How do pilgrimages and rituals arise? How do people become convinced to try something new? What makes a place so special that it persists through time, drawing people to it again and again? UC Davis anthropologists Cristina Moya and Nicolas Restrepo Ochoa are answering these questions at the ground floor. For the past few years, they’ve documented and studied a new pilgrimage taking form in the Peruvian Altiplano. 

Tariffs have a long complicated history in the U.S. that stretches back to before the nation's founding. Two UC Davis economists discuss what tariffs are, how they can be used and how they might impact the U.S. economy.

For the past five years, economist Santiago Pérez has studied the socioeconomic makeup of students at elite institutions. A new working paper shows that neither free tuition nor the introduction of standardized testing had any impact on the backgrounds of students attending elite institutions for the last hundred years.

Historian Gregory Downs explains the complicated history of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, including subsequent laws that undermined equal protections it guaranteed, as well as the court case affirming the definition of birthright citizenship we take for granted today.

As historian Traci Parker writes a new biography, she is learning just how much Coretta Scott King contributed to her husband’s ideas and actions, and how his story is also very much her own.

Edmond Dédé's four-act opera, “Morgiane," written in 1888, is the oldest known opera composed by an African American. Sally McKee, now a retired history professor at UC Davis, helped unearth his story in a biography on Dédé in 2017. Now, in 2025, the work is finally being performed in full.

Men and women alike are drawn to younger partners, whether or not they realize it. The conclusion came from a University of California, Davis, study of 4,500 blind dates of people seeking a long-term partner.

Alyssa Griffin discusses the importance of scientific diving in her research and her efforts to diversify who has access to the practice by co-developing the SCUBA DIVERsity Fellowship Program at UC San Diego.

Fushing Hsieh, a professor in the Department of Statistics, discussed the wide-ranging nature of his research in a conversation paradoxically titled “Statistical Analysis is Unscientific.”

International graduate students created a disproportionate number of new business startups in the United States in the past decade. They also increased entrepreneurialism among their U.S.-born peers, according to new research from the UC Davis College of Letters and Science.