An illustration of pollen and dust in the atmosphere from Popular Science Monthly, 1883

The Mystery of Crime-Scene Dust

In the late nineteenth century, forensic investigators began using new technologies to study minute details—such as the arrangement and makeup of dust.
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28032326?seq=6

Parthenogenesis, Medieval Whales, and Debating Science

Well-researched stories from Slate, Knowable Magazine, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
Woman in military clothes on a background of rainbow

From Handcuffs to Rainbows: Queer in the Military

The US military has done an about face on LGBTQ+ rights in just over a decade.
The cover of Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful by by Kwame Brathwaite, Tanisha C. Ford and Deborah Willis, 2019

Kwame Brathwaite Showed the World that Black is Beautiful

Photographing everyone from musicians to athletes to the person on the street, Brathwaite found the beauty in Blackness and shared it with the world.
The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt

Centered on the Stein-Toklas household and written from the point of view of their gay Vietnamese cook, Binh, this novel tells a story of converging queer diasporas.
The noble Ikhlas Khan with a petition, c. 1650

The Habshi Dynasty of India

Amongst the hundreds of minorities within the Subcontinent, Black Indians of African origin stand out.
Margaret Chase Smith being sworn into the House of Representatives on June 10, 1940

Declaration of Conscience: Annotated

In June 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith criticized Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist campaigns. She was the first of his colleagues to challenge his Red Scare rhetoric.
Martian Moon Deimos

Deimos: A Chip Off the Old Martian Block?

A new space probe suggests that the moonlet Deimos isn’t a captured asteroid after all.
A botanical illustration of Indigofera tinctoria from La botanique de J.J. Rousseau, 1805

Plant of the Month: Indigo

The cultivation of this plant for its cherished blue dye tells the story of exploitative agricultural practices—and, hopefully, its reversal.
A general view of the National Windrush Monument at Waterloo Station on June 22, 2022 in London, England.

Windrush Day

There were British African Caribbean immigrants to the UK well before June 22, 1948, but it was the arrival of Empire Windrush that got the media's attention.