The best stories from Slate, Sapiens, and other research-backed publications around the web.

People from eastern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, South Asia, and Southeast Asia have been sharing food plants across the Indian Ocean for millennia.

In the late nineteenth century, the postcard became the ideal medium for expanding the audience for pornography, much to the concern of social elites.

Groups such as Just Stop Oil are calling for change, but their aims need to be considered with respect to more than a reductionist slogan.

The increased use of machines and the division of labor allowed for the production of standardized products. It also made it easier to fence stolen goods.

Between 1920 and the 1960s, tens of thousands of people received treatment with a Spectro-Chrome to address various ailments.

South Asian maids and nannies journeyed to Britain by the thousands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with returning colonials.

Archaeopteryx and Hesperornis should be on the lists of any dino bird watcher.

By turns worshipped and reviled, the bird frequently associated with death has appeared in art works for thousands of years. Here’s a short history.

The first exhibition of paintings that would come to be described as Impressionism opened in Paris on April 15, 1874.