The nineteenth-century colonial economy of Western Australia depended on unfree labor, whether from indentured workers, convicts, or Indigenous people.

Cranes, sandpipers, ducks, geese and many other waterbirds have lost essential rest stops along their seasonal migration routes. Bird-friendly agriculture can assist in filling the gaps.

Painter William Merritt Chase opened an art school for a new generation of women, teaching them how to draw as well as how to advocate for themselves.

The import and mass-market replicas of the Kashmiri shawl highlighted Victorian anxieties about empire and its role in industrial modernity.  

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

The perception of weight discrimination shapes both people’s experience of their own weight status and their disability outcomes.

Since the religion’s early days, Christian thinkers have treated vegetarianism sometimes as heretical, sometimes as evidence of saintly asceticism.

Historians are recovering the overlooked history of North America’s Crotalus horridus, the timber rattlesnake.

In Mongolia, dogs are close companions to humans and a key part of a cosmology with Buddhist and shamanic influences. But they’re also seen as unclean.

The use of blackface may seem out of place in a Japanese-inspired stage production—until you think about the money to be made by dealing in stereotypes.