The Wedding Ritual Where Brides Wept in Song
In southern China, weddings once began with a ritual that let brides speak the unspeakable.
Wild Rice and the Rights of Nature
A groundbreaking lawsuit asks whether wild rice, or manoomin, can hold legal rights under tribal law and the growing rights of nature movement.
Dana Elle Murphy on Black Feminist Criticism
An interview with Dana Elle Murphy, whose work explores how drafts, fragments, and literary lineages expand our understanding of Black women’s writing.
When Profit Met Protest in Colonial New York
Economic self-interest shaped how New Yorkers responded to British taxes and imperial crackdowns.
How Gender Discrimination Works at Work
A study of employment discrimination cases reveals how bias operates through workplace rules.
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.
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’s Only Play
Beauvoir’s Who Shall Die? explores moral responsibility and the unequal valuation of human life during wartime.
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](https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/consuming_the_empire_alt_1050x700-600x400.jpg)
Consuming the Empire
Sugar, tea, and tobacco tied British daily life to empire, turning global exploitation into ordinary habits of consumption.