How America’s Industrial Elite Built Their Own Palaces
Historic photographs capture Cleveland’s Millionaires’ Row, where Gilded Age wealth met revival-style splendor.
In the Film Death in Venice, Music Is the Narrator
A haunting score shapes the rise and fall of a writer consumed by infatuation.
Simone de Beauvoir’s Only Play
Beauvoir’s Who Shall Die? explores moral responsibility and the unequal valuation of human life during wartime.
Jefferson’s Fossils
What can Thomas Jefferson’s mistaken ideas about fossils tell us about science and belief in the early United States?
![A Chelsea Pensioner, wearing a sprig of orange blossom [?] in his buttonhole, sipping a dish of tea. Engraving by J. Jenkins after M. W. Sharp, 1840](https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/consuming_the_empire_alt_1050x700-600x400.jpg)
Consuming the Empire
Sugar, tea, and tobacco tied British daily life to empire, turning global exploitation into ordinary habits of consumption.
Wayne Thiebaud’s Sweet Take on American Art
The beloved American painter rejected attempts to categorize his work as a Pop Art as he experimented with texture, light, and nostalgia.
Love Is Blind … but Are Your Hormones?
Do women’s attraction to certain faces really change across the menstrual cycle? A long-running theory meets modern data.
Dorothy Parker: Sharp-Witted Writer, Bitter Professor
Dorothy Parker’s year as a visiting professor shows how a celebrated literary voice struggled to adapt to the realities of academic teaching.
How Cold War “Orphans” Sang Their Way into American Hearts
Touring choirs helped cast Korean children as ideal adoptees—and Americans as benevolent saviors.
The Nineteenth-Century Science of Fashion
Victorian-era color theory moved from labs and studios into women’s magazines—and into everyday decisions about dress.