cultural history

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• SOURCE: Atlas Obscura
  11/17/2020
  

  How to Recreate Your Lost Family Recipes, According to Historians and Chefs

  Chefs and historians of food cultures are working to build public understanding of the history of immigration and the African diaspora through knowledge of cooking and eating practices.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/18/2020
  

  A Mysterious Autograph Hound’s Book Is Up for Auction

  Jeweler Lafayette Cornwall collected the autographs of the most famous figures of his time, including Melville, Houdini, Edison, Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt.

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• 10/11/2020
  

  Fear of the "Pussification" of America: A Short Cultural History

  by Gregory A. Daddis

  The bizarre idea that COVID-19 can be defeated through manliness is one of the stranger cultural themes of our time, but it connects to a long history of anxiety about masculinity in a changing America that encourages violent and even self-destructive actions in the name of proving virility.

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  10/12/2020
  

  How We Lie to Ourselves About History

  At its best, the "You're Wrong About" podcast transcends fact-checking and debunking to ask why so many of the stories we know are wrong, and why they persist nevertheless. 

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• 10/4/2020
  

  Andrew Rotter's "Sensual Empires: Britain and America in India and the Philippines"

  by Shannon Bontrager

  Andrew Rotter extends recent work in sensory history to the study of imperialism, documenting how British and American colonialism depended on the connection between sensory experience and racial and nationalist ideology.

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• SOURCE: NPR
  9/16/2020
  

  Stanley Crouch, Towering Jazz Critic, Dead at 74

  Crouch's criticism pulled no punches, and tackled big questions about the relationship between race and art in American music. He became an influential and controversial figure in the popular history of jazz as a consultant to Ken Burns's documentary.

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• SOURCE: Society for U.S. Intellectual History
  9/9/2020
  

  The Interdisciplinarity and Influence of Alan Trachtenberg

  by Jennifer Giuliano and Lauren Tilton

  "The need to interrogate, understand, and even disrupt how we see images is a part of Trachtenberg’s enduring legacy that becomes more important as researchers are distanced from physical archives." The work of Alan Trachtenberg in developing historical methodologies for understanding images is crucial for historians' ability to speak to current affairs.

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• 8/30/2020
  

  Remember Punk Rock? Probably Not…: The Real Culture War of 1980s America

  by Kevin Mattson

  Digging beneath the aesthetics of punk to find its politics, Kevin Mattson's new book finds a counterculture of suburban youths who identified the unrestrained capitalism of the Reagan era as the true nihilism threatening America.

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• SOURCE: The Metropole
  8/26/2020
  

  Athens’s Revolutionaries: A Review Of "Cool Town"

  Alex Sayf Cummings reviews Grace Elizabeth Hale's "Cool Town" on the rise of 1980s alternative culture in Athens, Georgia, for the blog of the Urban History Association. 

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• SOURCE: Yale News
  8/18/2020
  

  Alan Trachtenberg, Pioneered New Ways of Understanding American Culture

  Trachtenberg is best known as one of the most distinguished and authoritative interpreters of what photographers have shown about history through the camera lens.

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• 8/2/2020
  

  Conventional Culture in the Third Reich

  by Moritz Föllmer

  Although Nazi aesthetics are generally associated with the monumental architecture of Albert Speer and the propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, Germans generally encountered conventionality in art, music and cinema. This helped to normalize the acts of the Third Reich and to allow ordinary Germans to dissociate themselves from Nazism after 1945.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  6/21/2020
  

  Sally Banes, Distinguished Dance Critic and Historian, Dies at 69

  Her writing paired a vivid and inquisitive approach with a lack of agenda and a belief that dance was a crucial part of cultural history.

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• SOURCE: WTOP
  5/16/2020
  

  ‘Everyone Has A Story’: How Will World Remember Pandemic?

  Museums and historical societies are collecting materials, often with help from people accustomed to capturing and sharing even the most mundane moments around them.

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• SOURCE: Chicago Sun-Times
  4/7/2020
  

  John Prine Dies at 73; Acclaimed Folksinger, Songwriter Created Classics of Lyricism and Storytelling

  Bob Dylan once said, “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs.”

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• SOURCE: CNN
  3/8/2020
  

  New Orleans Cultural Historian Died of Coronavirus, But His Family Only Found Out on the Day of Funeral

  "I want to educate the world about our great culture," Ron Lewis wrote on the museum's website. "How we do this, and why we are so successful at it even though the economics say we ain't supposed to be."

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• SOURCE: Hyperallergic
  2/26/20
  

  A New Film Series Teases Out the Complex History of Black Heroines On Screen

  The series, entitled It's All in Me: Black Heroines, runs through March 5 at MoMA.

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• SOURCE: Time
  2/24/20
  

  President Trump's Take on Parasite Echoes an Old Debate Over the Role of Non-American Films at the Oscars

  Parasite was in fact the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture, but Hamlet, starring Laurence Olivier, was the first non-American film to win Best Picture, in 1949.

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• 2/11/20
  

  How Somalis Use Theatre to Rebuild Culturally

  by Farah M. Omer

  Modern Somali theatre rose to prominence in the 1960s, the period following the independence and the subsequent unification of Somaliland and Somalia. By the 1970s, there were multiple shows a night in any given city and the average Somali adult was considered a regular theatre goer regardless of socioeconomic status.

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• SOURCE: Linn’s Stamp News
  Accessed 2/10/20
  

  The american schoolboy who collected stamps in 1856

  by Ken Lawrence

  Learning about the exceptional life and tragic death of  David T. Latimer, the brave lad who built America’s oldest surviving stamp collection.

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• SOURCE: PBS Newshour
  2/6/20
  

  3 historians on American political divisiveness — and how to heal it

  Judy Woodruff sits down with the University of New Hampshire’s Ellen Fitzpatrick, presidential historian Michael Beschloss and Carolyn Lukensmeyer of the National Institute for Civil Discourse to discuss.