In the middle of the nineteenth century, upper-class America went gaga over a vision of the medieval. Carpenter’s Gothic ...

Plants have long employed a variety of defensive strategies against herbivores, but the scope and sophistication of these defenses is still being understood.

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, and became in her short life one of the most influential poets of the era.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, won and lost fortunes, giving into a compulsion that pitted her against some of society’s most notorious ne’er-do-wells.

Reduplication is a widespread linguistic process in which a part or an exact copy of a word is repeated, often for morphological or syntactic reasons (but not always).

Halloween poses questions for parents, like how scary is too scary for their kids? The answer depends on when we ask the question.

The possible futures predicted by fortune-telling happen just often enough to tantalize, preying on our deepest aspirations of catching a "big break."

Women's roles in the business world partly depended on their status as consumers in the early twentieth century.

Madame Helena Blavatsky was the 19th century's most famous and notorious occultist. She was also the godmother of the New Age movement. 

Extra Credit: Our pick of stories from around the web that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.