Cape Verde’s Dilemma(s)
While increased tourism may be a boon to the economy, increasing numbers of visitors may harm the environmental wonders that draw outsiders to the islands.
Parents’ Rights, Sex, and Race in 1970s Florida
Save Our Children is remembered as an effort to keep gay people out of public life. But it was also rooted in the movement against school integration.
How Mars Lost Its Magnetic Field—and Then Its Oceans
Chemical changes inside Mars's core caused it to lose its magnetic field. This, in turn, caused it to lose its oceans. But how?
Should Readers Trust “Inaccuracy” in Memoirs about Genocide?
To what extent do errors undermine life writing? The question is an urgent one when that writing is testimony to the genocidal actions of the Khmer Rouge.
When Did Americans Start Using Fossil Fuel?
The nineteenth-century establishment of mid-Atlantic coal mines and canals gave America its first taste of abundant fossil fuel energy.
Spectacle, Early Deaths, and Printing Brain Cells
Well-researched stories from The Conversation, Knowable Magazine, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
Urban Planning, Then and Now
Humans have been designing cities for millennia. California Forever is just the newest entry in a long list of planned communities around the world.
Fruit and Veg: The Sexual Metaphors of the Renaissance
Using peach and eggplant emojis as shorthand for sex may seem like a new thing, but Renaissance painters were experts at using produce to imply intercourse.
Peshtigo: The Nation’s Deadliest Fire
On the same night as Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871, some 2,400 square miles of Wisconsin and Michigan burned in a firestorm that took more than 1,000 lives.
The End of Asian Exclusion, the Beginning of Caribbean Exclusion
The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act allowed first-generation Japanese American immigrants to become US citizens while keeping African Caribbean immigrants out.