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

The Fugitive Slave Act erased the most basic of constitutional rights for enslaved people and incentivized US Commissioners to support kidnappers.

Inventor of the telephone Elisha Gray also pioneered the world’s first purpose-built electric musical instrument.

The American habitus was forged partly by the conquest of Native land and partly by the experiences of superiority and entitlement among white enslavers.

Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to Vietnam in 1929 fanned the debate about the region’s potential future without the French.

The ritual of animal sacrifice in ancient Greece brought humans closer to the gods even as it defined their differences.

A Soviet alternative to Disney cartoon became a state ideal, but the three-color process behind Silly Symphony cartoons wasn’t easy to perfect.

These spiny or slimy ocean creatures display an astonishing diversity of appearances, behaviors and lifestyles. Many are increasingly threatened.

An exemplar of modernism, Virginia Woolf's revolutionary novel explored ideas—psychology, sexuality, imperialism—that roiled the twentieth century.

In 1905, a group of writers and painters gathered in a London home and began a conversation on politics, love, sex, and art that lasted decades.