“I have always believed from the beginning that shoes tell a story more than covering your feet,” said shoe designer Stuart Weitzman, introducing members of the press to the New York Historical Society’s latest exhibit. “Walk This Way” bears his belief out, offering a fascinating tour through history via women’s…
I didn’t intend to start my day by crying at my desk (which is also my kitchen table—I’m working from home), but dammit, here we are. A brand new exhibit at a museum in Danville, Iowa contains copies of the only letters Anne Frank and her sister Margot wrote to their American pen pals, two school-age girls named…
A couple of amateur archeologists—one of them a 13-year-old—wielding metal detectors have found a cache of treasure from the 900s (you read that right) that once belonged to a “King Bluetooth.” This is a perfect story, featuring not just a teen stumbling upon ancient loot, but also a great new insult to lob at any…
Canada is honoring a prolific commercial illustrator responsible for the covers of more than 500 Harlequin romance novels—specifically, with a postage stamp.
Apparently participants on both sides of the English Civil War were extremely concerned about the prospect of women dressing as men and going into battle. (Or following the army as well disguised sex workers.) And a few women actually did it.
The legendary Zsa Zsa Gabor died in 2016, and now a Beverley Hills auction house is dispersing her things into the wider world. Here is your precious chance to own her Saks Fifth Avenue charge card. Let’s shop the online listings together, shall we?
“Some are born Janeites, some achieve Janeism, and some have Janeism thrust upon them,” Ted Scheinman writes in his charming new book, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan. For Scheinman, his temporary entry into Austen fandom was a bit of all three, done “half willingly and half accidentally.”
You’ve almost certainly seen the face of Suzanne Valadon, the woman who modeled for Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s famous painting Dance at Bougival (1883). But Valadon’s life was so much more eventful and fascinating than that one moment in time—as a new biography makes clear.
The concept of “body positivity” is a relatively recent invention. But so is mass-produced clothing. And bodies have always come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, many of them outside the predominant norms of the time—which have never been entirely stable.
The so-called “Canadian Rosa Parks” will be immortalized on Canadian currency in Canada’s attempt to apologize for being really fucking racist way back when.
Few people have had quite as much influence on the way Americans learn the history of this country than Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of The Little House on the Prairie.
To mark International Women’s Day, the New York Times wants to correct its mistakes. Specifically, the paper is embarking on an initiative to write obituaries for women who were originally “overlooked” by its writers.
Some very disquieting news about the honesty of everybody’s grandma: A lot of “old family recipes” are actually, in all likelihood, ripped off from magazines or—even worse!—food packaging. That’s right. Grandmas spent the 20th century running around, shamelessly plagiarizing the back of the flour package.
Originally, during Lent, you couldn’t eat meat, except for fish. Then rabbits snuck in. As with most religious traditions, the story of why is built on a foundation of lies.
As the United Kingdom marks the one hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage, the Labour party wants to pardon the country’s suffragettes for laws broken in pursuit of the vote. However, not everybody thinks this is a good idea.
When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a young white mother near Wilmington, North Carolina, received the news with resolve to circumvent the ruling, using “nerve and plenty of hell in the personality.” Mrs. Hugh Bell organized the Pender County Association for the…
Winds of change are blowing into the land of Greater Fauxlandia, where it’s always an amalgam of Disney’s The Sword in the Stone and let’s say circa 1530: A queen now reigns at Medieval Times.
What if I told you there was a magnificent collection of tens of thousands of magazines in a former cannon foundry outside London?
Naomi Parker Fraley—who as a young woman took up war work shortly after Pearl Harbor and boasted perhaps the single best case for having inspired the iconic “We Can Do It!” Rosie the Riveter poster—has died at 96.
Have you ever longed to experience a version of HBO’s Rome that gobbled several pounds of hallucinogens and took off for the Glastonbury Festival draped in a fashion bed sheet from Asos? Behold Britannia, premiering January 26th on Amazon Prime Video.
