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Black and white headshot of author Erin Blakemore

Erin Blakemore

Erin Blakemore is a Boulder, Colorado-based journalist Her debut book, The Heroine’s Bookshelf (Harper), won a Colorado Book Award for Nonfiction and has been translated into Italian, Korean and Portuguese. Erin has written about history and culture and other topics for Smithsonian.com, The Washington Post, TIME, mental_floss, NPR’s This I Believe, The Onion, Popular Science, Modern Farmer and other journals. You can find more of her work at erinblakemore.com.

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PMS
Health

How PMS Became a Thing

“Is PMS Real?” It was the headline that launched a thousand hot takes—a bold statement by Frank Bures (a male author) ...
Pierre and Marie Curie
Natural Science

How Marie Curie Claimed Credit for Her Scientific Work

Marie Curie was the first major woman scientist to get full credit for her scientific contributions.
Louisa May Alcott
Arts & Culture

Louisa May Alcott, Servant

She’s best known as the intrepid author of Little Women, but Louisa May Alcott was once a domestic servant.
Louisa Adams
Politics & History

Melania Trump Won’t Be America’s First Foreign-Born First Lady

Melania Trump, who reportedly will not immediately occupy the White House upon her husband’s inauguration, will not be your typical First Lady.
White House
Politics & Government

How Do White House Transitions Actually Work?

How do presidential transitions really work? Political science scholarship on White House staffers provides some insight.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Arts & Culture

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Black Lives

As historians continue to interrogate slavery’s lasting reverberations, narratives produced by slaves themselves have become a kind of ...
Laura Bridgman
Politics & History

Before Helen Keller, There Was Laura Bridgman

Before Helen Keller, there was Laura Bridgman, the first blind and deaf woman who learned to communicate through language.
Dorothy's ruby slippers
Arts & Culture

Consumerism and The Wizard of Oz

The Smithsonian Institution is running a Kickstarter campaign to restore and preserve Dorothy’s ruby slippers from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. 
Gold Records
Arts & Culture

How Have Music Charts Stayed Relevant?

Music charts conferred status on performers and became an arbiter of popularity and a signifier of success.
Twilight Zone the Hitchhiker
Arts & Culture

This Creepy Radio Broadcast Played With the Power of the Medium

Radio dramas became a way for broadcasters to get into the minds of listeners…and to comment on the very influence of radio itself.
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
Politics & History

How A Gambling Duchess Changed British Politics

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, won and lost fortunes, giving into a compulsion that pitted her against some of society’s most notorious ne’er-do-wells.
Cars in 1920s LA
Politics & History

How the Women of Los Angeles Protected Their Rights to Drive

In the 1920s, women's love of driving in auto-obsessed Los Angeles created traffic jams and a battle over women’s rightful place.
Catherine Howard
Politics & History

Did Materialism Lead to the Death of a Tudor Queen?

The very things that made Catherine Howard's time as Henry VIII's queen so pleasant became a cudgel with which to beat her.
Bobby Seale and Cesar Chavez
Politics & History

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.
Sheffield Radishes
Politics & History

Community Gardens Were All the Rage…in the 1700s

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

The Unlikely Hippies of the USSR

On the little-known hippie youth culture of the USSR.
Beauty and the Beast
Arts & Culture

How Disney Movies Teach Straightness

Despite the perils of mistaken identities, evil stepmothers, and cruel curses, in a Disney movie the princess always finds her prince.
Cutlery: Spoon, Fork, Knife
Art & Art History

Which Came First, the Spoon, Fork, or Knife?

The spoon predates the knife and the fork. It exists in every age and culture in a wide variety of shapes.
Agatha Christie, pharmacist
Arts & Culture

Agatha Christie, Pharmacist

If you think “poison” when you think Agatha Christie, you’re dead on. Many of her novels feature poison. But did you know Dame Agatha was also a pharmacist?
Marie Antoinette hair
Education & Society

The Political Power of Marie Antoinette’s Hair

With the help of a French hairdresser, Marie Antoinette embarked on what initially appeared to be a happily fated alliance between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons.
The Mummy movie poster
Arts & Culture

Why We Love to Be Scared

Nearly 1.5 billion tickets to horror movies were sold in 2015 alone. But why do we love being scared so much?
Queen Elizabeth I
Politics & History

Rags, Riches, and Cross-Class Dressing in Elizabethan England

In Elizabethan England, strict sumptuary regulations made sure that people dressed according to their rank in life, but many transgressed.
hospital bed
Politics & History

The Little-Known History of the Forced Sterilization of Native American Women

Jane Lawrence documents the forced sterilization of thousands of Native American women by the Indian Health Service in the 1960s and 1970s.
"March," John Lewis' Civil Rights Comic Book
Politics & History

Remembering the Civil Rights Movement…With Comics

Congressman John Lewis's graphic autobiography March: Book Two draws on the richly textured oral history of the Civil Rights Movement.
Leni Riefenstahl
Arts & Culture

Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi Olympics

Leni Riefenstahl was the Nazi regime’s most artistic propagandist. She is also remembered for Olympia, her documentary of the 1936 Olympics.

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