Learning about Language: An In-Class Activity
A scholar of the medical humanities shares ideas for helping students discover how language shaped past cultural attitudes—and still shapes them in the present.
“Border Science” vs. Commercial Occultism: A Nazi Debate
Occultism was widely embraced under the Third Reich, complicating Nazi attempts to wield it as a weapon against internationalism and other undesirable ideologies.
The Art of Deforestation
Landscape paintings show how quickly American forests changed in the early nineteenth century—and the mixed feelings people had about that change.
Arts and Crafts Democracy
The Arts and Crafts and Slow Food movements twinned pleasure and democracy though supporters of these artisanal crusades developed a reputation for elitism.
How the Union Lost the Remembrance War
The victors of the American Civil War failed to write their story into the history books, leaving a gap for the mythologizing of the Confederacy.
Should Yoga Be More Than Exercise?
How should Westerners studying modern postural yoga think about the religious and medical systems in which it developed?
A Practical Machine: The Wright Brothers in Dayton
Orville and Wilbur Wright wanted to create a practical machine—not a novelty or a gimmick—and they accomplished that at Ohio’s Huffman Prairie on October 5, 1905.
Dissident Memoirs Across Rust-Iron Curtains
Soviet dissident memoirs, like their authors, had to cross the Iron Curtain—an iron curtain of meaning and interpretation.
Jane Goodall
An intellectual powerhouse and dedicated conservationist, Goodall showed generations of humans how to engage with—and take care of—the natural world.