Isabelle Eberhardt: Travel’s Rebel with a Cause
A hash-smoking, cross-dressing woman traveling the Sahara in the early 1900s, Eberhardt unpicked the fabric of society just by being herself.
Family and Revolution in the Borderlands
Paula Carmona, the founding mother of the magonista movement, was all but erased from Mexico’s revolutionary history.
The Dangers of Tea Drinking
In nineteenth century Ireland, tea could be a symbol of cultivation and respectability or ill health and chaos, depending on who was drinking it.
The Debtor’s Blues: Music and Forced Labor
Debt peonage is often associated with agricultural labor, but in the early twentieth century, Black musicians found themselves trapped in its exploitative cycle.
Négritude’s Enduring Legacy: Black Lives Matter
Today's anti-racist activism builds on the work of Black Francophone writers who founded the Pan-African Négritude movement in the 1930s.
Publishing Queer Berlin
Weimar Germany was an improbably safe space for newspapers and magazines by and for lesbians.
Reading Between the Lines of an “Americanization” Campaign
Manuals used to teach “American” ways of homemaking in California c. 1915–1920 offer a rare opportunity to hear the voices of Mexican immigrant women.
Fascist Architecture in Rome
In Mussolini's Rome, the built environment struck a balance between the romance of the ancient past and the rationalism of avant-garde modernism.
How Gender Got on the Menu
As women began to be welcomed into restaurants, some started catering to what they perceived as “female tastes,” largely meaning the sugary stuff
The Canary Islands: First Stop of Imperialism
Before the New World, Europeans arrived in the Canary Islands and set the model for the enslavements, genocides, and radical ecological transformations to come.