The Legacy of Bruce Lee’s Sex Life
Lee’s untimely death in 1973 sparked an argument between his widow and his girlfriend over his libido that played out publicly in international media.
How Forced Labor Built Western Australia
The nineteenth-century colonial economy of Western Australia depended on unfree labor, whether from indentured workers, convicts, or Indigenous people.
How Farmers Can Help Rescue Water-Loving Birds
Cranes, sandpipers, ducks, geese and many other waterbirds have lost essential rest stops along their seasonal migration routes. Bird-friendly agriculture can assist in filling the gaps.
William Merritt Chase, the Accidental Ally
Painter William Merritt Chase opened an art school for a new generation of women, teaching them how to draw as well as how to advocate for themselves.
The Colonial Commodity of Knock-Off Cashmere
The import and mass-market replicas of the Kashmiri shawl highlighted Victorian anxieties about empire and its role in industrial modernity.
Peacock Feathers, Alien Life, and Pok-ta-Pok
Well-researched stories from Ars Technica, Nautilus, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
Weight Discrimination Is a Health Problem
The perception of weight discrimination shapes both people’s experience of their own weight status and their disability outcomes.
Vegetarian Heretics and the Christian Church
Since the religion’s early days, Christian thinkers have treated vegetarianism sometimes as heretical, sometimes as evidence of saintly asceticism.
Actual American Rattlesnakes
Historians are recovering the overlooked history of North America’s Crotalus horridus, the timber rattlesnake.
The Sacred and Profane Dogs of Mongolia
In Mongolia, dogs are close companions to humans and a key part of a cosmology with Buddhist and shamanic influences. But they’re also seen as unclean.