Diseases know no borders. International cooperation and solidarity, say scholars, are as essential as funding.

The World Health Organization has declared COVID-19 a pandemic. What exactly does that mean?

In the twentieth century, advertisements for a new type of garment for preteen girls sought to define the femininity they sold.

In the Decameron of Boccaccio, friends tell one another stories of love to while away the hours of quarantine.

In the 1800s, sick passengers weren’t blamed for disease epidemics—their baggage and cargo was.

Well-researched stories from The Atlantic, Aeon, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

American mycologist Violetta White Delafield painted over 600 stunning watercolors of mushrooms as part of her fieldwork. Here they are in all their glory.

The current vogue for the Amherst poet needs to give credit to the way she readily examined her childhood ideas about fixed and immutable truth.

The wildly popular books helped people understand farming and health through the movement of the planets, in a way compatible with Protestantism.

Japanese workers, many of them women, worked up to 17 hours a day in the early 20th century. Yet experts still wondered why they “wasted” time.