The Fear of Being Buried Alive (and How to Prevent It)
Pliny the Elder remarked: “Such is the condition of humanity, and so uncertain is men’s judgment, that they cannot determine even death itself.”
Industrial London’s Maternal Child Abductors
In industrial-era England, children took on new value in family life. Around this time, they started to be stolen more often, too.
Austen Fans, Modern Belief, and Environmental Politics
New books and scholarship from Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, and the University Press of Colorado.
The Restoration’s Filthiest Poet (and Why We Need Him)
Creature of the court, royalist and fop, dandy and dilettante, John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, knew how to scandalize with verse.
Victorian England Had a Problem With Cloth Piracy
Calico took the newly industrial world by storm. But battles over bolts of fabric shook Britain during the nineteenth century.
Edmund Burke and the Birth of Traditional Conservatism
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is one of the philosophical fountainheads of modern conservatism. But he didn't start out that way.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Speaker: Linguistic Isolation in the Modern World
Ayapaneco, an endangered Mexican language, sparked linguistic interest when the last two speakers of the language were not speaking to each other