Dates Hanging from Date Palm

Dates: Civilization’s Sweetest Indulgence

Offshoots from the “Tree of Life” traveled from Mesopotamia to the Levant to the United States, beguiling everyone with their toothsome confections.
Aerial view of Old Port of Marseille, France

Marseille: Independent, Industrial, and Mediterranean

From Caesar’s Commentaries to the modernism of Le Corbusier, the port city of Marseille has preserved a sense of individuality and industry.
Leo Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana, 1908

Tolstoy’s Christian Anarchism

A fateful visit to a market in Moscow entirely upended Tolstoy’s view on life and society—and changed the trajectory of his work and purpose.

From Oriental Riviera to Global Asia: Hong Kong in Travel Posters

A collection of travel posters shared via JSTOR by Hong Kong Baptist University highlights Hong Kong’s unique place in the global imagination over the decades.
From a 1957 map of the world

Transatlantic Studies: A Reading List

Using the Atlantic Ocean as a guiding metaphor, transatlanticism emphasizes the fluid nature of contrived national boundaries and identities.
Vienna, Austria. The Naturhistorisches (Natural History) Museum, Vienna

Natural History: A Reading List

This annotated bibliography samples scholarship on the rich—and difficult—history of natural history.
George Polk, c. 1943

The Murder Behind the George Polk Awards for Journalism

The murder of American journalist George Polk in Greece remains unsolved more than seventy-five years later.
A series of pages of a Chinese publication with dotted frames indicating some are missing

On The Fragility of Our Knowledge Base

Historian Glenn D. Tieffert shows how state interests in the People’s Republic of China can be protected by editing online databases and collections.
American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Agreement with Great Britain (unfinished oil sketch) by Benjamin West, between 1783 and 1784

The Treaty of Paris 1783: Annotated

The Treaty of Paris marked the end of the Revolutionary War and the hostilities between Great Britain and the newly independent United States—at least temporarily.
Soeur Jeanne by Charles Emmanuel Patas after Charles Monnet

A Mother Superior’s Demons

What does it mean when an entire convent of Urusline nuns appears to be possessed by demons? Many things, as it turns out.