The slave ship Diligente was engaged in the illegal slave trade when it was seized in 1838. A lieutenant in the British Royal Navy painted this scene from the ship.

The Unbearable Middle Passage

In the eighteenth century, doctors recognized melancholy as a disease endemic to groups forcibly displaced from their homes, particularly enslaved Africans.
A street dog in Varanasi city, India

How Street Dogs Spend their Days

Generally lazy, often friendly, the dogs of India know how to relax.
Hadzabe men going for hunt in a morning at the bush

Carbon Offsets for the Hadza People, Swedish Meals, and Freedom in Taoism

Well-researched stories from Vox, Aeon, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
A woman breast feeding her child, 13th century

Paying Moms to Breastfeed in Medieval Europe

The idea of offering remuneration to women for breastfeeding—even their own children—wasn’t unusual in late medieval and early modern Europe.
ADN-ZB / H‰fller 30.7.73 Together with Italian festival delegates, members of the National People's Army sing at Alexanderplatz, July 1973

The Red Woodstock: Not Quite According to Plan

The 1973 World Festival of Youth and Students highlighted the paradoxes inherent in the East German socialist project.
Circus Amok's Jenny Romaine by David Shankbone, New York City

How Queer Jews Reclaimed Yiddish

Queer Yiddishkeit challenges the notion that Yiddish is inherently heteronormative or conservative.
Photograph: NPS employee talking to visitors in the Tuolumme Meadows in Yosemite National Park.

Source:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HFCA_1607_NPS_Employees,_Women_512.jpg_(a3046c74ddc24fe6bc480fae94f4ce43).jpg

National Parks Are for Everyone

The majority of national park visitors—roughly seventy-eight percent—are white? Why, and why does that need to change?
Have One Brand

Orange Crate Art

California citrus growers drew on mass-printing techniques and advances in color lithography to create distinctive brands for their boxes.
Piggy bank sinking in water

How We All Got in Debt

Consumer debt shapes American lives so thoroughly that it seems eternal and immortal, but it’s actually relatively new to the financial world.
A couple holding hands

The Long History of Same-Sex Marriage

Same-sex marriages, in all possible configurations and with all possible motivations, have taken place throughout the history of the United States.