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.
King Arthur's knights, gathered at the Round Table to celebrate Pentecost, see a vision of the Holy Grail.

T. S. Eliot and the Holy Grail

The Nobel Laureate drew on a centuries-old legend when he put the Fisher King in The Waste Land.
François André Michaux, “Cotton Wood,” from The North America Sylva, 1817–19.

Plant of the Month: Poplar

Poplar—ubiquitous in timber, landscape design, and Indigenous medicines—holds new promise in recuperating damaged ecosystems.
Mono Lake

The Imperiled Inland Sea

Twenty years ago, scholar W. D. Williams predicted the loss of salt lakes around the world.
Genghis Khan and his wife, Börte

Mongol Women, Mass Shootings, and Playful Rats

Well-researched stories from Atlas Obscura, Pysche, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.