Dave the Potter’s Mark on History
...where, writes Liz Tracey for JSTOR Daily, “mounds of shells tossed from consumed mollusks are found, sometimes with pottery, clothing, and plants mixed in.” Before the Civil War, “the American...
“What to the Slave is The Fourth of July?”: Annotated
On Monday, July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech to the “Ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society,” which arguably became his most famous public oration. Rather than a...
Declaration of Conscience: Annotated
On the first day of June 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, gave a speech on the floor of the Senate that sounded the first shot in...
90 Years On: The Destruction of the Institute of Sexual Science
Ninety years ago this month, the Institute for Sexual Science (ISS) in Berlin was vandalized and looted, its library burned, in an early organized spectacle of the power of the...
The Sonic Triumph of American Graffiti
...period parlance) takes place. Walter Murch, 2005. Getty This technique has a name: “worldizing.” It is something Murch perfected during the production of American Graffiti. “Worldizing,” says Liz Greene, who...
Brown v. Board of Education: Annotated
The US Supreme Court’s decision in the case known colloquially as Brown v. Board of Education found that the “[t]he ‘separate but equal’ doctrine adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163...
The Paris Agreement: Annotated
The Paris Agreement on Climate was adopted in December 2015 at the twenty-first meeting of the Committee of the Parties (COP21), as part of a continuing international effort to mitigate...
“Zombie” Anthony Comstock Walks Among US (Again)
There are Friday news dumps, and then there are days like April 7, 2023, when, in less than an hour, two contradictory US District Court decisions on the use of...
Tiger Personalities, Urban Fruit, and Excess Deaths
...tigers, rating their “majesty” and “steadiness.” The Fruit of the City (Atlas Obscura) by Liz Susman Karp Urban foragers know that food is all around us. With some technological help,...
“There’s Gold in Them Thar Fungi”: Cordyceps as Cash Crop
HBO’s series The Last of Us may have been the first time many viewers encountered the nightmare-inducing fungus of the genus Cordyceps. Or perhaps it was in that spectacular sequence...