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History

Daniel Morales-Armstrong’s ‘Inclusive City’
Masked adults sit four to a table with papers and folders during a brainstorming session.

Participants and Inclusive City students facilitate charrette brainstorming sessions. (Image: OMNIA)

Daniel Morales-Armstrong’s ‘Inclusive City’

The William Fontaine Fellow of Africana Studies and History helms a course designed to lead students in a collaborative engagement with a local Philadelphian community.

Blake Cole

African American in the ‘raceless’ Soviet Union
Person in glasses miles at the camera with green trees behind

African American in the ‘raceless’ Soviet Union

History Ph.D. candidate Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon’s work looks at how the African American experience in the Soviet Union shaped Black identity and how the presence of people of color shaped Soviet understandings of race.

Kristen de Groot

Metal artifacts in Southeast Asia challenge long-held archaeological theory
A photo of a metal artifact in the shape of a spear on a black background. In the foreground is a scale that runs from 0 to 5 cm.

An individual can create a stone tool or a pot without assistance, but creating a metal tool like the spear here is a group endeavor—and a complex one. Artifacts like this found in Thailand showed that such metal technology could be developed and exchanged using an economic model based on communities making decisions about how to participate in regional exchange systems. (Image: The Ban Chiang Project)

Metal artifacts in Southeast Asia challenge long-held archaeological theory

According to the Penn Museum’s Joyce White and Elizabeth Hamilton, prehistoric communities, rather than the ruling elites, in Thailand were the deciders in how to use metal resources.

Michele W. Berger

Unexpected finds bring fresh excitement to the archives
A table in the archives office with an old painting, historic newspaper clippings, and old pamphlets from Penn Medicine archives.

Image: Penn Medicine News

Unexpected finds bring fresh excitement to the archives

Stacey C. Peeples’ discovery of a trove of historic papers, newspaper clippings, and various ephemera adds to the rich history she curates as lead archivist at Pennsylvania Hospital.

From Penn Medicine News

100 years of insulin
insulin lab

Homepage image: Laboratory on the University of Toronto campus where Banting and Best carried out some of their research on insulin. (Image: Courtesy of Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)

100 years of insulin

On July 27, 1921, Canadian doctors Frederick Banting and Charles Best successfully isolated the hormone insulin, one of the most important breakthroughs in treating diabetes. Experts from around the University share their thoughts on the medical triumph on the 100th anniversary.

Kristen de Groot

Afro-Cubans come out in droves to protest government

Afro-Cubans come out in droves to protest government

Amalia Dache of the Graduate School of Education spoke about the history of racial disparities and injustices in Cuba. “When we're thinking about global solidarity with Black people, especially right now, we need all hands on deck,” she said.

Fear of a Black Cuban planet

Fear of a Black Cuban planet

Amalia Dache of the Graduate School of Education was interviewed about Cuba’s recent uprisings and its long history of Black resistance. In the 1960s, the Communist government said it would eradicate racism. “It’s counterrevolutionary to talk about Black history in Cuba, to engage Black history,” she said.

Digging into the government report on UFOs
meteor streaks across a night sky

Digging into the government report on UFOs

In a Q&A, historian of science Kate Dorsch illuminates the history behind reporting and investigating UFO sightings and contextualizes the new government report on such phenomena.

Katherine Unger Baillie