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Mammal bones protrude from pit 91 at the La Brea Tar Pits on August 17, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.

La Brea and Beyond

Pits and seeps full of tar and asphalt offer new insights into old ecosystems and cultures.

Unearthing Justice

Who Owns the Ground Beneath Your Feet?

Carbon removal, a proposed solution to climate change, will require the injection of CO₂ underground—but under whose property?

Pedagogies

Assigned Readings: Questions to Ask Yourself

Choosing texts to assign next semester? An experienced instructor offers tips for deciding what to add to your syllabus—and what to let go.

The Where We Were

Daniel Burnham in the Philippines

Building on his success as an architect and planner in Chicago, Daniel Burnham took American values and aesthetics to the new US colony of the Philippines.

Plant of the Month

Saguaro Cactus: A Desert Sentinel’s Prickly Plight

The saguaro cactus has evolved to endure dry days and high temperatures, but even this resilient plant struggles to cope with the effects of climate change.

Most Recent

Plaque of Marbury v. Madison at SCOTUS Building

Annotations

Marbury v. Madison: Annotated

Justice John Marshall’s ruling on Marbury v. Madison gave the courts the right to declare acts and laws of the legislative and executive branches unconstitutional.

Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, Put in the Pillory

Humiliation, Headaches, and Narcissism

Well-researched stories from Undark, Yale Environment 360, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Unearthing Justice

Who Owns the Ground Beneath Your Feet?

Carbon removal, a proposed solution to climate change, will require the injection of CO₂ underground—but under whose property?

Pedagogies

Assigned Readings: Questions to Ask Yourself

Choosing texts to assign next semester? An experienced instructor offers tips for deciding what to add to your syllabus—and what to let go.

The Where We Were

Daniel Burnham in the Philippines

Building on his success as an architect and planner in Chicago, Daniel Burnham took American values and aesthetics to the new US colony of the Philippines.

Plant of the Month

Saguaro Cactus: A Desert Sentinel’s Prickly Plight

The saguaro cactus has evolved to endure dry days and high temperatures, but even this resilient plant struggles to cope with the effects of climate change.

Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Disappearance

In December 1926, Christie went missing for more than a week. Where did she go, and what was she up to?

A circle of white claymation guys around a black claymation guy

Reading Lists

Racist Humor: Exploratory Readings

An introduction to the history and theory of racist humor and the social role it plays in Western societies.

A painting of The Belgic, the ship on which Ella Sheldon wrote many of her diaries.

Archive Adventures

Lonely Diarist of the High Seas

As ship stewardess, Ella Sheldon tended to upper-crust women onboard and battled a range of workplace demons. Her journals tell her story.

Long Reads

A caricature of the Berners Street Hoax by William Heath, 1810

Politics & History

Is “Swatting” Rooted in a Prank Craze from the 1800s?

Why did Georgian-era England go mad for dangerous hoaxes, and what can that mania tell us about today’s volatile, content-hungry world?

Arrival of the Brides by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

Politics & History

Filles du roi: the Founding Mothers of New France

Sent by Louis XIV, the filles du roi were sent to North America to birth new generations of colonists and help conquer the land.

Politics & History

Pan-Asianism Redux, or Why We Think Japan Is Special

Observers have long hailed Japan’s aptitude for cultural synthesis. Is this characterization warranted, or does it reflect a collective fantasy about exceptionalism?

A child reading about the phases and rings of Saturn

Education

Science Lit for Kids Holds a Mirror Aloft

Over decades, books that rouse children’s interest in the natural world have morphed in style and approach—an evolution reflective of tectonic societal change.

Editors' Picks

Politics & History

The Trouble with Reentry

Reentry of space junk in the 1970s forced First Nations communities into a reckoning with Cold War geopolitics and a burgeoning envirotechnical disaster.

Politics & History

Iran’s Protest Culture

A succession of authoritarian regimes birthed a strong tradition of collective action.

Arts & Culture

Tyler S. Sprague on the Intersection of Structure and Design

An interview with Tyler S. Sprague, a historian of the built environment whose work depends on multidisciplinarity and a deep knowledge of structure and materials.

Arts & Culture

12 Poems by Frank O’Hara

Plus his manifesto on Personism and writings about O’Hara by Ted Berrigan, Joseph LeSueur, and Joe Brainard.

Politics & History

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.”

Quirky History

Is “Swatting” Rooted in a Prank Craze from the 1800s?

Why did Georgian-era England go mad for dangerous hoaxes, and what can that mania tell us about today’s volatile, content-hungry world?

Coco De Mer: The Magical Derrière of the Sea

Once viewed as a precious item of mysterious origin, the seed of the coco do mer palm, though better understood today, remains a rare and valuable commodity.

Shadowbox with a wedding photograph of a bride and groom, surrounded by the bride's veil

First Comes Love

A top divorce lawyer collected strangers’ marriage certificates and other wedding-related ephemera—a testament to her perhaps surprising faith in matrimony.

Collections on JSTOR

Lonely Diarist of the High Seas

As ship stewardess, Ella Sheldon tended to upper-crust women onboard and battled a range of workplace demons. Her journals tell her story.

First Comes Love

A top divorce lawyer collected strangers’ marriage certificates and other wedding-related ephemera—a testament to her perhaps surprising faith in matrimony.

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.

Reading Lists

A parent and child near windmills at sunset

Black Midwestern Studies: A Reading List

This primer on Black Midwestern Studies examines the factors shaping communities of color in America’s “flyover country,” long mistaken as a place of normative whiteness.

Crowd taking photographs on mobile phones

Citizen Journalism: A Reading List

The ubiquity of smartphones has ushered in a new era for journalism—facilitating citizen journalism and changing the very nature of reporting.

Left to right: Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mrs. Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, July 1915

The Bloomsbury Group: A Reading List

In 1905, a group of writers and painters gathered in a London home and began a conversation on politics, love, sex, and art that lasted decades.

Syllabus

Celebrating Indigenous Peoples and Cultures

More and more states are choosing to celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day instead of Columbus Day.

Voting in American Politics: A Syllabus

From battles to expand the franchise to the mysteries of turnout, voting is one of the most important things to understand about US politics.

An illustration of a hand holding a set of hand cuffs

A True Crime Syllabus

How did we become so obsessed with “true crime”? This multidisciplinary syllabus shows how we view crime as a whole and how those views have changed over time.