Vignette on page 1 of Volume 6 from Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des insectes, by René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur.

Insects in the Mail

The efficiency of the postal system and generosity of local experts played important roles in the advancement of entomology in eighteenth-century France.
A game table by David Roentgen

Editors’ Picks of 2024

Magical furniture, toxic gardens, and Scottish hideaways: we’ve gathered our favorite JSTOR Daily stories published this year.
The fool plough, 1814

Plough Monday

Or, how to follow the Christmas holiday with a festival of pranks, trick-or-treating, and drunken revelry.
An orange cat playing with a toy

Ginger, Tortie, Calico

The mystery gene responsible for orange color in cat coats has been found.
Grand Central terminal clock

Keeping Time: A New Year’s Collection

A selection of stories that chronicle our complicated notions of time.

Feminist Bookstore News by the Numbers

Now part of Reveal Digital, Feminist Bookstore News was a vital source of information (and gossip) amid a flourishing in publishing fifty years ago.
Sofia Kovalevskaya

Science in Defiance of the Tsar: The Women of the 1860s

Sofia Kovalevskaia became the first woman in Europe to obtain her doctorate in mathematics—but only after leaving Russia for Germany.
Destruction of the Roehampton Estate, January 1832

Holiday Escapes, Entropy, and the Future That Was

Well-researched stories from Mongabay, The Conversation, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
A lion tamer in Ancient Rome

Our Most Popular Stories of 2024

The artifacts of ancient technologies, the allure of rebel science, and many, many ghosts.
Painting of Song Ong Siang by J. Wentscher, 1936

Writing a “Different Type of Chinese” into Being

The Western-educated Straits Chinese elite of colonial Malaya were among the first writers to produce a local literature in the English language.