Freeing a prisoner—a gesture of generosity and benevolence—may have been a way to bring together a fractured spiritual community.

These collective rituals of death brought meaning and identity to urban, working-class youth.

Russia's rise as an imperial power was built on intercontinental expansion, and a mission of "civilizing, protecting and educating" the conquered.

The sport of Newcomb ball was created by Clara Gregory Baer two years before volleyball. Now forgotten, it's a good bet it lives on in the gyms and beach courts of today.

In Early America, some prestigious residents advocated for the replacement of cane sugar, supplied by enslaved workers, with maple sugar from family farms.

The mobilization of housewives in 1950s California echoes through US national politics in the twenty-first century.

The participation of white mothers in the "bitter robbery" of Indigenous children from their families was a cruel irony in the colonialist programs of the US and Australia.

In fascist Italy, childbirth, breastfeeding and motherhood were given a hybrid structure of industrial management and eugenicist biological essentialism.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Yiddish became the language of political organizing for Russian Jews, thanks to the flow of literature from New York.

Dueling was a dangerous, ritualized response to a real (or perceived) slight. It may also have been a means of proving one's social and economic capital.