Today in 1957, nine African American students were escorted by federal troops through a screaming white crowd into Little Rock Central High School, the culmination of a bitter desegregation battle. Though of course the harassment and abuse of the students continued long afterward.
A famous act of political violence is often used to illustrate the utter collapse of civic norms in the run-up to the Civil War: the caning of Charles Sumner by his fellow congressman, Preston Brooks of South Carolina, on the floor of the Senate.
Two hundred and seven years ago this September, novelist Fanny Burney—whose works include Evelina and Cecilia—had a mastectomy. She wrote about the experience in detail that can only be described as excruciating.
Last summer, I received the first of a string of emails from Joseph Blaine, a man who wanted to share his story with me: despite his lack of medical training, in the decade before Roe v. Wade, he provided illegal abortions. “I am most eager to confess,” Blaine’s first email read, “just how bad it was, with infections,…
The shearling jacket is the iconic fashion staple of the apocalypse. It’s protected Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead, Regan Abbott in A Quiet Place, and even Ryan Gosling’s Agent K in Blade Runner 2049.
The New York Times Magazine recently published a lengthy cover story on “The Unlikely Activists Who Took On Silicon Valley—And Won;” it’s about the battle to pass a privacy law in the country’s most populous state. It’s great and definitely worth reading, but it forgot something: the woman who helped win the battle.
As Donald Trump arrived in the United Kingdom for his fawning Tory tour of monuments to power—tea at Windsor with the Queen, a meeting at the PM’s country residence of Chequers—a fun-house reflection was borne aloft into the London sky in the form of Baby Trump, a diaper-wearing, phone waving caricature of the…
Tiffany Haddish’s ever-growing Fuck List, a roster bounded only by how far you can dream while defying sexual constructs previously existed peacefully with Brad Pitt and Stephen Colbert (which, okay, because his National Anthem performance was not exactly sexy, but I could see the leap). But all logic ruptured last…
For the 20th anniversary of Sex and the City—which premiered on HBO on June 6, 1998 and went on to become iconic prestige television—Jezebel is doing a week of posts dedicated to our favorite band of sexual women friends.
Anne Frank’s diary was particularly powerful in that she wrote about the mundanities of her life as a typical teenager—crushes and all—even as the encroaching threat of Jewish genocide loomed over her family. And now researchers have uncovered that this typical teenager wasn’t beyond a good dirty joke.
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.
When we’re taught about the history of the feminist movement in the United States, it often highlights icons like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But the first-wave feminism of the suffragette movement was pretty racist, and willfully ignored and excluded the voices and issues of black women.
Ever wanted to own a piece of history? How about a piece of something that happened a week and a half ago that didn’t really change much and inspired bitter arguing from all sides, but was ultimately a harmless and fine show of good faith? The world moves fast and history meanders in mysterious ways, in other words:…
On one hand, the Victorians were all for keeping the body hidden beneath layers of fabric and thinking of England when confronted with a living penis. On the other, they were fascinated by any deviation from the rigidity of their self-imposed norms, paying hard-earned money to examine the skin connecting conjoined…
I cannot believe how soothing I’m finding this video of a German man in full Medieval costume explaining how people used to walk in the Middle Ages, before the advent of fixed-sole shoes.
In a Tuesday interview, Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that, two years after the state removed the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse, there are still monuments “on our Statehouse grounds that I find wholly offensive.” “There are a few of them, actually, have to do with the Civil…
On Monday evening, protesters in Durham, North Carolina pulled down a Confederate monument that had stood in front of the old Durham County courthouse since its dedication on May 10, 1924. As one of the protesters climbed a ladder and put a rope around the sculpture, the rest chanted, “We are the revolution.” In an…
The news was pretty goddamn depressing today–not only of the violent protests in Charlottesville, where one death three deaths and 19 injuries are now confirmed–but try paging over to Instagram for entertainment and only find more Kardashian-Jenners (ahhh), or for humor, and these Kim Jung-Trump memes about nuclear…
It has come to my attention that HomeAway is currently holding a sweepstakes pegged to the release of Beauty and the Beast, which allows the winner to stay in a 14th century Scottish castle. Well, I regret to inform you that a 14th century Scottish castle has precisely zero to do with the architectural aesthetic of…
