The History of Peer Review Is More Interesting Than You Think
The term “peer review” was coined in the 1970s, but the referee principle is usually assumed to be as old as the scientific enterprise itself. (It isn’t.)
History’s Footnotes
The addition of footnotes to texts by historians began long before their supposed inventor, Leopold von Ranke, started using them (poorly, as it turns out).
Revolutionary Writing in Carlos Bulosan’s America
Bulosan’s fiction reflects an awareness of the inequality between the Philippines and the US and connects that relationship to his own class experience.
Heritage Bilinguals and the Second-Language Classroom
So-called heritage learners are forcing educators to rethink and reframe their approaches to teaching second languages in the classroom.
The Joy of Burglary
In the early 1900s, a fictional “gentleman burglar” named Raffles fascinated British readers, reflecting popular ideas about crime, class, and justice.
Sui Sin Far, the Chinese Canadian-American Sentimentalist
The short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance should be read in the context of nineteenth-century sentimentalism, which was shaped by Christian morality.
Finding Lucretia Howe Newman Coleman
Once a powerful voice in the Black press, Coleman all but disappeared from the literary landscape of the American Midwest after her death in 1948.
The Novels that Taught Americans about Abortion
Twentieth-century novels helped readers to learn about the practicalities of abortion as well as the social and moral questions around the procedure.
A “Genre-Bending” Poetic Journey through Modern Korean History
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée is an experiment in both lyric and epic modernism that uses form to invoke the tragedy of the wartime partition of Korea.
Separated by a Common Language in Singapore
Singapore English is famous for its sentences that end with the particle lah. But what does it mean when people use the particle one instead?