Jan van der Heyden and the Dawn of Efficient Street Lights
17th-century Amsterdam was the first city in Europe to have an efficient system of street lighting—thanks to a Golden Age painter called Jan van der Heyden.
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Words?
Censorship isn't just redacted text and banned words. What happens when censorship is furtive, flying under the radar as much as possible?
On Embracing Boredom
What does "boredom" even mean? As both a word and a concept, boredom is not a universal phenomenon but a historical construction specific to our times.
Rudyard Kipling’s Little-Known Poem on New Year’s Resolutions
With New Year’s Day on the horizon, many people will write their resolutions. Rudyard Kipling's poem explores the trials and tribulations of resolutions.
A Feminist Reading of The Long Winter
In The Long Winter, often praised as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s greatest novel, the villain may be not the snow, but oppressive gender roles.
Player Pianos and the Commodification of Music
Half of all American homes had a piano or player piano a century ago, but very few do now. Whatever happened to the parlor piano?
How Victorians’ Fear of Starvation Created Our Christmas Lore
One scholar sees more in the Christmas food of authors like Charles Dickens—English national identity and class.
Shakespeare, Rembrandt, and the Real “Twelfth Night”
"Twelfth Night" was more than a Shakespeare play; for a very long time it was an extremely popular European winter feast.
Our Best Stories of 2017
JSTOR Daily published a whopping 834 stories in 2017—that’s a lot for our small staff. Here are the ...
The Scottish Sisters Who Pioneered Art Nouveau
Margaret and Frances Macdonald and their Glasgow School of Art classmates Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Harold MacNair were Art Nouveau's Glasgow Four.