cultural history 
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1/23/2022
The Art of Swimming (Excerpt)
by Bill Hayes
Unline many recognizable modern sports, for most of human history swimming was treated as a utilitarian activity (and occasionally as a pleasure), unsuited for competition or spectatorship.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
1/11/2022
Will Omicron Break Up America's Unhealthy Cycle of January Gym Resolutions?
by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Could one positive effect of the Omicron surge be that people are separating their personal motivations to exercise from the commercial imperatives of the fitness and diet industries?
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
1/4/2022
Hobbies are How Work Infiltrates Leisure
"The anxieties of capitalism are not confined to the workplace. They have a long history of leaking into our free time," explains leisure historian Steven M. Gelber.
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SOURCE: Teen Vogue
12/31/2021
The DC Punk Scene Relied on the Local Latinx Community
by Mike Amezcua
"A big piece is missing from the stories told about punk and hardcore in the 1980s: Primarily, that marginalized spaces and communities in urban America gave a stage to the predominantly white subculture."
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SOURCE: Uncivil Religion
1/6/2021
Braveheart: President Donald J. Trump
by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Following the threads of religion and nationalism that form the unlikely comparison between Trump and Mel Gibson's (heavily mythologized) Scottish movie hero.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/20/2021
Grief Is Evidence of Love
by Kellie Carter Jackson
The resurgence of the pandemic is an opportunity to reflect on the late theorist and public intellectual bell hooks, who "gave me... the language to understand grieving and healing as radical, communal acts."
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SOURCE: The New Republic
12/16/2021
The Vigilante World of Comic Books
A major theme of Jeremy Dauber's new history of comics is the tension between democratic values and the desire to eradicate evil through overwhelming force.
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12/12/2021
Acquiring Eyes: The Unlikely Cross-Cultural Partnership Behind the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
by Charles Dellheim
The world of American art collecting was transformed by the unlikely partnership of the Boston Brahmin Isabella Stewart Gardner and the ambitious Russian Jewish immigrant Bernhard Berenson.
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SOURCE: Slate
11/7/2021
Inside the 1980s Phenomenon of "Truly Tasteless Jokes" and What it Says about a Cultural Shift around Offensiveness
The wildly successful series of paperbacks heralded a moment when the embrace of offensiveness as a political weapon was shifting from the left to the right (audio contains the contents of some Truly Tasteless Jokes).
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SOURCE: NPR
11/29/2021
Lizabeth Cohen: Why Americans Buy So Much Stuff
As holiday shopping overlaps with historic supply chain disruptions, NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Lizabeth Cohen on the economy's reliance on spending and the culture of consumerism in the U.S.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
11/28/2021
Utopia’s Settler Colonialism Problem
by Jessica Namakkal
The commune movements of the 1960s counterculture were organized around a number of pernicious assumptions about indigenous people and the prerogatives of whites to settle and reorganize land.
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SOURCE: Willamette Week
11/10/2021
For Research, Portland State Prof Read 60 Years of Marvel Comics
Douglas Wolk argues in "All the Marvels" that the more than 27,000 comics he read are the "longest, continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created," but doesn't necessarily advise any comics fans to try to repeat his research process.
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10/24/2021
Portrait of the Artist as a Businesswoman: Dorothea Lange’s Lost San Francisco Years
by Jasmin Darznik
Dorothea Lange's early work as a portrait photographer for San Francisco's elite seems at odds with her famous documentary work of the Depression. But that work sharpened her sense of aesthetics and of her own place in the world, foundations of her more famous later period.
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SOURCE: Nursing Clio
10/14/2021
Manhood, Madness, and Moonshine
by Dillon Carroll
Today's concern for "deaths of despair" among white Americans isn't unprecedented; a wave of alcoholism and temperance advocacy after the Civil War highlighted the relationship between social unsettlement, substance abuse and social reformism.
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10/17/2021
Passing Time and the Challenge of Catching "Eyewitnesses to History"
by Thomas Doherty
Historians have only recently wised up to the need to capture eyewitness remembrances of events. As the "Greatest Generation" passes and the Baby Boomers age, a cultural historian urges: talk to people while you still can.
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10/10/2021
Recovering Women's Reproductive Lives, One Mutilated Record at a Time
by Catherine Prendergast
"Far too often, archives resemble graveyards with marked tombs for men in which a few bones of women are scattered. It’s time to dig up all of the bones and ask them what story they tell."
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SOURCE: Places Journal
9/25/2021
Extinct
by Barbara Penner and Adrian Forty
"The history of objects becomes far richer when we also consider the underside of progress: the conflicts, obsolescence, accidents, destruction, and failures that have been such an integral part of modernization and its modes of operation."
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SOURCE: Dissent
9/30/2021
The Real Foucault
by Michael C. Behrent
"Why does Foucault now feel like our contemporary, almost forty years after his death? Why are leftists turning against him? And why are some conservatives adopting him?"
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SOURCE: New York Times
9/29/2021
What Young People's Embrace of "The Sopranos" Says about a Changing Culture
"The show’s depiction of contemporary America as relentlessly banal and hollow is plainly at the core of the current interest in the show, which coincides with an era of crisis across just about every major institution in American life."
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
9/24/2021
Making a More Inclusive Disney Means Pushing Back Against the Park's History
by Eric Avila
Complaints about "wokeness" at Disney theme parks ignore the way that the parks' designs reflected Walt Disney's conservatism and a hierarchical view of human civilizations.