Lucy Stone

Marriage and the Maiden Name

While many women trade surnames they had at birth for their husbands’, some hold on tightly to the former, a tradition famously established by Lucy Stone.
Ettore Petrolini

Laughing With the Fascists

Mussolini’s regime isn’t generally associated with a sense of humor, but the Fascist party found comedy useful in certain circumstances.
Children with their Indian nanny at St Ann's Well in the spa town of Buxton, Derbyshire, August 1922.

Ayahs Abroad: Colonial Nannies Cross The Empire

South Asian maids and nannies journeyed to Britain by the thousands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with returning colonials.
Members of the Kikuyu tribe held in a prison camp in Kenya

Reporting Atrocity—Or Not—In Postwar Britain

Or, what metropolitan Britons could know about the colonies.
Up the Junction by Nell Dunn

Up the Junction: A Place, A Fiction, A Film, A Condition

In addition to a New Wave hit, Nell Dunn's 1963 book about young women in a poor London neighborhood inspired a Ken Loach adaption that helped shift British attitudes toward abortion.
An advertisement for Gale Borden Eagle brand condensed milk, 1887

The Sweet Story of Condensed Milk

This nineteenth-century industrial product became a military staple and a critical part of local food culture around the world.
An undated Bay Area poster by a “punk with copymachine,” offering up free copies (BYO paper).

Xerox and Roll: The Corporate Machine and the Making of Punk

On the 85th anniversary of the first xerographic print, a collection of punk flyers from Cornell University provides an object lesson on (anti-)art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Isokon Flats, c. 1978

The Spy Who Shared My Foyer

Luminaries from Agatha Christie to Walter Gropius gravitated to London’s “Lawn Road Flats.” So too did a far less conspicuous cohort: assets for the USSR.
Psychic researcher Harry Price X-raying a sealed box which once belonged to religious prophetess Joanna Southcott with his assistant, August 1938

Ghosts of Landed Gentry, But Never the Ghosts of Serfs

Psychical researcher Harry Price combined the power of academic language with a cultural identity crisis to build a reputation as a “scientific” ghost-hunter.
Kuda Bux

Kuda Bux: Fire-walking for Fame and Fortune

The Kashmiri American illusionist and mystic drew on his legendary powers of concentration to entertain and astound (in)credulous audiences.