Journalist, physician, and committed black nationalist Martin Delany took Frederick Douglass to task over, among other things, Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

In the 18th century a new trend in women's underwear sparked public scandal: the hoop petticoat. How the world became obsessed with what was under women’s skirts.

Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" is a cultural touchstone. But what about the women behind the "Women," Alcott's real-life sisters on whom she based her characters? An interview with novelist Elise Hooper considers the life of "The Other Alcott."

The Tet Offensive of January 1968 has been much studied from the American perspective, but what did the North Vietnamese think about it?

In 1985, a writer in Economic and Political Weekly saw the beginning of private hospitals in India and warned of the dangers of their mismanagement.

Marooned sailor Alexander Selkirk, rescued after four years on a remote island, is usually taken as the model of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, but is he really?

The ritual of public shaming is nothing new. But today's brand of mass humiliation is more public, more widespread, more scarring, and potentially more dangerous. 

A money belt with a zipper became an instant success among WWI U.S. sailors, whose uniforms did not have pockets. Almost all initial zipper sales were for the money belts.

2018 marks the 150th anniversary of a number of constitutional conventions in Southern states during Reconstruction. One lasting achievement was creating universal education systems.

"Isn't the 'subjection of women' in science fiction merely a symptom of a whole which is authoritarian, power-worshipping, and intensely parochial?"