The import and mass-market replicas of the Kashmiri shawl highlighted Victorian anxieties about empire and its role in industrial modernity.  

Well-researched stories from Ars Technica, Nautilus, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

The perception of weight discrimination shapes both people’s experience of their own weight status and their disability outcomes.

Since the religion’s early days, Christian thinkers have treated vegetarianism sometimes as heretical, sometimes as evidence of saintly asceticism.

Historians are recovering the overlooked history of North America’s Crotalus horridus, the timber rattlesnake.

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.

The use of blackface may seem out of place in a Japanese-inspired stage production—until you think about the money to be made by dealing in stereotypes.

Truman’s domestic agenda attempted to solve the problem of Black American oppression while undermining the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Charged with saving the immortal souls of the condemned, comforters held tavolette showing the Crucifixion in front of the eyes of those facing execution.

New evidence suggests the universe might not behave as expected, raising questions about the costs of being wrong.