Hunters in the Snow (Winter) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The Climate Canvasses of the Little Ice Age

Low Country artists of the late Renaissance and Early Baroque eras captured the happiness and hardships of snowy winters—an ever rarer phenomenon now.
A photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Gilbert Wells included in the front matter of Anthropology applied to the American white man and Negro

Passing Narratives That Pre-Date Black Like Me

In 1905, Robert Gilbert Wells used a fictional character to explore the experience of being a Black man in America.
Isabelle Eberhardt, 1895

Isabelle Eberhardt: Travel’s Rebel with a Cause

A hash-smoking, cross-dressing woman traveling the Sahara in the early 1900s, Eberhardt unpicked the fabric of society just by being herself.
Title page for Sinners in the hands of an angry God, 1741

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: Annotated

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.
Portrait of Edna St. Vincent Millay, c. 1914-1915

The Poetry Contest Edna St. Vincent Millay Lost

Though her writing career opened in an inauspicious manner, Edna St. Vincent Millay became the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Leonard Woolf

How Leonard Woolf Critiqued Bloomsbury from Within

A literary scholar argues that Leonard Woolf has been unfairly neglected—perhaps because his anti-imperialism implicated his friends.
A street during the plague in London

Plague and Protest Go Hand in Hand

Scholars of early modern England have shown how plague and protest are often correlated. The Black Death of 1348 laid the groundwork for the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, for example.
Oscar Wilde with a green carnation

Four Flowering Plants That Have Been Decidedly Queered

The queer history of the pansy and other flowers.
Photo by _HealthyMond . on Unsplash

Asian Families, the RAND Book, and Science Fiction

New books and scholarship from Stanford University Press, University of Minnesota, and MIT Press.
An illustration of a TSA security checkpoint

Why Can’t the TSA Just Go on Strike?

The post-9/11 expansion of federal powers over transportation security was also an extension of power over the security workforce.