Monrovia, Liberia, 1910

Poland’s Colonial Dreams

With the resurrection of a Polish state in the aftermath of World War I, Poland seriously flirted with colonialism—in Liberia.
An illustration of a hand holding a set of hand cuffs

A True Crime Syllabus

How did we become so obsessed with “true crime”? This multidisciplinary syllabus shows how we view crime as a whole and how those views have changed over time.
Grand Central terminal clock

Keeping Time: A New Year’s Collection

A selection of stories that chronicle our complicated notions of time.
Kudzu taking over forest

Coming Up Kudzu

Employed as a symbol of the American South or used as shorthand for unchecked growth, kudzu has demonstrated a tenacity beyond all imagination.
Undated broadsheet, Printed Ephemera Collection, Portfolio 23, Folder 11, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. ht

The Rise of Anti-Societies

In the early 1800s, Americans formed all sorts of anti-vice societies, triggering jokes and serious resistance to reform through a wave of anti-societies.
Sketches of cinchona trees. Aylmer Bourke Lambert, A Description of the Genus Cinchona (1797). Rare Book Collection, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Cinchona: A Legacy of Extraction and Extirpation

The source of quinine, cinchona tells a story about the value placed on parts of plants and how that value can be extracted and distorted in support of empire.
An artist's rendering of a black hole

Ancient Black Hole Challenges Our Understanding of the Early Universe

The Big Bang theory is not threatened, but astrophysicists have some explaining to do.
Shrunken heads in the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum

Human Remains and Museums: A Reading List

Questions over their value for research conflict with the ethics of possessing the dead, especially when presenting human remains in the setting of a museum.
The covers of the book Erasure by Percival Everett and the film American Fiction

The Indelible Lessons of Erasure

A Percival Everett fan weighs in on the novelist’s approach to racial satire and considers the translation of Erasure to the big screen in American Fiction.
Dublin Castle, 1830

Weaponizing Homophobia in Ireland

One of the arguments of Irish nationalism was that English rule was morally corrupting. There was no better example of this than same-sex desire.