A poster used in Japan to attract immigrants to Brazil. It reads: "Let's go to South America (Brazil highlighted) with families."

Asian South America

The migration of Asian people—from India, from China, from Japan—to South America and the Caribbean began as early as the sixteenth century.
A child being taught how to shoot a gun by his father

American as Apple Pie

How marketing made guns a fundamental element of contemporary boyhood.
An advertisement by the Partnership for a Drug Free America

The Story Behind “This is Your Brain on Drugs”

How did the campaign behind the Partnership for a Drug Free America’s iconic commercials develop, and why were its products so memorable?
Cardboard box of paper tissues on a wooden table.

Grief, Animism, and the Bestseller List

Well-researched stories from The Atlantic, Public Books, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
A banquet to HH Ranjit Nawanagar in India, 1907

Gender, Meat-Eating, and British Colonialism

As the power of the East India Company grew, British writers embraced the idea that the (alleged) passiveness of Indians was due in part to vegetarianism.
Portrait of a baby in a light coloured stroller

The Imperative to Buy the Best Stroller

The baby stroller is only the most visible symbol of the ethos of consumer capitalism that saturates American pregnancy and parenthood.
Reverse Freedom Riders in Hyannis, MA in 1962

The Reverse Freedom Rides

The White Citizens’ Councils used the transportation of Black Americans to Northern states as a way to embarrass liberal critics and rally segregationists.
The collector of prints, by Edgar Degas, 1866, and A woman ironing, by Edgar Degas, 1873, both with original frames

Framing Degas

The French painter Edgar Degas was Impressionism’s most energetic and inventive frame designer.
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, c. 1843-47

The Contrary Journalist: Lady Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake

One of the sharpest female journalists of Britain’s Victorian era, Eastlake considered Jane Eyre an exercise in rudeness and vulgarity.
Boston Public Library

Out of the Card Catalog Closet

Librarians gathered in 1970 to challenge Library of Congress classifications and catalog subject headings that aligned homosexuality with deviance.