Well-researched stories from The Atlantic, The Republic, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Where did potato chips come from? How about clams casino? Are the origin stories for these foods true, or do they fall into the category of “fakelore”?

For many Swedish immigrants to the United States, coffee was a key to hospitality and a way to signal prosperity.

Cooperative space initiatives between non-US powers such as China and South America are under-explored in scholarship and misunderstood in popular politics.

Capitalizing on stereotypes earned Chinese-American practitioners patients, but it also helped keep them confined to the margins of American society.

The electric chair was promoted as civilized and at the same time imbued with the technological sublime, the mystery of electrical power harnessed by humans.

An exploration of creativity, ingenuity, and resilience using the American Prison Newspapers collection and JSTOR. The second curriculum guide in this series.

The sixteenth-century handwritten collection of poetry and commentary offers a glimpse of intellectual life at the court of King Henry VIII.

In the 1980s, Cold War tensions led to thousands of Cubans languishing in American prisons, unable to be released or repatriated. Uprisings followed.

For those thousands involved with the Bund, the group played an important role in a era marked by trauma, displacement, and resettlement.