Marsupials make people think of Australia, but Europeans encountered and described their first marsupial, the Virginia opossum, in 1499.

In the 1930s, mothers wrote to the US president and the federal Children’s Bureau asking for support for their sick children. They rarely received help.

Rumors that enslaved Black New Yorkers were planning a revolt spread across Manhattan even more quickly than fires for which they were being blamed.

In the late 1960s, gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan made political hay by picking a fight with UC Berkeley over student protest and tenured “radicals.”

Nearly synonymous with the global tropics and subtropics, hibiscus symbolizes the Caribbean’s transnational past, present, and future.

The pursuit of happiness is often considered an ideal, but it may be possible to have too much—or the wrong kind—of a good thing.

The defrocking ceremony was meant to humiliate a disgraced member of the clergy while discouraging laypeople from viewing him as a martyr.

The popularity of tanning rose in the early twentieth century, when bronzed skin signaled a life of leisure, not labor.

Vacations in the Soviet Union were hardly idylls spent with one’s dearest. Everything about them—from whom you traveled with to what you ate—was state determined.

A camp diva, a queer icon, and a model of feminism—the memorable Mae West left behind a complicated legacy, on and off the stage.