How Trading Card Collectors Have Fought Stereotypes
By making what may have been unseen visible, trading cards have often provided an opening into larger conversations on race, gender, and representation.
The Satanic Foreign Film That Was Banned in the U.S.
Benjamin Christensen's Häxan was part documentary and part fantasy—and considered too disturbing for public viewing.
ONE: The First Gay Magazine in the United States
ONE is a vital archive, but its focus on citizenship and “rational acceptance” ultimately blocked it from being the safe home for all that it claimed to be.
How Influenza Devastated the Navajo Community in 1918
Like COVID-19, the 1918 influenza pandemic moved swiftly through the Navajo community, but firsthand accounts of the devastation are rare.
How Black Artists Fought Exclusion in Museums
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art excluded artworks from a major exhibition all about Harlem, Black artists protested the erasure.
What Drove Buster Keaton to Try a Civil War Comedy?
“Someone should have told Buster that it is difficult to derive laughter from the sight of men being killed in battle.”
Diorama, qu’est-ce que c’est?
Before his daguerreotype, the French inventor Louis Daguerre unveiled a new kind of “virtual reality” on a British stage.
The Sorry State of Apologies
"Sorry" can be more than a mere word when it has real-world consequences.
Media Literacy & Fake News: A Syllabus
Ten lessons from the past and steps we can take now to educate ourselves and our students about how to be a thoughtful consumer of information.
Fake Stone and the Georgian Ladies Who Made It
Coade stone was all the rage in late eighteenth-century architecture, and a mother-and-daughter team was behind it all.