Walking Streetlamps for Hire in Seventeenth-Century London
Much in the same way we hail cabs in cities today, a medieval Londoner could hail a torch-bearer (a link-boy) to light their way home from a night on the town.
Halloween: A Mystic and Eerie Significance
Despite the prevalence of tricks and spooky spirits in earlier years, the American commercial holiday didn’t develop until the middle of the twentieth century.
Latin America Revisits Its Modern Architecture
As preservationists grapple with crumbling monuments in Brazil and Peru, they’re also confronting the progressive agendas that originally shaped the buildings.
The Accents of Our Bodies: Proxemics as Communication
American language educator Max Kirch suggests that adopting the nonverbal habits of another culture gives one’s behavior a "foreign accent."
Do You Trust Your Democratic Representatives?
Scholars of politics and media have been tracking an ongoing collapse of trust in representative democracy's core institutions. What's at stake?
The Visual Medium Has a Message
How does the medium in which an image is rendered, its materiality, shape our perception of the subject matter?
J. B. Jackson and the Ordinary American Landscape
Jackson’s creative mind analyzed the landscapes of everyday life to understand the modest worlds—present and past—of regular people.
A Tale of Two Times: Edo Japan Encounters the European Clock
In country that followed a time-keeping system with variable hours, the fixed-hour clock of the Europeans had only symbolic value.
Temperance Melodrama on the Nineteenth-Century Stage
Produced by the master entertainer P. T. Barnum, a melodrama about the dangers of alcohol was the first show to run for a hundred performances in New York City.
Cultivating the Art of Slow Looking
When we examine the subject, foreground, and background of an image separately, the nuances of the scene emerge.