An illustration from Mansfield Park depicting Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford rehearsing Lovers' Vows

The Scandalous Play in Mansfield Park

Jane Austen uses Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows to explore the social boundaries, both public and private, of Regency England.
Three species of pollen grains

Using Pollen To Make Paper, Sponges, and More

Reengineered, the powdery stuff could become a range of eco-friendly objects.
Books of imagination. Surreal art. fantasy painting. Books flying in the clouds.

Speculative Fiction: Beyond a Novel’s Entertainment Value

The classroom is a place to equip students to better understand the world as it was and is. Speculative fiction can help.
Cute tiny people reading different books, giant textbooks. Concept of book world, readers at library, literature lovers or fans. Colorful vector illustration in flat cartoon style

Speculative Fiction: A Reading List

Speculative fiction, from Afrofuturism to Star Wars, offers students tools and methods for analyzing social movements, power structures, and utopian thinking.
Reichstag building in Berlin, Germany.

The Reichstag Building Rises

Built at the end of the 1800s and rebuilt a century later, Berlin’s Reichstag building has proven a malleable symbol of political and social values.
Cheese dairy master cutting a parmesan cheese wheel at the dairy

Parmesan, Nanotech, and Doing the Twist

Well-researched stories from Nursing Clio, Mongabay, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
People standing around a shopping cart with Trump's head inside

From Neoliberalism to Trumpism

The neoliberal politics that developed in the 1970s created financial instability and fragmented cultural markets, helping to pave the way for Trumpism.
Cross Reference image

Urgent Notification: It’s Time to Play Cross Reference

This month’s crossword puzzle kindly requests your attention.
Thomas Paine

Eighteenth-Century Takes on Basic Income

Universal basic income has gotten some serious twenty-first-century play, but the idea is hardly new.
Newspaper clipping about the Haymarket Riot from Harpers Weekly, 1887

Demonizing Immigrants in the 1880s

American newspapers portrayed members of immigrant groups as potential anarchists, linking the ideology to other anxieties and stereotypes about foreigners.