John Aubrey

Archiving the Inventor of the Archive

Scholarship traces the birth of the archive to natural philosophers like John Aubrey.
Bobby Seale and Cesar Chavez

The Black Panthers’ Unlikely Ally

Cesar Chavez's non-violent United Farm Workers and the militant Black Panthers aligned politically throughout the 60s and 70s.
Battle of Hastings tapestry

The Battle of Hastings and the Ongoing Fight for Britain

Nine hundred and fifty years ago, Normans sailed across the English Channel, landing on England on September 27, 1066. The Norman Conquest had begun.
Polish refugees

Refugees Have Always Made Americans Nervous

What happens when a big stream of refugees enters an American community, bringing their foreign customs and values and taking scarce jobs?
Ford Model T, 1908

Henry Ford’s Anti-Semitism

Henry Ford's newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published years of anti-Semitic articles, prompting Hitler to call him the "single great man."
Nikita Khrushchev

The Power of Anecdotes in Politics

The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously pounded his shoe at a United Nations meeting in 1960. Anecdotes of erratic behavior like this are unsettling.
Strikers fight police in Minneapolis, c. 1934

The Checkered History of Colleges, Unions, and Scabs

In the early twentieth-century, some aristocratic college men were eager to prove their masculinity by working as strikebreakers.
Painting: Dessert No. 4 by  Carducius Plantagene Ream, depicting cake, raspberries, and ice cream

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dessert_No._4_by_Boston_Public_Library.jpg

The First Celebrity Chef

Alexis Soyer frequently cooked for royalty and dignitaries, but also displayed a healthy social conscience.
Sheffield Radishes

Community Gardens Were All the Rage…in the 1700s

An eighteenth-century precedent for today's community gardens in Sheffield, England.
Soviet Hippie

The Unlikely Hippies of the USSR

On the little-known hippie youth culture of the USSR.