cultural history

Hollywood Has Abandoned the Citizen-Inventor

After generations of populist inventors making the things they need, Hollywood has framed our relationship to invention as receiving the gifts bestowed on us by plutocrats. 

Museum Celebrates Sweet Smell of... Failure

The Museum of Failure is a global traveling exhibition that celebrates the signal marketplace flops of capitalism, from the infamous Edsel and New Coke to the obscure, highlighting the vagaries of consumer taste and historical contingency. 

Leon Uris's "Exodus" Shaped Jewish Identity for a Generation—Does it Matter Today?

By fictionalizing many of the events surrounding the founding of the Israeli state (and ignoring others), Uris helped launch a profoundly influential view of Israel's place in the world and Jews' relationship to Israel. But a younger generation of Jewish readers seems indifferent. 

Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson, Guru of Poker Revival, Dies at 89

Brunson's outsized persona and publication of books detailing his techniques for Texas Hold 'Em made him an early and successful figure in the recent revival and rise to respectability of high-stakes poker. 

The First Campgrounds Took the City to the Wilderness

by Martin Hogue

The growing popularity of the Model T put wilderness excursions within reach of ordinary city dwellers, bringing trash, fire, and pollution with them. The solution, mass campgrounds, made camping more accessible at the cost of rendering the experience more orderly, rule-bound, and urban. 

Beyond Quiet Quitting: The Real Crisis of Work

by Erik Baker

Impressionistic accounts of worker withdrawal and labor militancy both fail to capture a deeper issue: Work is failing to deliver on the promises the state has made as an avenue of meaning and fulfillment. 

Is Parental Divorce the Hallmark of the Gen X Experience?

As 90s nostalgia gets mined for commercial benefit, a researcher looks at the centrality of divorce in the cultural expressions of Gen X. 

Historian's Book on 1970s NBA Shows Racial Politics around Basketball Have Always Been Ugly

by Jay Caspian Kang

The decade saw Black players become dominant in the league and assert their rights as skilled workers. Owners pushed back through the media, smearing the players as entitled drug abusers, as historian Theresa Runstedtler's new book explains. 

Keri Leigh Merritt on the Politics of Grief and the Power of Historians' Witness to COVID

Three years since the public became aware of the seriousness of the COVID pandemic, a recent collection of essays turns the skills of historians toward reflection on grief, survival, and connecting understanding of the past to a better collective future.

The History and Politics of the Right to Grieve

by Erik Baker

Grief isn't a personal psychological and emotional process; we experience it through the demands a capitalist economy makes on our time, energy and attention. It's time to make bereavement a matter of right, instead of a favor doled out at the whim of your boss. 

Is Globalization Changing Mexico's Relationship to Death?

by Humberto Beck

Post-revolutionary Mexico embraced cultural commemorations of the dead—Diá de los Muertos—to help conceal the violence of the regime's rise. Now, that "traditional" culture is again being transformed by global cultural appropriation and the escalating violence of global drug trafficking.

Can a "Return to Normal" Happen Without Repairing Sociability?

by Nate Holdren

The push to return to many pre-pandemic modes of working and living is taking place without sufficient provision for mitigating risk, and with seriously damaged bonds of trust and mutual support; people are again in proximity to each other, but far from being together. 

Arctic Explorer, Nazi-Fighter, Iconoclast: Peter Freuchen's Case for "Most Interesting Man in the World"

by Reid Mitenbuler

A biographer contents that an unlikely celebrity from the early twentieth century should inspire people today to take risks and embrace a humanism that doesn't depend on loyalty to party or ideology. While this without-a-net kind of public discussion is increasingly rare today, it's what makes people interesting.

The Case For Calling the Language "American"

by Ilan Stavans

The history of pragmatic adaptation that built the American form of English is reflected in its present status as the world's second language. It's not jingoistic, just accurate, to declare the particularity of the American tongue. 

The Case for Blondie as the Sound of the 70s

by Kevin Dettmar

While the decade's pop scene was undeniably eclectic, there's an argument to be made that the New York group was at the center of the most lasting trends of the 1970s. 

Masculinity and Trauma in War and Football

by Sarah Handley-Cousins

Sports have been cast as a (relatively) peaceful way of inculcating a set of masculine virtues otherwise associated with war. But the experience of injury and grief will continue to confound the rules of manhood—and football fans and citizens should pay attention. 

Cheers... to Drinking Songs

by R. Eric Tippin

Drinking songs have been pervasive in human history, but profoundly divided between those framing drink as a divine gift ordered by ritual and those concerned with a party. 

Review: How Fitness Joined the Middle-Class Mainstream

by Katrina Gulliver

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela's "Fit Nation" reviews the move of exercise from the fringe to the mainstream, while examining the ways fitness culture reflects social divisions in America. 

You Can't Unsee the Truth About Cars

by Andrew Ross and Julie Livingston

Despite cultural mythology, cars are actually un-freedom machines, and drivers of inequality, particularly for racial minorities. It's a mistake for the Biden administration's infrastructure agenda to further enshrine the car as the dominant means of mobility. 

The History of Fashion's Turn to Embracing Fakery

Fashion historians Valerie Steele and Einav Rabinovitch-Fox explain the historic push and pull between designers and copycats, and how recent trends have blurred the lines between authenticity and fakeness and exclusivity and popular style.