Compiled by graduate students in a 2016 course on “Activism and Digital Culture,” at University of Southern California.

In Maya culture, rulers used stingray spines in bloodletting rituals. Researchers have ideas about why.

Well-researched stories from Mel Magazine, The Cut, and more great publications that that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Using aluminum as a case study, a geographer shows how wartime "commodity chains" can devastate the Earth.

The Beatles first played Hamburg's pleasure zone in 1960, in a former strip club near the infamous Reeperbahn.

Underrepresented in the country's newsrooms, Black journalists found an outlet on public affairs shows like Black Journal.

Emmett Till was a boy of fourteen when he was lynched in Mississippi. The press would influence public opinion, and the outcome of the trial.

The blockbuster Jaws (1975) provoked fear by portraying sharks as "mindless eating machines." But what did people think of sharks before then?

Feminists supported universal childcare as a means of allowing women to advance in the workforce. But did this argument focus mostly on white women?

Every day, in every way, the pop psychology of Emile Coué conquered 1920s Britain.