television 
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SOURCE: Newsweek
5/1/2022
"Gaslit" Recalls Martha Mitchell's Role in the Watergate Scandal
The outspoken and media-friendly wife of Attorney General John Mitchell had warned reporters of CREEP "dirty tricks" before the infamous burglary. After, keeping her from talking to reporters was the first battle of the coverup.
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SOURCE: CNN
4/29/2022
"Pachinko" Tells History of Korean Women in Mid-20th Century Japan
The Apple+ series, based in a fictionalized narrative of Korean immigration to Japan, concludes with interview footage of eight women, now all more than 90 years old, who lived this history.
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SOURCE: Religion Dispatches
4/25/2022
"Under the Banner" Improves, but Doesn't Sanitize, Book's Reductive History of Mormonism
by Benjamin E. Park
The new series raises questions about America's homegrown faith, and shakes off some of the source book's post-9/11 concerns with extremism and religious violence to show the complexity among different tendencies and branches of the faith.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
4/19/2022
New TV Shows Reduce "Black Excellence" to Materialism
by Tanisha C. Ford
Equating excellence with opulence, and portraying the Black wealthy as champions of progress, ignores many of the ongoing concerns of Black Americans and highlights historically significant class divisions among African Americans.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
4/7/2022
"Is It Cake?" is Brain Candy for Pandemic-Weary, but also Part of Long History of Visual Illusion
by Maggie Cao
"At a time when we often don’t know if what we encounter on our screens can be trusted, it feels good to alleviate those anxieties with a show in which the only consequence of being fooled is cutting into a shoe that we assumed was a cake."
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SOURCE: Slate
3/24/2022
"Bridgerton" Keeps Perpetuating the Hollywood Corset Myth
by Hilary Davidson
Hollywood tends to portray women's historical fashions through a lens formed by today's ways of dressing, and ignore the more complex material and social history of clothing.
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SOURCE: Fast Company
2/12/2022
Docuseries "Everything's Gonna Be All White" Challenges Recurrent Historical Denial
The CRT moral panic is just the latest instance of white America preferring to forget about the significance of race in history. Historian Nell Irvin Painter joins a new series where Americans of color critique the idea of whiteness.
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SOURCE: Forward
1/31/2022
Whoopi Goldberg's Holocaust History Latest "The View" Flap
The host's comments that the Nazi persecution of Jews was not rooted in racism drew argument from fellow panelists and is at odds with historians' understanding of European antisemitism.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
1/23/2022
Reviewed: The BBC: A People's History
David Hendy's book was built on complete access to BBC archives, but a reviewer finds that it's long on bureaucratic history and short on analysis of the programming that made the Beeb a national institution.
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1/30/2022
Neville Chamberlain: Unsung Hero of WWII
by Luke Reader
A new Netflix film should prompt a reassessment of the legacy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who arguably succeeded in saving Britain and the European opposition to Hitler through a two-pronged strategy that used appeasement to buy time for rearmament.
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SOURCE: Perspectives on History
1/18/2022
Native on TV in 2021
by Liza Black
"Where 20th- and early 21st-century shows used Native characters in superficial ways, perhaps to create an appearance of diversity, Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls center Indigenous characters, themes, and content, decolonizing conventional television narratives about Native people."
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SOURCE: Smithsonian
1/20/2022
The True History Behind HBO's "The Gilded Age"
by Kimberly A. Hamlin
The new series follows fictional characters but is well-grounded in the innovations and inequalities that characterized urban America in the late nineteenth century, thanks in large part to the work of the show's historical consultant Professor Eric Armstrong Dunbar.
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SOURCE: Deadline
11/11/2021
Jeopardy! To Host Tournament of Professors
Historians Ed Hashima and Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders will be among the competitors in the $100,000 event beginning December 6.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
11/16/2021
A Beautiful Mess: On “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”
by Emily Suzanne Johnson
"The people who made this film seem to care about its subject, but the film does not know itself well enough to be itself and love itself. Tammy Faye’s heart and soul just aren’t in it."
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SOURCE: USC School of Cinematic Arts
11/11/2021
View the Pioneering 1971 TV Series "Chicano" Through the USC Moving Image Archive
The Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive of the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts has made available recently preserved video of the 1971 television program "Chicano," a pioneering examination of the political, social and cultural concerns of Mexican Americans in California and the U.S. Southwest.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
11/7/2021
Pioneering Chicano Movement TV Show Reemerges after 50 Years in Garage
On a recent August day, Frank Cruz, now 82, thought to himself as he had dozens of times before: “Pendejo, you better do something about those films. It might be too late.”
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
10/12/2021
"The Chair" Creator: How to Fight Adjunctification
by Annie Julia Wyman
"The academic job market had collapsed -- indeed, it has been collapsing for more than a decade. Even L.A., where people famously go to get their dreams stomped on, seemed like a better bet."
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SOURCE: Vox
10/14/2021
The Lies of TV's Abortion Storylines
by Tanya Melendez
"Looking back on how abortion came into our living rooms starting in the 1960s and persisted into our audience-fragmented streaming era can teach us how these stories taught, shaped, and contributed to today’s public discourse about abortion."
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SOURCE: CNN
10/9/2021
Ted Lasso Isn't About What You Think
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
"As historians, we've spent the past 18 months of the pandemic not only watching "Ted Lasso" but also thinking deeply about the values communities need to weather difficult times."
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
10/1/2021
New "Wonder Years" Revives a 1970s Tactic for Diversifying TV. Will it Work?
by Kate L. Flach
The technique of "racial inversion" was intended in the 1970s to encourage white viewers to empathize with Black characters. Today, as then, the results show that TV alone can't bridge the nation's racial divisions.
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