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A selection of pages from the The Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries Bibliotheca Fictiva collection
JSTOR Collections

Enchanting Imposters

Johns Hopkins University’s Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection of Literary and Historical Forgery shows that humans have been creating fan fiction and fake news for millennia.

Unearthing Justice

Dancers prepare to enter the contest powwow at the 100th Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial at Red Rock Park on August 13, 2022

Honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day: A Reading List

With scholarship on Indigenous knowledge, environmental justice, resistance, and decolonization, this list honors Native sovereignty and self-determination.

Reading Lists

Stained Glass Window in the Nazareth Synagogue in Paris

Introduction to Jewish Studies: A Reading List

The broad, ever-expanding field of Jewish Studies is united by texts, events, and figures that engage an established canon of ideas across disciplines.

Read Before You Go

Commercial and tourist docks of St. George's, Grenada.

Grenada: When the Cold War Got Spicy

The 1983 invasion of Grenada raised questions about the legitimacy of American reactions to a communist presence on the island.

Suggested Readings

Claudia Zenteno, activist and environmental defender of the Xochimilco wetlands, sails a raft to a chinampa on April 17, 2021 in Xochimilco, Mexico.

Old Wet Farms, New Pain Meds, and New Chemistry

Well-researched stories from Mongabay, Ars Technica, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Most Recent

An old Lego character from the 80s on a green Lego surface.
Arts & Culture

LEGO: Brick by Ideological Brick

Toys, even ones marketed as tools for the imagination, are never value neutral.
Schröder-Schräder House
The Where We Were

Building De Stijl Style

Piet Mondrian, co-founder of De Stijl, argued that the art movement wasn’t ready for architecture. Theo van Doesburg and others believed it was. Who was right?

More Stories

Unearthing Justice

Dancers prepare to enter the contest powwow at the 100th Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial at Red Rock Park on August 13, 2022

Honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day: A Reading List

With scholarship on Indigenous knowledge, environmental justice, resistance, and decolonization, this list honors Native sovereignty and self-determination.

Reading Lists

Stained Glass Window in the Nazareth Synagogue in Paris

Introduction to Jewish Studies: A Reading List

The broad, ever-expanding field of Jewish Studies is united by texts, events, and figures that engage an established canon of ideas across disciplines.

Read Before You Go

Commercial and tourist docks of St. George's, Grenada.

Grenada: When the Cold War Got Spicy

The 1983 invasion of Grenada raised questions about the legitimacy of American reactions to a communist presence on the island.

Suggested Readings

Claudia Zenteno, activist and environmental defender of the Xochimilco wetlands, sails a raft to a chinampa on April 17, 2021 in Xochimilco, Mexico.

Old Wet Farms, New Pain Meds, and New Chemistry

Well-researched stories from Mongabay, Ars Technica, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Trending

Candace Tustin in the Corner Cupboard Food Bank on March 1, 2018 in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania.
Education & Society

Listening to White Working-Class Women in Coal Country

Researchers interviewed women in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town to understand how they coped with social and economic changes tied to deindustrialization.
The Song of Songs of the Allfather: A Germanic Creed by Adolf Knoll, Jena 1918. Odin Germanic mythology heathenism neopaganism Voelkisch. German National Library. Unidentified illustrator.
Education & Society

“Border Science” vs. Commercial Occultism: A Nazi Debate

Occultism was widely embraced under the Third Reich, complicating Nazi attempts to wield it as a weapon against internationalism and other undesirable ideologies.
Federal encampment on Cumberland Landing, Pamunkey River, VA, 1862
Politics & History

How the Union Lost the Remembrance War

The victors of the American Civil War failed to write their story into the history books, leaving a gap for the mythologizing of the Confederacy.

Long Reads

The cover of the book "The Sandinista Revolution"
Politics & History

The Sandinista Revolution, Reconsidered

A new book from historian Mateo Jarquín seeks to decouple Nicaragua’s unique socialist uprising from reductive Cold War clichés.
A student at Tuskegee University in Alabama learns to print a newspaper page in the Institute's printing works, ca. 1955
Arts & Culture

The Enduring Value of Student Newspapers

More than curiosities, college papers are unique pedagogical tools that help undergraduates achieve media literacy.
Efka Pyramiden cigarette papers in a green packaging sleeve made in Nazi Germany, Accession Number 2004.705.5
Politics & History

Papering Over History

Efka—the German rolling paper company—was a Nazi regime favorite. After World War II, it was refashioned as a darling of the pot-infused counterculture.
Blue-stained serpentine Neotyphodium coenophialum mycelia inhabiting the intercellular spaces of tall fescue leaf sheath tissue. Magnified 400x.
Plants & Animals

Better Farming Through Endophytes

Scientists look to “probiotics” for crops as a new green revolution in agriculture.

Editors' Picks

Education & Society

Simon Miles on Superpowers and Serendipity

An interview with historian of US foreign policy and diplomacy Simon Miles, who finds that surprises in the archives can lead to the most compelling projects.
Politics & History

The Trouble with Reentry

Reentry of space junk in the 1970s forced First Nations communities into a reckoning with Cold War geopolitics and a burgeoning envirotechnical disaster.
Politics & History

Iran’s Protest Culture

A succession of authoritarian regimes birthed a strong tradition of collective action.
Politics & History

The Trailblazing Merze Tate

A celebrated historian of race and imperialism, Tate was an intrepid traveler who avidly shared her passion and meticulously documented her journeys.
Politics & History

How to be a Modern Autocrat

In the twenty-first century, dictators are less likely than their predecessors to use violence to suppress dissent, cultivating instead “informational autocracies.”

Quirky History

Pekinese competitors arrive in the arms of their owners at the Wimbledon Dog Show, 1912

The Surprising Imperial History of the Pekingese Dog

Upper-class British women in the early 1900s participated in a craze for Pekingese dogs, signalling the role of empire in their social identities.
Clorosi by Sebastià Junyent

Green Sickness, the Disease of Virgins

In the mid-seventeenth century, John Graunt, the “father of English statistics,” claimed dozens of young women in London died of green sickness every year.
Women bowling, ca. 1900

The Bowling Alley: It’s a Woman’s World

Even when it was considered socially unacceptable, American women were knocking down pins on the local lanes.

Collections on JSTOR

Send in the Clowns

Lulu Adams came from a long, illustrious line of circus performers and was credited—even if wrongly—with being the world’s first female clown.
A painting of The Belgic, the ship on which Ella Sheldon wrote many of her diaries.

Lonely Diarist of the High Seas

As ship stewardess, Ella Sheldon tended to upper-crust women onboard and battled a range of workplace demons. Her journals tell her story.
Shadowbox with a wedding photograph of a bride and groom, surrounded by the bride's veil

First Comes Love

A top divorce lawyer collected strangers’ marriage certificates and other wedding-related ephemera—a testament to her perhaps surprising faith in matrimony.

Reading Lists

Cute tiny people reading different books, giant textbooks. Concept of book world, readers at library, literature lovers or fans. Colorful vector illustration in flat cartoon style

Speculative Fiction: A Reading List

Speculative fiction, from Afrofuturism to Star Wars, offers students tools and methods for analyzing social movements, power structures, and utopian thinking.
A parent and child near windmills at sunset

Black Midwestern Studies: A Reading List

This primer on Black Midwestern Studies examines the factors shaping communities of color in America’s “flyover country,” long mistaken as a place of normative whiteness.
Crowd taking photographs on mobile phones

Citizen Journalism: A Reading List

The ubiquity of smartphones has ushered in a new era for journalism—facilitating citizen journalism and changing the very nature of reporting.

Partner Posts

Western meadowlark singing on a fence post at sunrise in Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge near Valentine, Nebraska.

Birding by Ear

How to learn the songs of nature’s symphony with some simple techniques.
Image Updown Girl left and Worth Matravers boy Right.

Two Seventh-Century People Found With West African Ancestry

A story of diversity and integration in early Anglo-Saxon society.
Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland

A Massive Eruption 74,000 Years Ago Affected the Whole Planet

Archaeologists use volcanic glass to figure out how people survived.

Caught in nature’s own flypaper, insects are preserved more perfectly than almost anywhere else; some beetles even retained the color of their shells.

La Brea and Beyond

Annotations

Copy of the signature page of the Declaration of Sentiments, 1848

“Declaration of Sentiments”: Annotated

The document that came out of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention extended the long-lived and hard-fought movement for women’s rights in the United States.
Bill of Rights, 1791

The Bill of Rights: Annotated

Proposed as a compromise to ensure the ratification of the new US Constitution, the Bill of Rights has become a critical protector of civil liberties.
Plaque of Marbury v. Madison at SCOTUS Building

Marbury v. Madison: Annotated

Justice John Marshall’s ruling on Marbury v. Madison gave the courts the right to declare acts and laws of the legislative and executive branches unconstitutional.

Teaching Resources

Humans shown in their relationships with their pet animals, including a man trying to teach his crow the principles of language and children snail racing.

Learning about Language: An In-Class Activity

A scholar of the medical humanities shares ideas for helping students discover how language shaped past cultural attitudes—and still shapes them in the present.
Dakota pipeline protestors

Celebrating Indigenous Peoples and Cultures

More and more states are choosing to celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day instead of Columbus Day.
Copy of the signature page of the Declaration of Sentiments, 1848

“Declaration of Sentiments”: Annotated

The document that came out of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention extended the long-lived and hard-fought movement for women’s rights in the United States.

Reveal Digital Collections

Frank O'Hara

12 Poems by Frank O’Hara

Plus his manifesto on Personism and writings about O’Hara by Ted Berrigan, Joseph LeSueur, and Joe Brainard.
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.36531311

Toledo’s Most Singular Pharmacist

The Ella P. Stewart Scrapbooks offer insight into the life and legacy of a pioneering Black woman who broke color barriers and helped birth the fight for civil rights.

Feminist Bookstore News by the Numbers

Now part of Reveal Digital, Feminist Bookstore News was a vital source of information (and gossip) amid a flourishing in publishing fifty years ago.

Roundup

Dakota pipeline protestors

Celebrating Indigenous Peoples and Cultures

More and more states are choosing to celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day instead of Columbus Day.
Photographs of Natasha Trethewey, Debora Kuan, Sam Sax, Louise Glück, Rebecca Lehmann, and Alex Dimitrov against a green background

10 Contemporary Pastoral Poems

Poems that reflect and reinterpret the pastoral tradition, by Louise Glück, Alex Dimitrov, Rebecca Lehmann, Sam Sax, Natasha Trethewey, and more.
White Pines in Cathedral Woods, Intervale, White Mountains, N. H

What the Trees Are Telling Us

Markers of both environmental change and periods of stability, trees have a lot to tell us about nature—but also about humanity.

Natural Science

Dancer surrounded by others foragers

The Bee Dance Debate

Can insects communicate? In the middle of the twentieth century, scientists disagreed on whether bees could possess a “language” expressed through motion.
Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland

A Massive Eruption 74,000 Years Ago Affected the Whole Planet

Archaeologists use volcanic glass to figure out how people survived.
Ice formations in a cave in Werfen, Austria, 1925

Underground Conquest: Cave Exploration and Nationalism

As cave exploration became more popular and speleology developed as an academic discipline, cave explorers were drawn into a problematic European nationalism.

Sustainability & The Environment

Jane Goodall watching her photographer husband, Baron Hugo Von Lawick, adjust a camera, to which a baboon is clinging, in the Gombe Reserve, east central Africa.

Jane Goodall

An intellectual powerhouse and dedicated conservationist, Goodall showed generations of humans how to engage with—and take care of—the natural world.
Conceptual image of green server room.

Is AI Good for the Planet?

The algorithms that promise to predict wildfires and optimize energy grids are powered by servers that drink up rivers and belch out more carbon than cars.
Illustration of carbon capture technology which uses filter technology to remove the green house gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it underground.

Who Owns the Ground Beneath Your Feet?

Carbon removal, a proposed solution to climate change, will require the injection of CO2 underground—but under whose property?

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