How the Phone Book Taught America to Ask for Answers
A collection of Texas directories from 1913 to 1959 shows how phone books—and the people who used them—helped invent “information” as we know it.
How Telepathy Helped Build the Russian Internet
During the Cold War, Soviet scientists pursued an unlikely way to communicate with the outside world.
The Art of the Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum
How do horticulturists coax more than 1,000 flowers from a single plant? The answer lies in a centuries-old Japanese tradition.
Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and the Spirit of the Humanities
How one ghost story competition continues to haunt the humanities—just in time for Halloween.
The Radical History of Italian Americans
In the early twentieth century, immigrant anarchists organized across U.S. cities and stood at the center of major labor struggles.
Disgust, Desire, and Durian
How Southeast Asia’s famously pungent fruit became a source of cultural identity and global demand.
The Case for Aesthetic Education
Why Friedrich Schiller believed art belongs at the heart of education—and why it matters for equal opportunity today.
The Peacock Flower and Reproductive Resistance Under Slavery
European naturalists documented the peacock flower's medicinal uses but left its most consequential history behind.
The Hidden Grief of American Musicals
Musicology professor Jake Johnson argues that beneath the bright songs and happy endings of midcentury musicals lay the grief and anxieties of postwar America.
Rediscovering The Jewish Gazette
A rare archive reveals how Ireland’s Jewish community navigated identity, culture, and rising antisemitism in the 1930s.