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.
Although few women were employed as governesses in Victorian Britain, their potential for social and class transgression left Britons awash with worry.
Gay rights activist Lige Clarke embraced non-monogamy, LSD, and unconventional spirituality, tying many of his radical ideas to his upbringing in Kentucky.
Chinese calligraphy is a personal art that draws on Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism as well as spiritual practices that date to the second century CE.
In the Meiji period, geisha embraced the nation’s modernizing project, helping to improve education for women and promoting a western-style domestic ideal.
Abraham Lincoln was no Marxist, but his ideas about the relationship of labor and capital mirrored Marx’s in some ways—albeit with a rural American flavor.
Between the 1960s and 1980s, state governments created lotteries to supplant illegal gambling operations that brought revenue to marginalized communities.
Italian immigrants had no qualms about working and living alongside Black Americans, which made them targets for violence by white vigilantes in Louisiana.
In the early centuries of Vajrayāna Buddhism in India, practitioners worked to reconcile the religion’s teaching of nonviolence with the realities of warfare.
Activists including W. E .B. Du Bois in the United States and Lajpat Rai in India drew connections between Black American and Indian experiences of white rule.
The peach industry represented a new, scientifically driven economy for Georgia, but it also depended on the rhythms and racial stereotypes of cotton farming.
Concerns about privacy and pressures regarding the physical appearance of women and their homes contributed to the failure of AT&T’s 1960s Picturephone.
Following the publication of the DSM-5, mental health professionals debated the expansion of “mental illness” to include normal parts of the human condition.
In 1968, an international group led by an Indian freedom fighter and a French spiritualist formed a utopian—and problematic—community called Auroville.
The medical profession saw nothing wrong with offering a cocaine-laced cola to white, middle-class consumers. Selling it to Black Americans was another matter.
In the early 1900s, a fictional “gentleman burglar” named Raffles fascinated British readers, reflecting popular ideas about crime, class, and justice.
