Jan van Der Heyden painting

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.
Censorship bubble

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?
bored woman

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.
Kipling in study

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.
Winter Shack Landscape

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 piano

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?
Christmas banquet

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.
Twelfth Night party

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.
Comic illustration of a mother ignoring her child in favor of a smart phone

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 ...
Spring Frances MacDonald

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.