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Amanda Gorman, Walt Whitman, and Joy Harjo

Poetry’s Vital Role in Politics

Like Walt Whitman before them, Joy Harjo and Amanda Gorman are reimagining what it means to be a poet in this democratic republic.

Archive Adventures

Greening Philly’s Neglected Lots

Spearheaded by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, an urban beautification program transformed neighborhoods in the city of brotherly love.

Reading Lists

The Promise and Problems of Public Lands: A Reading List

Discover key research on U.S. public lands through scholarly works exploring conservation, Indigenous knowledge, and public policy.

Read Before You Go

The Long and Winding Island

New York’s Long Island has long served as a backdrop for social and political conflicts between the newly arrived and the established residents.

Perspectives on Public Space

In Praise of Loitering

A possible remedy to sexual harassment and assault in public spaces is to encourage more people of all kinds to spend time on the streets.

Most Recent

Children playing on a roundabout at a playground

Education & Society

Playing with Consciousness

Out-of-the-ordinary mental states are the goal of many religious rituals, but they’re also important in “playful” situations like kids’ games and fraternal hazing.

An illustration showing a post office building, a hand holding a smartphone, and a cover of the book "The Dark Forest Anthology."

Perspectives on Public Space

The Case for a Public Social Media Platform

Artist and writer Joshua Citarella explores why corporate platforms corrode democracy—and what a postal-service-style digital commons could do differently.

Archive Adventures

Greening Philly’s Neglected Lots

Spearheaded by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, an urban beautification program transformed neighborhoods in the city of brotherly love.

Reading Lists

The Promise and Problems of Public Lands: A Reading List

Discover key research on U.S. public lands through scholarly works exploring conservation, Indigenous knowledge, and public policy.

Read Before You Go

The Long and Winding Island

New York’s Long Island has long served as a backdrop for social and political conflicts between the newly arrived and the established residents.

Perspectives on Public Space

In Praise of Loitering

A possible remedy to sexual harassment and assault in public spaces is to encourage more people of all kinds to spend time on the streets.

Bread, Circuses, Baths: Bathing in Rome, the Public Way

By the fourth century CE, Rome had some 856 privately owned public baths, the grounds of which served as civic gardens adorned with sculptures.

Education & Society

The First Futurists and the World They Built

From Saint-Simon to Silicon Valley, the urge to forecast the future has always masked a struggle over who gets to define it.

A woman wearing a face mask walks inside the Universal Studio station on March 05, 2020 in Osaka, Japan.

Education & Society

The Fear of Bare, Naked Ladies’ Faces

The mask, like the veil, is seen by the anxious West as concealing a racialized female subject in need of liberation from a backward culture.

Long Reads

Education & Society

The First Futurists and the World They Built

From Saint-Simon to Silicon Valley, the urge to forecast the future has always masked a struggle over who gets to define it.

Education

The Hidden History of Women Game Designers

Nineteenth-century women turned music lessons into interactive entertainment, complete with spinning wheels and ivory counters.

Workers for the Insular Lumber company felling a small Almon (Thorea species) in Northern Negros, 1910.

Plants & Animals

The Mythical Mahogany that Helped Build the American Empire

How “Philippine mahogany” became America’s tropical timber of choice, thanks to a rebrand from a colonial logging company that drove deforestation.

An illustrated reconstruction of the dire wolf

Education & Society

“Playing God” with De-Extinction

As tech companies tout successes in bringing back the likes of the long-gone dire wolf, they must grapple with accusations such innovation is immoral. Why isn’t it?

Editors' Picks

Arts & Culture

Rebecca Lehmann on Breaking the Rules of Poetry

An interview with writer and poet Rebecca Lehmann, who finds splendid things can follow when she stretches the rules of craft.

Politics & History

The Voting Rights Act 1965: Annotated

The passing of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965 prohibited the use of Jim Crow laws and discriminatory tests to disenfranchise Black voters.

Science & Technology

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.

Science & Technology

Jane Goodall

An intellectual powerhouse and dedicated conservationist, Goodall showed generations of humans how to engage with—and take care of—the natural world.

Arts & Culture

From Oriental Riviera to Global Asia: Hong Kong in Travel Posters

A collection of travel posters shared via JSTOR by Hong Kong Baptist University highlights Hong Kong’s unique place in the global imagination over the decades.

Quirky History

Pekinese competitors arrive in the arms of their owners at the Wimbledon Dog Show, 1912

The Surprising Imperial History of the Pekingese Dog

Upper-class British women in the early 1900s participated in a craze for Pekingese dogs, signalling the role of empire in their social identities.

Green Sickness, the Disease of Virgins

In the mid-seventeenth century, John Graunt, the “father of English statistics,” claimed dozens of young women in London died of green sickness every year.

The Bowling Alley: It’s a Woman’s World

Even when it was considered socially unacceptable, American women were knocking down pins on the local lanes.

Collections on JSTOR

The Tamest Grizzly of Yellowstone

Adored by tourists and studied by scientists, a grizzly mother named Sylvia became an emblem of the fragile balance between humans and the wild.

A selection of images from the Heinz Gaube Lebanese Architectural Photographs Collection, housed at Notre Dame University-Louaize

Documenting a Disappearing Architecture

The Heinz Gaube Lebanese Architectural Photographs Collection, supported by an innovative mapping project, details threatened buildings across Lebanon.

A selection of pages from the The Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries Bibliotheca Fictiva collection

Enchanting Imposters

Johns Hopkins University’s Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection of Literary and Historical Forgery shows that humans have been creating fan fiction and fake news for millennia.

Reading Lists

Panoramic of 14th street and Union Square. Taken August 25, 2017 in New York.

Perspectives on Public Space: A Reading List

This list introduces some of the main debates about public space, from park politics to political protest, public expressions of sexuality to safety and security.

Stained Glass Window in the Nazareth Synagogue in Paris

Introduction to Jewish Studies: A Reading List

The broad, ever-expanding field of Jewish Studies is united by texts, events, and figures that engage an established canon of ideas across disciplines.

Cute tiny people reading different books, giant textbooks. Concept of book world, readers at library, literature lovers or fans. Colorful vector illustration in flat cartoon style

Speculative Fiction: A Reading List

Speculative fiction, from Afrofuturism to Star Wars, offers students tools and methods for analyzing social movements, power structures, and utopian thinking.