Livia Gershon
@liviagershon.bsky.social
Former journalist. New Hampshire. she/her. liviagershon at gmail
The Japanese soft drink company Calpis invited Mussolini to offer an “inspirational message” to Japanese youth daily.jstor.org/why-italian-...
Why Italian Fascists Loved Samurai - JSTOR Daily
Japan offered Italian Fascists a powerful example of how ancient traditions could serve modern nationalism.
daily.jstor.org
A northern California peddler named Harriet Wasson Styer described a man telling her that, if she were his sister, he would murder her rather than allow her to canvass. (Post based on work by @joliebraun.bsky.social) daily.jstor.org/the-women-wh...
The Women Who Sold Books Door to Door - JSTOR Daily
Three nineteenth-century memoirs reveal the risks and rewards of life on the road as a traveling bookseller.
daily.jstor.org
Between the 1920s and 1940s, the elites included in Britain's Who’s Who developed the set of interests that would define “high culture,” such as music, reading, and “the arts.” daily.jstor.org/how-the-elit...
How the Elite Learned to Seem Less Elite - JSTOR Daily
British elites once signaled status through high culture. Over time, pop culture and everyday leisure became part of the picture.
daily.jstor.org
Honest Abe was no Marxist, but his ideas resonated—albeit with a rural American flavor: "Abraham Lincoln’s Labor Theory of Value" @liviagershon.bsky.social @jstordaily.bsky.social (Plus- Prison treadmills) Take the day off: roughlydaily.com/2026/09/07/l...
An early civics education advocate wrote that when teachers spend too much time on the mechanics of government, students “come to look upon civics as the driest, the most unprofitable, and the most stupid of all their studies... And their impressions are often just.” daily.jstor.org/what-civics-...
What Civics Class Is For - JSTOR Daily
Should schools tackle controversial political issues? A 1903 educator thought doing so was essential to preparing future voters.
daily.jstor.org
ICE has fallen out of the headlines but July marked the largest number of migrant detentions ever on record. Five migrants have died in ICE custody in the last two months. It's also currently impossible to legally migrate to this country, as 100% of visa applications have been paused.
amanda moore 🐢@noturtlesoup17.bsky.social · 4w agoA man and woman embrace as ICE and FHP detain her during an immigration stop in Fort Myers this morning.
Attentional boredom involves the alignment between our cognitive capacity and the task at hand. We might get bored by watching a sitcom when we’re ready for a challenge, or by trying to do a hard task when we’re already drained. daily.jstor.org/not-all-bore...
Not All Boredom Is the Same - JSTOR Daily
Psychology suggests that boredom is a signal. Understanding its cause can help us decide how to respond.
daily.jstor.org
Here is my understanding of “Woke 1” Woke was a compliment Black people used for those who understood racism enough to not be terrible. When white liberals/leftists learned what it meant, many began to aspire to it. That aspiration became the subject of ridicule by conservatives. WHOSE mistake?
Livia Gershon@liviagershon.bsky.social · last mo.Which is why it's so maddening to hear people saying "woke 1" was a mistake! 6/6
Nothing against this thread, which seems basically right to me, but I think something people don't talk enough about is how people see themselves as targets of the "deplorables" comment not because they support Trump but because they *are* racist, sexist, etc. 1/
Larry Glickman@larryglickman.bsky.social · last mo.At an LGBT Gala for Hillary in New York City, Clinton did say "you could put half of Trump supporters" into a "basket of deplorables" because they hold "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic" views and that Trump "has lifted them up."/2
Historically, researchers often incorrectly painted autistic people as lacking empathy. Criticism by autistic individuals led to further research that has found neurotypical researchers may simply fail to see how autistic empathy manifests itself daily.jstor.org/neurodiversi...
Neurodiversity in the Clinic - JSTOR Daily
Autism researcher Patrick Dwyer examines how the neurodiversity movement is influencing autism research and clinical decision-making.
daily.jstor.org
As late as 1972, a Wall Street Journal article identified yogurt consumption with foreign countries including Russia, Turkey, and India. It claimed that “most people really dislike yogurt—at least at first.” daily.jstor.org/how-america-...
How America Reinvented Yogurt - JSTOR Daily
The journey from immigrant staple to diet snack reveals how yogurt took on a distinctly American identity.
daily.jstor.org
Baldwin compared people “in genuine trouble” to comfortable professionals “whose only real trouble is inertia, who work at the most disgraceful jobs in order to pay, for the luxury of someone else’s attention, twenty-five dollars an hour.” daily.jstor.org/james-baldwi...
James Baldwin's Complicated Relationship with Psychoanalysis - JSTOR Daily
Baldwin criticized Freudian thinking yet drew on ideas like repression in his fiction and essays.
daily.jstor.org
In 1922 Perry, Florida, the label of escaped convict carried a very specific meaning—a Black man forced by the convict leasing system into hard labor at an isolated turpentine camp deep in the forest. daily.jstor.org/how-a-murder...
How a Murder Fueled Racial Terror in Florida - JSTOR Daily
The hunt for Charlie Wright exposed how convict leasing, labor tensions, and white supremacy shaped rural life in the Jim Crow South.
daily.jstor.org
In 1950, the academic study of Maya culture was almost totally dependent on writings by the sixteenth-century friar Diego de Landa, who destroyed the vast majority of Maya codices known to Europeans and wrote up his own observations of the literature daily.jstor.org/reading-the-...
Reading the Maya with William S. Burroughs - JSTOR Daily
Burroughs drew on the leading Maya scholarship of his day, much of which has since been overturned.
daily.jstor.org
My friend Curtis Smith is spearheading this effort to protect Lake Massabesic and the drinking water of over 159,000 people in Greater Manchester. Fundraiser: gofund.me/8197baeb7 Scientific explanation of why the land should not be developed: tinyurl.com/498rds66
Donate to Save Lake Massabesic from Overlook Estates, organized by Curtis Smith
Help Protect Lake Massabesic Before It Is Too Late Dear friend of Lake Massab… Curtis Smith needs your support for Save Lake Massabesic from Overlook Estates
gofund.me
Hoan's initial priorities as mayor included vaccinations, clean drinking water, improvements to the city’s harbor, and city planning. daily.jstor.org/what-was-sew...
What Was Sewer Socialism? - JSTOR Daily
Milwaukee mayor Daniel Hoan believed the best argument for socialism was a city government that worked.
daily.jstor.org
In a society grappling with Darwinian evolution and the new discipline of psychology, some Westerners admired Buddhism’s long history of studying the mind’s activities. Post based on work by @doctorwaffle.substack.com daily.jstor.org/rudyard-kipl...
Rudyard Kipling’s Buddhism - JSTOR Daily
Long read as an imperial novel, Kim also reflects Britain's changing ideas about Buddhist thought and spiritual practice.
daily.jstor.org
Indonesian women from many different backgrounds use online resources created by scholarly feminist groups to learn about religious interpretations. One noted that “before reading this post, I thought female circumcision was obligatory.” daily.jstor.org/how-indonesi...
How Indonesia’s Feminists Use the Internet - JSTOR Daily
Online platforms help Muslim scholars and activists share feminist interpretations of Islam, expanding access to new audiences.
daily.jstor.org
People said Occupy was a failure and it ushered in 15 years of actual political engagement on economic inequality People like to call BLM, Abolish ICE, etc failures and, no. Spontaneous mass protest moments rarely win immediately. But they change the political environment and lay the groundwork.
Kat Tenbarge@kattenbarge.bsky.social · 3mo agoI see people characterize the student protests against Israel as failures, and I really don’t think that’s true. They may not have toppled the U.S.-Israel alliance or ended the genocide, but they have helped usher in a generational turning point in attitudes toward Israel and Palestine
In the years after WWII, cartoons in the farm press depicted a technologically savvy farm owner running the operations with the push of a button. daily.jstor.org/the-making-o...
The Making of the Muscular Farmer - JSTOR Daily
As automation transformed agriculture, advertisements increasingly celebrated physical strength and traditional masculine ideals.
daily.jstor.org
I have been doing a lot of critical reevaluation of Roman and medieval historians recently because I am living through the kind of end to an autocratic regime that very sober, serious modern historians have footnoted with phrases like "an unreliable account from a hostile chronicler."
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE@golikehellmachine.com · 3mo agoi will repeat that i think the reflecting pool debacle might actually kill him, he’s losing his mind over it
Until the twentieth century, presidents observed an unwritten rule against international travel. For early presidents, such trips seemed too much like regal flaunting of political power. daily.jstor.org/when-did-pre...
When Did Presidents Start Traveling Abroad? - JSTOR Daily
For more than a century, foreign trips have reflected America's changing role in the world—and presidents' political priorities.
daily.jstor.org
Wealthy plantation owners traveled a great distance to meet arriving ships. And workers—many of them enslaved—also arrived in town, bringing food and firewood to inns and taverns and helping to deliver newly arrived captives to the plantations. daily.jstor.org/how-the-slav...
How the Slave Trade Built Charleston - JSTOR Daily
The city's prosperity grew from a system that trafficked human beings and turned their lives into profit.
daily.jstor.org
Sociologist Orrin E. Klapp suggested that the macho “national character” made Mexicans prone to embracing rash ideas like Communist revolution daily.jstor.org/inventing-ma...
Inventing “Machismo” in the US - JSTOR Daily
Academics and media turned “machismo” into a cultural stereotype during the Cold War.
daily.jstor.org
"Did I set my house on fire trying to deep-fry a turkey? Sure. But you have to understand, literally everyone who cooks a turkey deep-fries it from frozen in their kitchen. It's just so seductive."
Jonathan Bernstein@jonbern.bsky.social · 4mo agothis is not true, and this guy doesn't speak for me! nymag.com/intelligence...
Beyond "care work," what if society were structured to support all the things we do to help each other to thrive? daily.jstor.org/why-care-mat...
Why Care Matters More Than Work - JSTOR Daily
Reproductive justice offers a new way to think about human flourishing beyond the job market.
daily.jstor.org
Frank L Baum's proto-robot fails completely when asked to suggest which road to take in an unfamiliar area, acknowledging—in a way that ChatGPT probably wouldn’t—that “My ma-chin-er-y is not made to tell that.” daily.jstor.org/did-the-firs...
Did the First Robot Come from Oz? - JSTOR Daily
Long before chatbots, fiction grappled with rule-bound intelligence, exploring what it means to build and rely on thinking machines.
daily.jstor.org
i am once again reminding people about the California flag
Ariel Edwards-Levy@aedwardslevy.bsky.social · 8mo agowill take any excuse to point out that the bear on the California flag looks like you asked it for a favor just when it was leaving the office
Fascinating how ChatGPT is presented as enabling something we already had YouTube, Reddit, and a million other resources for. The failure of the solution is just a bonus in terms of how odd this choice is for an opening anecdote. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/o...
