Chimney Sweeps and the Turn Against Child Labor
The slowly expanding protections of “climbing boys” reveal the changing attitudes to child labor in Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
A Village Responds to Disaster
When a tsunami struck American Samoa in 2009, the key to a swift response was Indigenous institutions that drew on local knowledge and community training.
Call the Midwives—Assuming Any Are Left
While midwife-attended deliveries are the norm in the United Kingdom, they’re the exception in the United States. Time was, this difference wasn’t so stark.
Chains of Credit: The Entrepreneurial Advantage of Slavery
As the financial history of Maryland shows, slavery represented extraordinarily liquid wealth and outsized political power.
The Rise of Police Torture in New Orleans
Even as crime rates dropped in the 1930s, the police of New Orleans stepped up their use of torture to obtain confessions from Black Americans accused of crimes.
The Fight for Native American Voting Rights
Despite the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, Native American activists have had to repeatedly take their fight for voting rights to Congress.
Boven Digoel, the Prison Camp in the “Siberia of Indonesia”
The number of ethnic Chinese incarcerated in Boven Digoel in the 1920s was low, but the New Guinea colonial prison nonetheless shaped Sino-Malay literature.
In the Palm of Your Hand
Palm reading, also known as palmistry or chiromancy, has fascinated us as a practice and a party trick for centuries.
Inventing Silk Roads
The idea of a Silk Road, though it conjures up visions of exotic goods passing between Asia and Europe via ancient trade routes, is a thoroughly modern one.
The Mayaguez Incident: The Last Chapter of the Vietnam War
Reeling from defeat in Vietnam, the US invaded a Cambodian island to rescue a US freighter—just before its crew members, who were elsewhere, were released.