Set of school teachers stand at the blackboard and explains the material. Hand drawn illustration.

This One Number on a Form Can Reduce Gender Inequality

Reducing the gap between quantitative evaluation scores for male and female instructors may be as simple as changing a single number.
Court in session, Freedmen's Bureau offices, Richmond, Virginia, summer 1866

A Short Course in Justice: the Freedmen’s Bureau Courts

Freedmen’s Bureau courts provided a forum for newly emancipated people in the “uncertain legal landscape” of the defeated Confederacy.
Sturgeon

Atlantic Sturgeon Were Fished Almost to Extinction

Ancient DNA reveals how the Chesapeake Bay population changed over centuries.
An illustration of an arm controling media manipulation

How to be a Modern Autocrat

In the twenty-first century, dictators are less likely than their predecessors to use violence to suppress dissent, cultivating instead “informational autocracies.”
Caricature of Joseph Conrad by David Low in Lions and Lambs, 1928

Joseph Conrad’s Travel Stories Weren’t Black and White

Conrad’s celebration of imperial exploration is accompanied by an acknowledgment that such feats often go hand-in-hand with oppression and exploitation.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cabildo_Supreme_Court,_New_Orleans,_La_(NYPL_b12647398-62248).tiff

Eulalie Mandeville’s Fortune in Court Records

Court records can function as a kind of archive for those without any other paper trail in history: free people of color and the enslaved.
A collection of several book covers in the LGBTQ Canon

Is There an LGBTQ+ Canon?

An English professor considers the questions raised about selecting queer works for study and discussion when planning a course on LGBTQ+ literature.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Visit_to_Dred_Scott_-_his_family_-_incidents_of_his_life_-_decision_of_the_Supreme_Court_LCCN2002707034.tif?page=1

The US Army as a Slaveholding Institution

Until the Civil War, US Army officers relied on enslaved servants even while serving in “free states.”
Frank O'Hara

12 Poems by Frank O’Hara

Plus his manifesto on Personism and writings about O’Hara by Ted Berrigan, Joseph LeSueur, and Joe Brainard.
Sugar maple (Acer saccharum) in The North American Sylva by François André Michaux. Illustration by Henri-Joseph Redouté, 1819.

Tradition in Turmoil: Sugar Maple and Climate Change

With harvests dependent on the spring freeze-thaw cycle, the maple industry is seeking ways to mitigate damage wrought by a changing climate.