Tavolette: Paintings to Comfort the Condemned
Charged with saving the immortal souls of the condemned, comforters held tavolette showing the Crucifixion in front of the eyes of those facing execution.
Marseille: Independent, Industrial, and Mediterranean
From Caesar’s Commentaries to the modernism of Le Corbusier, the port city of Marseille has preserved a sense of individuality and industry.
Cerbera odollam: “The Suicide Tree” That Harms and Heals
Even before The White Lotus, people feared the poisonous pong-pong tree, Cerbera odollam. But there's another way to look at the plant and its effects.
Terroir Terror: The 1911 Champagne Riots
An environmental crisis and a dispute over regional boundaries sent both rioters and rivers of champagne pouring into the streets of Aube.
Annotations: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Scrooge became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.
The Treaty of Paris 1783: Annotated
The Treaty of Paris marked the end of the Revolutionary War and the hostilities between Great Britain and the newly independent United States—at least temporarily.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Lust
The turn from punishing sexual activity outside of marriage toward the idea of personal sexual freedom began in the West between 1600 and 1800.
A Potash Primer
Ash from burnt wood, weeds, bracken, and kelp helped fuel the Industrial Revolution.
Humans for Voyage Iron: The Remaking of West Africa
Europeans used standardized bars of iron mined in northern Europe to purchase humans during the slave era, transforming the coastal landscape of West Africa.
Tramping Across the USSR (On One Leg)
Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick explores the limits of the Stalinist system through the biography of a marginal figure, one Anastasia Emelianovna Egorova.