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The Musical Games by Anne Young

The Hidden History of Women Game Designers

Nineteenth-century women turned music lessons into interactive entertainment, complete with spinning wheels and ivory counters.

Archive Adventures

The Tamest Grizzly of Yellowstone

Adored by tourists and studied by scientists, a grizzly mother named Sylvia became an emblem of the fragile balance between humans and the wild.

Reading Lists

A view of the landscape seen along the Golden Gate Trail in the Paradise area of Mount Rainier National Park, Washington.

The Promise and Problems of Public Lands: A Reading List

Discover key research on U.S. public lands through scholarly works exploring conservation, Indigenous knowledge, and public policy.

Read Before You Go

Aerial shot of an autumn sunset over the Long Island Sound taken from Port Washington, NY

The Long and Winding Island

New York’s Long Island has long served as a backdrop for social and political conflicts between the newly arrived and the established residents.

Perspectives on Public Space

We Descend from the River

Public spaces are often sites of commemoration of events in the nation’s history. But which public is represented in and served by those spatialized celebrations?

Most Recent

A table with many dishes of food

Potluck Nation

Food in America is a living archive of exchange and adaptation, where “ethnic” cuisines blend and redefine what national identity tastes like.
Sunday Morning in front of the Arch Street Meeting House, Philadelphia, 1811

Quakers Against Thanksgiving

In colonial America, government “thanksgivings” blurred faith and politics. For Quakers, rejecting them was an act of religious conviction.

More Stories

Archive Adventures

The Tamest Grizzly of Yellowstone

Adored by tourists and studied by scientists, a grizzly mother named Sylvia became an emblem of the fragile balance between humans and the wild.

Reading Lists

A view of the landscape seen along the Golden Gate Trail in the Paradise area of Mount Rainier National Park, Washington.

The Promise and Problems of Public Lands: A Reading List

Discover key research on U.S. public lands through scholarly works exploring conservation, Indigenous knowledge, and public policy.

Read Before You Go

Aerial shot of an autumn sunset over the Long Island Sound taken from Port Washington, NY

The Long and Winding Island

New York’s Long Island has long served as a backdrop for social and political conflicts between the newly arrived and the established residents.

Perspectives on Public Space

We Descend from the River

Public spaces are often sites of commemoration of events in the nation’s history. But which public is represented in and served by those spatialized celebrations?

Long Reads

Workers for the Insular Lumber company felling a small Almon (Thorea species) in Northern Negros, 1910.

The Mythical Mahogany that Helped Build the American Empire

How “Philippine mahogany” became America’s tropical timber of choice, thanks to a rebrand from a colonial logging company that drove deforestation.
An illustrated reconstruction of the dire wolf

“Playing God” with De-Extinction

As tech companies tout successes in bringing back the likes of the long-gone dire wolf, they must grapple with accusations such innovation is immoral. Why isn’t it?
Theodore Roosevelt speaking with reporters

The President and the Press Corps

Theodore Roosevelt was the first White House occupant to seek control over how newspapers covered him.
An illustration from the cover of Amrita Pritam's Pinjar

Caught in Partition’s Violent Fray

Published seventy-five year ago, Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar explores the devastation suffered by the women of India and Pakistan after political rupture.

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

Three colorful shapes against a black background demonstrating the idea of national parks and public lands

The Victory of Public Lands

Most Americans agree on the value of preserving public lands. How did the idea of public lands come about, and how can we ensure they exist in the future?
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.