What makes someone else's behavior so embarrassing? The answer lies in our expectations of how people should act.

Before Disneyland, Fantasia brought imagineering to life through an ambitious experiment in animation. Fantasia is an early ...

The horror films of the 1970s captured a cultural shift from fears of institutional abuse to anxieties about psychiatric ...

In the eighteenth century, Spanish colonizers in the Western Hemisphere asserted their superiority over indigenous and African people and their descendants in many ways, including visually. One genre ...

In France during World War II, the French police had a large part in implementing the Nazi’s Final Solution. These “ordinary agents of the state,” as historian Laurent Joly calls them, arrested 38,500 ...

As London’s graveyards overflowed, a private company proposed a remarkable new way to bury the dead.

A collection of Texas directories from 1913 to 1959 shows how phone books—and the people who used them—helped invent ...

I teach first-year academic writing courses in the University of Georgia English Department. Lately, I have been using JSTOR to help my students see research differently through an activity I call ...

Until the early twentieth century, medical schools in the United States resembled today’s for-profit colleges, both in quality and reputation. There were no common standards for curriculum or ...

For hundreds of years, almost all representations of ancient Greek and Roman marble statues have shown them to be clean, white marble. Today it’s clear that many of the statues were originally ...

What do spinning on a merry-go-round, dancing by a campfire, and being hit with a paddle as part of a fraternity initiation have in common? Folklorist Jay Mechling argues that they’re forms of play ...