Category: History

An essay on growing up in the South, legacy, and a place rooted in white supremacy.

“Tyrian purple was a difficult color to manufacture. Thousands of snails were required to create a single ounce of dye.”

A hidden diary, a love story, and a mystery.

In and around Los Angeles, natural and man-made disasters have been inextricable for almost two centuries.

What if the Olympic Games never come back?

Lockets simultaneously display and hide. But does squirreling our love and grief away in a piece of jewelry keep the memories and emotions present for us, or minimize them?

New arrivals didn’t hand Natives the keys to the modern world — but took the tools that built its foundations.

When “Who gets to go jogging without getting shot?” is an actual question a society has to ask, that society is fundamentally flawed.

“Even children with treatable issues—perhaps they were cross-eyed or anemic, or had a cleft lip—were classified as ‘unsalvageable.'”

The soft-focus Britain of Downton Abbey bears little resemblance to the real Britain collapsing under the weight of racism, austerity, and COVID-19. As Brexit plods on, it’s time for an honest reckoning of the history and future of this outsize little island.

“First, you exclude black people from the festivals. Then write them out by not recording them. And pretty soon, ‘you have this manufactured image of country music being white and being poor.'”

“What are you carrying dormant in your body that springs up when confronted with Black joy, Black power, Black brilliance, Black Blackness in the world?”

In Victorian London, a gang of U.S. hustlers attempts a ten-million-dollar heist on the safest bank in the world. Can the detective who inspired Sherlock Holmes catch them?

History may have pigeonholed her as Renaissance Italy’s most notorious seductress, but it’s high time we give the Duchess of Ferrara a closer look.

The work of a young Jewish diarist, writing in Amsterdam around the time Anne Frank began her famous diary, shows the transformation of pain into radical altruism.

‘“Notre Dame will come out of this experience enriched,” she says. “And so will we.”’

Lawrence Wright did it again; Jordan Peterson in a coma?; Myriam Gurba forced out of her job; Woody Allen canceled by his publisher’s employees; THE VIRUS; and more.

We can all quarantine alone, together, in one big villa in the cloud.

In an excerpt from ‘The Third Rainbow Girl,’ Emma Copley Eisenberg interrogates various social conditions that might have contributed to a mysterious double murder in West Virginia in 1980.

‘“A bagel,” the newspaper of record explained in 1960, “is an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis.”’

Highly public pressure campaigns against telephone companies were the crux of early LGBTQ activism.

In the ancient hot mess known as Judea, a young queen had to navigate a self-destructive royal dynasty and one of history’s worst husbands.

From Martin Luther to The Nutcracker, Germany’s original national nightmare was a tangled knot of writhing rats.

Reexamining the motives of Felipe and Vivián Espinosa, two of the American West’s most brutal killers.

“U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.”

Honeymooning in Cambodia, Lindsey Danis and her wife seek refuge in queer spaces, but struggle to find the acceptance granted to male travelers.

“Each arm, with its own brain inside, moves completely independent of the others. So much so that arms have been known to steal food from each other.”

Irving Nachumsohn invented the crock pot so that his family didn’t have to use the stove to prepare dinner on hot summer evenings. You’re welcome.

Almost everything you think you know about Aladdin is wrong.

Nina MacLaughlin discusses her retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “[In] my very vague high school memories…there was no discussion of the fact that this book is just rape after rape after rape.”