Allenby St c. 1930

Electrifying the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Jewish immigrants and British authorities tried to sell electrification as a matter of business while Palestinian Arabs viewed it as a Zionist nation-building project.
Soldiers fighting in the Battle of Bennington during the American War of Independence

Revolutionary Atrocity

For the Americans, narratives about the savagery of the British became an important part of nation-building and a moral justification for armed rebellion.
Preparatory sketches for a pittura infamante or shame painting by Andrea del Sarto

Punitive Portraits of the Renaissance

The Italian legal tradition called for the public display of a humiliating—but recognizable—portrait of the disgraced person.
Tenzing Norgay

Tenzing Norgay: The Mountaineer Who Refused to be Categorized

By remaining vague about his own biography, Norgay called into question the idea of nationhood and made a deafening point about actions speaking louder than words.
Chinese incense clock that measures time by burning powdered incense along a pre-measured path, with each stencil representing a different amount of time.

Keeping Time with Incense Clocks

As chronicled by Chinese poet Yu Jianwu, the use of fire and smoke for time measurement dates back to at least the sixth century CE.
Marcus G. Daniel

Charity Scams of Yore

Between the 1850s and 1940s, a charity scam worked a collection circuit of Evangelical Christians in least five hundred towns across eighty countries.
Voters dropping their voting slips into the ballot box.

Why Do We Vote by Secret Ballot?

Election days used to be raucous affairs, with individual votes sometimes cast orally for all to hear.
Botanical manuscript of 450 watercolors of flowers and plants

Plant of the Month: Dittany

Did women in the premodern world have much agency over reproduction? Their use of plants like dittany suggests that they did.
Photograph showing Waldemar Mordecai Wolffe Haffkine (1860-1930), Bacteriologist with the Government of India, inoculating a community against cholera in Calcutta, March 1894.

Anti-Asian Racism in the 1817 Cholera Pandemic

We should learn from, instead of repeating, the racist assignations of the past.
A fetus inside of an artistic depiction of an artificial womb

On the History of the Artificial Womb

Will outside-the-womb gestation, increasingly viable for animal embryos, lead to a feminist utopia? Or to something like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?