Player Pianos and the Commodification of Music
Half of all American homes had a piano or player piano a century ago, but very few do now. Whatever happened to the parlor piano?
How Victorians’ Fear of Starvation Created Our Christmas Lore
One scholar sees more in the Christmas food of authors like Charles Dickens—English national identity and class.
Shakespeare, Rembrandt, and the Real “Twelfth Night”
"Twelfth Night" was more than a Shakespeare play; for a very long time it was an extremely popular European winter feast.
Our Best Stories of 2017
JSTOR Daily published a whopping 834 stories in 2017—that’s a lot for our small staff. Here are the ...
The Scottish Sisters Who Pioneered Art Nouveau
Margaret and Frances Macdonald and their Glasgow School of Art classmates Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Harold MacNair were Art Nouveau's Glasgow Four.
The Great American Game of Picking the Great American Novel
Arguing about the great American novel was perfect fodder for periodicals in the late 1800s, and it is catnip for a listicle-obsessed internet.
10 Winter Poems To Cozy Up To
Settle in to the winter season with verse from Dylan Thomas, H.D., Pushkin, and more.
Super Mario, Homer’s Odyssey, and the Meaning of Marriage
Nintendo's Mario and Homer's Odysseus have more in common than you might think.
Gabrielle Berlinger
An interview with scholar and folklorist Gabrielle Berlinger, a professor of American Studies at the University of North Caroline Chapel Hill.
The Surprising History of the Kimono
The kimono that the world associates with Japan was actually created in the late-nineteenth century as a cultural identifier.