Dr Spurzheim phrenology chart

What Skulls Told Us

The pseudoscience phrenology swept the popular imagination, and its practitioners made a mint preying on prejudices, gullibility, and misinformation.
American athlete Nancy Voorhees clears the bar as she trains for the high jump event ahead of the 1922 Women's World Games, during a training session at Weequanic Park in Newark, New Jersey, 1922

Sport in America: A Reading List

Covering the colonial era to the present, this annotated bibliography demonstrates the topical and methodological diversity of sport studies in the United States.
A pork-butcher's shop

Meat and the Free Market

Significant political changes in three major global cities fueled experimentation with laissez-faire economics, which had peculiar effects on the meat market.
Circa 1565, Native Americans cure meat for the coming winter.

Spanish Colonists were Desperate for European Food

Spanish colonists in the Americas were terrified that their essential humors would change if they ate local food.
Black and white photograph of a man being arrested by the police.

Policing Radicals: Britain vs. the United States

British policing of Communism before and into the Cold War has often been compared favorably with America’s witch-hunt hysteria. But was it really better?
From Puck, 1898

Annexation Nation

Since 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine was first introduced to the world, the US has regarded Cuba as key to its designs for Latin America.
American actors Cindy Williams (right) and Ron Howard as Laurie and Steve on the set of the Lucasfilm production 'American Graffiti',

The Sonic Triumph of American Graffiti

In 1973, George Lucas joined forces with sound designer Walter Murch to celebrate a bygone era. They ended up revolutionizing the role music plays in film.
Study of Hibiscus Plants by Adolf Senff

Plant of the Month: Hibiscus

Nearly synonymous with the global tropics and subtropics, hibiscus symbolizes the Caribbean’s transnational past, present, and future.
War Camp Community Service. Newport News. American Library Association. c. 1919

Uncle Sam Wants You to Donate Books!

During World War I, the American Library Association built libraries on military training camps in a project that championed patriotism, literacy, and self-improvement.
Basel Mission catechist William Timothy Evans raised his two daughters in the mission community in Accra and Akropong after his Ga wife, Emma Evans (née Reindorf), died during childbirth in 1900.

Exposing the Sexual Hypocrisy of European Colonists

In the early twentieth century, white colonizers’ exploitation of women in West Africa’s Gold Coast stoked anti-colonial politics.