Sandhill Cranes

How Farmers Can Help Rescue Water-Loving Birds

Cranes, sandpipers, ducks, geese and many other waterbirds have lost essential rest stops along their seasonal migration routes. Bird-friendly agriculture can assist in filling the gaps.
William Merritt Chase with Parsons School of Design students

William Merritt Chase, the Accidental Ally

Painter William Merritt Chase opened an art school for a new generation of women, teaching them how to draw as well as how to advocate for themselves.
Portrait of a young woman leaning on a meridienne by Louise Hersent, 1828

The Colonial Commodity of Knock-Off Cashmere

The import and mass-market replicas of the Kashmiri shawl highlighted Victorian anxieties about empire and its role in industrial modernity.  
Close up of a male peacock displaying its stunning tail feathers

Peacock Feathers, Alien Life, and Pok-ta-Pok

Well-researched stories from Ars Technica, Nautilus, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
An illustration of a silhouette of obese person losing weight with measuring tape

Weight Discrimination Is a Health Problem

The perception of weight discrimination shapes both people’s experience of their own weight status and their disability outcomes.
Still Life with Rabbit by Johann Amandus Wink

Vegetarian Heretics and the Christian Church

Since the religion’s early days, Christian thinkers have treated vegetarianism sometimes as heretical, sometimes as evidence of saintly asceticism.
Wild timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus) on train tacks at sunrise, Florida

Actual American Rattlesnakes

Historians are recovering the overlooked history of North America’s Crotalus horridus, the timber rattlesnake.
A dog in Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, Mongolia

The Sacred and Profane Dogs of Mongolia

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 cover of the play Abbu San in Old Japan

Blackface on Stage in “Old Japan”

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.
President Truman addresses the closing session of the 38th annual conference of the NAACP at Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C., 1947

Why Did Truman Support Civil Rights?

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