A man and woman in office attire discuss something against a gray and orange background.

How Gender Discrimination Works at Work

A study of employment discrimination cases reveals how bias operates through workplace rules.
A herd of Buffalo in Western Kansas, 1860s

Drought and Indigenous Migration in the American Midwest

In the seventeenth century, life at the prairie–forest edge was dynamic, unstable, and deeply shaped by climate.
Bjorn Andresen plays Tadzio in a scene from the film 'Death In Venice', 1971.

In the Film Death in Venice, Music Is the Narrator

A haunting score shapes the rise and fall of a writer consumed by infatuation.
Simone de Beauvoir, 1947

Simone de Beauvoir’s Only Play

Beauvoir’s Who Shall Die? explores moral responsibility and the unequal valuation of human life during wartime.
An illustration of a fossilized claw from Megalonyx Jeffersonii, a giant ground sloth, found in a cave in Greenbriar County, West Virginia.

Jefferson’s Fossils

What can Thomas Jefferson’s mistaken ideas about fossils tell us about science and belief in the early United States?
A Chelsea Pensioner, wearing a sprig of orange blossom [?] in his buttonhole, sipping a dish of tea. Engraving by J. Jenkins after M. W. Sharp, 1840

Consuming the Empire

Sugar, tea, and tobacco tied British daily life to empire, turning global exploitation into ordinary habits of consumption.
Man proposing to woman on one knee, presenting her with a bouquet of roses, separated by black cubes

Love Is Blind … but Are Your Hormones?

Do women’s attraction to certain faces really change across the menstrual cycle? A long-running theory meets modern data.
Dorothy Parker, ca. 1935

Dorothy Parker: Sharp-Witted Writer, Bitter Professor

Dorothy Parker’s year as a visiting professor shows how a celebrated literary voice struggled to adapt to the realities of academic teaching.
Korean Orphan Choir in the Netherlands in 1962

How Cold War “Orphans” Sang Their Way into American Hearts

Touring choirs helped cast Korean children as ideal adoptees—and Americans as benevolent saviors.
Fashion plate from an 1869 issue of The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, surrounded by an 1861 color wheel by Michel Chevreul.

The Nineteenth-Century Science of Fashion

Victorian-era color theory moved from labs and studios into women’s magazines—and into everyday decisions about dress.