Marie Antoinette by Marie Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun

The Drama of Point d’Alençon Needle Lace

In its heyday, lace was beautiful, expensive, and handmade. Naturally, lace smuggling became the stuff of legend.
Housewife Annie Driver of Hunstanton, Norfolk, scrubbing the floor, 1956

NOW and the Displaced Homemaker

In the 1970s, NOW began to ask hard questions about the women who were no longer "homemakers", displaced from the only role they were thought to need.
Cover of Muhammed Speaks, 1975

The Nation of Islam’s Role in US Prisons

The Nation of Islam is controversial. Its practical purposes for incarcerated people transcend both politics and religion.
Uber Eats delivery people

COVID-19 and Justice for Food Workers

The COVID-19 pandemic put food workers in danger of contracting infections, with few, if any, consequences for the industries' failures to protect them.
Denée Benton as Peggy Scott on The Gilded Age

Julia C. Collins & the Black Elite of the Gilded Age

HBO's The Gilded Age has done its homework on Black History, creating a character based upon real life wealthy Black women of the time.
Dolores Huerta

The Foundations of Chicana Feminism

The Chicana feminist movement was initially met with resistance from within, and racism from without.
Ashley Rubin

The Invention of Incarceration

Prisons have been controversial since their beginnings in the late 1700s — why do they keep failing to live up to expectations?
Close up of illustration of prisoners from La Roca

St. Patrick’s Day in Prison

Offhand references to St. Patrick’s Day showcase broader humor, humanity, and history in the American Prison Newspapers collection.
Convicts working at Reed Camp, South Carolina, 1934

Mass Incarceration: A Syllabus

This selection of stories focuses on prison and mass incarceration in the US, which has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world.
A gold coin commemorating the assassination of Julius Caesar

Beware the Ides of March. (But Why?)

Everybody remembers that the Ides of March was the day Julius Caesar was assassinated. But what does it mean, and why that day?