The Immigrants Who Supplied the Smithsonian’s Fish Collection
The Smithsonian’s fish collection preserves not just specimens but the labor and knowledge of immigrant fishermen on the California coast.
Category: Essays
When We Repealed Daylight Saving Time
In 1922, 16 states and 137 cities followed Daylight Saving Time—and the rest of the country did not. Repealing Daylight Saving Time only made the map of national temporal borders more complex, causing heartbreak and confusion at the border.
Rural People and Academic Elites Saved Higher Education Once. They Can Do It Again.
Rural resentment is nothing new. When one university reckoned with it a century ago, it convinced farmers that the university worked for them—and improved itself in the process.
Ecological Homes: Making Women, Men, and Nature
At the New Alchemy Institute’s bioshelters, green technologies promised social revolution. But women still found themselves stuck with the dishes.
Cottonwoods in Concrete: A Call for Collaborative Survival among Ruins
A forest sprouting from a levee in eastern Washington offers a model for flood management, if only we notice it.
Painting an Empire: Landscapes of Napoleon’s Dreams in Haiti
French landscape painting during the Haitian Revolution lays bare colonial concern for controlling both people and the environment.
The American Recycling Myth
Why do we recycle? American consumers have learned to think of recycling as a local activity, but a recent Chinese ban on imported solid waste may force us to see the ways that recycling is a global industry.
Zozobra & Me: Performance and Place at the Santa Fe Fiesta
A meditation on how the annual burning of a 51-foot marionette forges connections to a city and its complex, violent past.
From TNT to Tallgrass: Prairie Restoration at a Munitions Plant Turned National Grassland
It was the world’s largest munitions plant. Now it’s a rich grassland teeming with wildflowers, hikers, and even a bison herd. Illinois’s Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie offers an environmental success story for our time.
Bittersweet Catch: Korea’s Diving Women and the Pitfalls of Cultural Preservation
While attending a school set up to train the next generation of haenyeo divers, one woman grapples with the historical and ongoing complexities of maintaining the traditional practice.
