Humanities & Society

Increases in federal transfers, money that the federal government sends to states to improve the well being of citizens, are strongly associated with a decrease in infant mortality rates, finds a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

Over the past four years, The Divided City, an urban humanities initiative at Washington University in St. Louis, has supported dozens of projects exploring the effects of spatial segregation. This fall, the university will launch a second phase, The Divided City 2022, thanks to a $1 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Rather than social work practice being based solely on a therapist’s intuition and assumptions, social workers should consider a system of evaluation and measurement based on hard data, suggests a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis.

National security adviser John Bolton, a longtime critic of the International Criminal Court, threatened to impose sanctions on court personnel if the court continues with an investigation into alleged U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan. The move could easily backfire, says international war crimes expert Leila Sadat.

“Nike is turning towards a younger, more diverse America because they’ve calculated that Trumpian claims about compulsory patriotism and black athletic obedience will not win out,” says Noah Cohan, who studies sports narratives and fandom at Washington University in St. Louis.

British architect Sir David Adjaye, who led design of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, will receive the 2018 International Humanities Prize from Washington University in St. Louis. The $25,000 prize is among the largest U.S. awards in the humanities.

The dramatic rise of income inequality since 1970 has largely been caused by advances in marketing, says a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Rents: How Marketing Causes Inequality.”

Often viewed as wild, naturally pristine and endangered by human encroachment, some of the African savannah’s most fertile and biologically diverse wildlife hotspots owe their vitality to heaps of dung deposited there over thousands of years by the livestock of wandering herders, suggests new research in the journal Nature.

Christine Hallquist became the first transgender candidate to be nominated for a governorship by a major party when she won Vermont’s Democratic primary Aug. 14. The nomination marks a seismic shift in the social culture of our nation, says an expert on transgender adults at Washington University in St. Louis.

In studying and teaching American history, Iver Bernstein noticed the prevalence and importance of hope in the American democratic experiment. Nowadays, it may seem that hope is in short supply, but Bernstein says that it continues to be part of America’s foundation and future.