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.
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.
In Brazil, Indigenous people and city-dwellers of all backgrounds mix various shamanic practices, including rituals imported from North America and elsewhere.
Before the Civil War, pro-slavery forces in the South—particularly the future president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis—tried to extend their power westward.
