Livia Gershon is a freelance writer in Nashua, New Hampshire. Her writing has appeared in publications including Salon, Aeon Magazine and the Good Men Project. Contact her on Twitter @liviagershon.
The story of Cizhong’s Catholic holiday festival began when French missionaries arrived in northwest Yunnan with plans to spread their faith across Tibet.
In 1963, more than thirty Mexican guest workers died in a terrible accident in California. The fallout helped turn farmworkers’ rights into a national cause.
After World War II, IBM worked to influence the new balance of power by locating facilities for the production of its electric typewriter across Europe.
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.
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.
Since the 1930s, the idea of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” has been used in American politics, but some Jews have always taken issue with the entire concept.
In classic British detective stories, villains might be atavistic monsters, foreign menaces, or conniving professionals—all tied to aristocrats’ anxieties.
In the years between the world wars, the League of Nations attempted to change how history was taught to emphasize commonalities across national lines.
In The Gambia, adherents of the Tablighi Jama‘at movement believe in the segregation of men and women, which often affects gender roles in unexpected ways.
Black American voluntary migrants to Liberia were eager to embrace their African roots, but their vision for the country was very much an American one.
In his retellings of ancient myths, Bacon called for research to extend human lifespans, but only if those longer lives were spent in the pursuit of knowledge.
Gaining strength in the early 2000s, the New Atheism movement was fueled by a fear of Christian fundamentalism and a belief that secularism was under attack.
The 1974 Rumble in the Jungle was freighted with symbolism regarding American racial politics and the pan-African struggle in the context of the Cold War.
The belief that animals cross the “Rainbow Bridge” to an afterlife is relatively new and not part of any formal theology, yet many Americans embrace it.
Leading up to a 2004 debate about same-sex marriage, conservatives shifted their focus away from moral issues and toward arguments about children’s welfare.
For some young, working-class Japanese men and women, Jamaican reggae clubs offer an escape from cultural norms and a way to gain currency in the music world.
