month

Longwood Gardens’ Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum on display at the entrance to the East Conservatory, November 2025. Photographer: Becca Mathias. © Longwood Gardens

The Art of the Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum

How do horticulturists coax more than 1,000 flowers from a single plant? The answer lies in a centuries-old Japanese tradition.
From the cover of Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America by Jake Johnson.
Arts & Culture

The Hidden Grief of American Musicals

Musicology professor Jake Johnson argues that beneath the bright songs and happy endings of midcentury musicals lay the grief and anxieties of postwar America.
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.42478893
Reveal Digital Collections

Rollerena: New York’s Fairy Godmother

A newly digitized archive traces a roller-skating queer icon from Pride marches and discos to AIDS activism.

Most Recent

Promotion for the 1956 SuperScope reissue of Fantasia. Colorized.
Arts & Culture

The Art and Science of Disney’s Fantasia

Before Disneyland, Fantasia brought imagineering to life through an ambitious experiment in animation.
An illustration of a man holding his hand to his face
Education & Society

Why We Cringe

What makes someone else's behavior so embarrassing? The answer lies in our expectations of how people should act.

More Stories

Cabinet of Curiosities

The seal for the London Necropolis Railway over an image of the railway station of the London Necropolis Company, at Waterloo.

London’s Railway for the Dead

As London's graveyards overflowed, a private company proposed a remarkable new way to bury the dead.

Pedagogies

Teaching Students to See What They Miss

A classroom exercise in slow looking uses art to sharpen observation skills and encourage more attentive listening.

Archive Adventures

A selection of campaign buttons from Muhlenberg College's Donald Poppe '59 Political Memorabilia Collection

The Forgotten Stories Behind Presidential Campaign Buttons

The race for the White House has always inspired unusual publicity stunts. A vast collection shows just how strange they could get.

Plant of the Month

Longwood Gardens’ Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum on display at the entrance to the East Conservatory, November 2025. Photographer: Becca Mathias. © Longwood Gardens

The Art of the Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum

How do horticulturists coax more than 1,000 flowers from a single plant? The answer lies in a centuries-old Japanese tradition.

Trending

The seal for the London Necropolis Railway over an image of the railway station of the London Necropolis Company, at Waterloo.
Cabinet of Curiosities

London’s Railway for the Dead

As London's graveyards overflowed, a private company proposed a remarkable new way to bury the dead.
Colorized image of courtesans in Shanghai ca. 1875
Politics & History

The Rise and Fall of Shanghai’s “Sing-Song Girls”

How did celebrated entertainers become associated with a profession increasingly defined by exploitation?
Pedagogies

Teaching Students to See What They Miss

A classroom exercise in slow looking uses art to sharpen observation skills and encourage more attentive listening.

Long Reads

From the cover of Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet by Natalia Konradova
Arts & Culture

How Telepathy Helped Build the Russian Internet

During the Cold War, Soviet scientists pursued an unlikely way to communicate with the outside world.
Henry Louis Stephens (American, 1824–1882). Vampyre from The Comic Natural History of the Human Race (1851). The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Arts & Culture

Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and the Spirit of the Humanities

How one ghost story competition continues to haunt the humanities—just in time for Halloween.
Italian-American labor organizer and activist Carlo Tresca with workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, US, circa 1920.
Politics & History

The Radical History of Italian Americans

In the early twentieth century, immigrant anarchists organized across U.S. cities and stood at the center of major labor struggles.
Opened Durian Tropical Fruit on Green Colored Background.
Plant of the Month

Disgust, Desire, and Durian

How Southeast Asia’s famously pungent fruit became a source of cultural identity and global demand.

Editors' Picks

Arts & Culture

Rebecca Lehmann on Breaking the Rules of Poetry

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

The Voting Rights Act 1965: Annotated

The passing of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965 prohibited the use of Jim Crow laws and discriminatory tests to disenfranchise Black voters.
Science & Technology

A Practical Machine: The Wright Brothers in Dayton

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.
Science & Technology

Jane Goodall

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

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.

Quirky History

Cast iron and slate urinal with three stalls raised modesty screen, mounted with lamppost and lantern. Boy standing nearby beside lamppost, face blurred by movement. Avenue du Maine, Paris, France.

Where Did All the Public Bathrooms Go?

Nineteenth-century Paris tackled public urination with ornate pissoirs. American reformers later turned toilets into a temperance cause.
Illustration from a WWII anti-rumor poster. The text below this illustration reads "Keep mum, she's not so dumb! Careless talk costs lives."

The Long History of Sexpionage

How honey traps evolved from human seduction to digital deception in the changing world of espionage.
Miss May Hibbert displays two of her musquash or muskrats at Mears Ghyll Fur Farm in Caton, England

The Rise and Fall of Britain’s Muskrat Empire

A fur-farming experiment unleashed a prolific rodent—and sparked one of the rare successful eradications of an invasive species.

Collections on JSTOR

Road, Alexandria to Middleburg, Fairfax, Virginia, ca. 1929-1935. Colorized image.

The Photographer Who Preserved Everyday Architecture

Frances Benjamin Johnston looked beyond grand estates to document the ordinary buildings that defined American life.
Low counter circulation desk with three women.

Building a Library in Wartime Paris

Photos from the American Library in Paris reveal how librarians brought books to US troops during World War I.

What Came Before the American Suburb?

Hofstra University’s historic photographs capture Hempstead’s shops and streets before postwar development transformed Long Island.

Reading Lists

Colorful landscape with colorful mountains and sun

Rights of Nature: A Reading List

What would it mean for rivers, forests, and animals to have legal rights? A global movement is rethinking law’s relationship to nature.
Landscape garden showing the foot path, lawn area, benches, water feature and pavilion on background. This sketch created, drawn in pen and marker.

Landscape Architecture: A Reading List

A survey of classic and contemporary works revealing how cities, materials, power, and ecology shape landscapes—and how design can create healthier, more just places.
A view of the landscape seen along the Golden Gate Trail in the Paradise area of Mount Rainier National Park, Washington.

The Promise and Problems of Public Lands: A Reading List

Discover key research on U.S. public lands through scholarly works exploring conservation, Indigenous knowledge, and public policy.

Unlike already established symbols such as the peony, peach, or pomegranate, the mango had no preexisting meaning in China and, importantly, no association with emperors or divinity.

When Mao’s Mango Mania Took Over China

Annotations

The Fifteenth Amendment and its results, drawn by G.F. Kahl, 1870

The Fifteenth Amendment: Annotated

The brevity of the Fifteenth Amendment of the US Constitution belies its impact on American voting rights.
Copy of the signature page of the Declaration of Sentiments, 1848

“Declaration of Sentiments”: Annotated

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.
Bill of Rights, 1791

The Bill of Rights: Annotated

Proposed as a compromise to ensure the ratification of the new US Constitution, the Bill of Rights has become a critical protector of civil liberties.

Teaching Resources

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22A_Thrilling_Hallowe%27en.%22_(Three_black_cats_flying_through_the_air_with_Jack-o-lanterns).jpg

Ghosts, Witches, and Other Halloween Stories

A spine-tingling roundup of historical mysteries, supernatural folklore, and the strange things that have frightened us for centuries.

Ten Poems about Sleep and Dreaming

Visions of the unconscious by Emily Dickinson, Louise Glück, Lucille Clifton, Carl Phillips, and more.
Hands working on laptop

How to Keep Track of Your Sources on JSTOR

Learn where to find bibliographic information so you have the details you need when it’s time to cite your research.

Reveal Digital Collections

Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.42478893

Rollerena: New York’s Fairy Godmother

A newly digitized archive traces a roller-skating queer icon from Pride marches and discos to AIDS activism.
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.40754518?seq=22

The Oral Histories of the AIDS Crisis

The voices of artists and activists illuminate the human experience behind the AIDS epidemic.

Preserving the Art of Ed Aulerich-Sugai

An artist’s work is traced through memory, stewardship, and decades of care.

Roundup

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22A_Thrilling_Hallowe%27en.%22_(Three_black_cats_flying_through_the_air_with_Jack-o-lanterns).jpg

Ghosts, Witches, and Other Halloween Stories

A spine-tingling roundup of historical mysteries, supernatural folklore, and the strange things that have frightened us for centuries.

Ten Poems about Sleep and Dreaming

Visions of the unconscious by Emily Dickinson, Louise Glück, Lucille Clifton, Carl Phillips, and more.
Dakota pipeline protestors

Celebrating Indigenous Peoples and Cultures

Discover scholarship that challenges myths and explores the histories, cultures, and enduring contributions of Indigenous peoples.

Natural Science

A close-up shot of a patch of muddy earth, showing the texture and detail of the mud. The mud is grey and lumpy, with some areas that are more smooth and others that are more cracked and dry.

Why Mud Matters

The microbes in muddy sediments help regulate Earth’s climate and keep ecosystems functioning.
Joshua Lederberg at work in a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, October 1958

Taking Alien Life Seriously: The Origins of Exobiology

The search for extraterrestrial life began with an unexpected question: How could humans keep from destroying the evidence?
Illustration of Myosotis capitata in Flora Antarctica. Drawn and engraved by Walter Hood Fitch for Joseph Dalton Hooker,1844.

The Debate Over Pictures in Science

Botanical illustrations helped bring science to new audiences—but not every scientist welcomed the change.

Sustainability & The Environment

Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, Colorado

The Disappearing History of America’s Nuclear Weapons

Once a key site of Cold War arms production, Rocky Flats is now a wildlife refuge. What happened to its troubled past?
John Steinbeck, 1935.

Returning to Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez

A literary classic doubles as data, helping scientists trace decades of ecological change in the Gulf of California.
Source: https://collections.artsmia.org/art/36169/gathering-wild-rice-seth-eastman

Wild Rice and the Rights of Nature

A groundbreaking lawsuit asks whether wild rice, or manoomin, can hold legal rights under tribal law and the growing rights of nature movement.