Jordan Motor Car Company

How Car Ads Started Selling Sizzle

In the 1920s car ads began changing. Specialists began to craft auto manufacturer's images solely to please their customers.
JSTOR Daily Friday Reads

Kathleen Collins and Black Women’s Sexuality

A new book is getting a lot of attention in the literary world right now…although its author died ...
1920s-era Remington Portable typewriter

The QWERTY Truth

How did the QWERTY keyboard became the gold standard? The answer is probably not what you'd think. Welcome to the economic concept of "path dependence."
General strike, Spain

The Curious Character Who First Called For a General Strike

The idea of a general strike is to shut down all but essential services in a city, region, or nation. America has had its share. A Briton invented the idea.
Peterloo Massacre

Identity Politics and Popular Movements

Issues tied to gender have often been part of broad-based popular movements, like the Zetetic movement in early nineteenth-century England.
nuclear blast

The Doomsday Clock: Menacing Metaphor of the Nuclear Age

Pessimism is on the rise. Mercurial politicians, rising nationalism and isolationism, international bluster, a changing climate, mass protests, ...
Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction

Francis Picabia’s Chameleonic Style

The Francis Picabia retrospective at MoMA is wowing museumgoers again with his ever-shifting, always challenging art.
A woman looking out of a window

Why Does Menopause Exist?

What is the point of menopause? Evolutionarily speaking, why do female humans go through menopause and then live for many more decades?
Saturday Evening Girls Club

The Saturday Evening Girls’ Guide to Helping Immigrants Succeed

The “Saturday Evening Girls" was a Progressive-Era club that afforded urban, Jewish and Italian girls and women a chance at coveted social mobility.
Springfield, Mass. High School

The High School of the Future (in 1917)

In 1917, a Progressive education reformer surveyed the high school landscape and looked to the future. His grand plans still haven’t come to fruition.