The creation of bespoke clothing offered women a way to escape traditional middle-class expectations and gain unprecedented power, until men took over.

The first US bank for women was opened by a fraudster in 1879. It took 40 years for a reputable women’s bank to be founded in Tennessee.

Within the alienated and antagonist cultures inside Israel’s borders, Arabic and Hebrew—related, but mutually unintelligible languages—cross-fertilize each other.

The notion that everybody was going to be hairless in Heaven may not have sat well with Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli.

Well-researched stories from Aeon, OpenMind Magazine, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Opium has been used as a medicinal and recreational substance in China for centuries, its shifting meanings tied to class and national identity.

The Boston Typesetting Races of 1886 demonstrated the speed of women compositors, helping to lower the barriers to workplace equity for female “swifts.”

The Italian physicist and philosopher was the first woman to earn a doctorate in science and the first salaried female professor at a university.

Long before Dry January became a thing, Mexicans were using a similar program of temporary abstinence based on a pledge to the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Public intellectuals in Great Britain disagreed on what to do with Governor Eyre after his heavy-handed response to the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica.