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 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sailors gained a knowledge of the world and access to exotic goods unlike anything other non-elites could imagine.
After the co-founder of the Jesuit Society died in 1552, the miraculous preservation of his body advanced the cause of Catholicism across Europe and Asia.
In the 1970s, Willie Brim, a member of the Buluwai people, learned about Peter Tosh and Bob Marley from hippies who lived near his community. And the joy began.
The discourse around police raids of so-called molly houses reflected the fear that London was a new Sodom where anonymity allowed people to be shameless.
Native to Paraguay, Ka’a he’e followed a circuitous path through Indigenous medicine, Japanese food science, and American marketing to reach the US sweeteners market.
In the late nineteenth century, forensic investigators began using new technologies to study minute details—such as the arrangement and makeup of dust.
With the emergence of the US as a global superpower in the twentieth-century, anti-Palestinian stereotypes in the media bled over to stigmatize Arab Americans.
In stories from around the world, foxes offer rewards or punishments to humans, play tricks on their fellow animals, and sometimes transform into foxy ladies.
When it came to the transport of goods within local areas, it took decades for the competition among horses, electric vehicles, and gas trucks to shake out.
In the eighteenth century, if people in British North America had to travel, they stayed at public houses that were often just repurposed private homes.
In physics, the whole point of the thought experiment is that it’s absurd. But in literature, it’s been used to explore all sorts of ideas and possibilities.
Many northern Indigenous cultures think about hunting in terms of literal “gifts” from animal to human, yet outsiders often dismiss the concept as a metaphor.
In the late 1960s, gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan made political hay by picking a fight with UC Berkeley over student protest and tenured “radicals.”
Revelations about secret government programs after Kennedy’s assassination increased the power of conspiracy theories and the fervor of those who set out to expose them.
Particularly before the Second Vatican Council (a.k.a. Vatican II), fasting was part of the Catholic calendar. No one took it more seriously than the Irish.
