Illustration from the cover of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

How Octavia E. Butler Became a Legend

The early inspiration and experiences that shaped the visionary science fiction storyteller.
Sans Dessus Dessous by Jules Verne

How Early Sci-Fi Authors Imagined Climate Change

A century before the modern “cli-fi” genre, many authors envisioned unsettling worlds shaped by man-made climate chaos.
Illustration by Arthur Rackham

Sick Party!

The party as site of contagion in Edgar Allan Poe, Evelyn Waugh, and Ling Ma.
A punk with a mohawk in a cottagecore painting

The Punk Rock Linguistics of Cottagecore

So you want to borrow a concept from another culture but don’t know what to call it? Try a morpheme!
Anna Julia Cooper, 1892

Black Women Have Written History for over a Century

Barriers of racism and sexism slowed them down, but academia wasn't their only venue.
Collage of contemporary Black Poets

Poems by 10 Contemporary Black Poets

Poems by Black poets, including Morgan Parker, Hanif Abdurraqib, Simone White, Terrance Hayes, and more.
The cover over of Freedomways, Volume 20, Issue 3, 1980

A New Civil Rights Movement, a New Journal

Freedomways, the African American journal of politics and culture chronicled the civil rights and Black freedom movements starting in the early 1960s. Read it on JSTOR.
Five female literacy volunteers return to Havana at the end of the literacy campaign in December 1961.

Rosa Hernández Acosta on the Cuban Literacy Campaign

Armed with just some textbooks and a kerosene lantern, Rosa Hernández Acosta taught literacy in rural Cuba without electricity, running water, or paved roads.
The 135th St Branch of the New York Public Library

JSTOR Companion to the Schomburg Center’s Black Liberation Reading List

JSTOR has created an open library to support readers seeking to engage with BIPOC+Q-authored reading lists like the one developed by the New York Public Library.
a caricature of three women whose depicted clothing satirizes the beginnings of neo-classical fashion influences in England.

Why Are So Many Romances Set in the Regency Period?

The British Regency era lasted less than a decade, but it spawned a staggering number of unlikely fictional marriages.