Are witches the ultimate feminists?
Sollee’s book positions itself as a whirlwind history of the witch in America and her shared history with sexually liberated women and radical liberationary politics. It’s a bite-sized grimoire than…
Born This Gay
At the turn of the 20th century, a German doctor sets out to prove that homosexuality is rooted in biology—but his research has consequences he never intended. In pre-Nazi Germany,…
Dialect versus language — what’s the big deal?
There are many rubrics that people cite as indicators of a dialect versus a language. Take mutual intelligibility. If two varieties of speech are mutually intelligible, surely they must be…
Private Mohammed Kahn: Civil War Soldier
It is rare to find records of Muslim Civil War soldiers in our holdings. So far, Jesse has only encountered two pensions, and historians know of only about 250 Muslim…
Why solving ‘hidden’ suburban poverty is trickier than helping cities
Suburbs weren’t created to be inclusive places
Kurt Vonnegut and the Rainmakers
In the mid 1940s, no one would publish Kurt Vonnegut’s stories. But when he gets hired as a press writer at General Electric, the company’s fantastical science inspires some of…