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

Casting a vote at your local polling place helps elect candidates who can enact environmental policies while in office. But is voting enough to bring change?

As the financial history of Maryland shows, slavery represented extraordinarily liquid wealth and outsized political power.

Even as crime rates dropped in the 1930s, the police of New Orleans stepped up their use of torture to obtain confessions from Black Americans accused of crimes.

Despite the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, Native American activists have had to repeatedly take their fight for voting rights to Congress.

The number of ethnic Chinese incarcerated in Boven Digoel in the 1920s was low, but the New Guinea colonial prison nonetheless shaped Sino-Malay literature.

What does it mean when an entire convent of Urusline nuns appears to be possessed by demons? Many things, as it turns out.

Scholar Alison Habens tells us more about the Greek goddesses who provided divine inspiration for ancient poets.

In the 1950s, supersized insects were the villains in a rash of big-screen horror movies. What did those monstrous roaches represent, and how were they vanquished?

Palm reading, also known as palmistry or chiromancy, has fascinated us as a practice and a party trick for centuries.