cultural history 
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
2/2/2023
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.
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SOURCE: Nursing Clio
1/19/2023
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.
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SOURCE: New Criterion
1/1/2023
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.
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SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
1/2/2022
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.
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SOURCE: New York Times
12/15/2022
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.
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SOURCE: W
12/13/2022
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.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/14/2022
What's the Path from Crunchy Counterculture to Alt-Right?
by Kathleen Belew
Observers have tracked a growing affinity between online adherents of natural lifestyle and alternative medicine communities and the antigovernment and white supremacist movements. Thinking about the connections disrupts our idea of a linear spectrum of political affinity from "left" to "right."
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SOURCE: The Nation
12/13/2022
From Hot Yoga to Tae Bo: How American Fitness Trends Went Global
by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
The cultural disaffections of the affluent and emergent globalization made a host of exotic exercise trends big business in the 1970s and afterward.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
11/10/2022
Lunchtime in Italy: Work, Time and Civil Society
by Jonathan Levy
The Italian lunchtime insists that time be organized around communal rituals and sustenance, not work. Does the utter foreignness of this attitude in America help explain the current national derangement?
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SOURCE: New York Magazine
11/1/2022
How Gael Greene Reinvented the Restaurant Critic
Greene wrote about restaurants as arenas for the display of status and a part of the city's culture, the way that the dining public did.
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SOURCE: The Baffler
11/7/2022
Who Still Needs the Carnivalesque?
by Ed Simon
Despite its repeated theorization, the political meaning of carnivals and the social inversions they temporarily enable remains hotly debated.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
11/2/2022
The Shift from Norms to Boundaries Explains the Problem of TMI
"Too Much Information" is a social error that arises from the need for individuals to determine their own boundaries and match their expression to others'. But longing for firmer rules of etiquette should be tempered by understanding how those rules were based in ideas about whose voices should be heard.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
11/1/2022
Pickup Trucks: Less Needed for Work, More Needed to Signal Masculinity?
Historian Mark Metzler Sawin explains why pickup trucks are the top-selling vehicles in America, even as the country is more urbanized and less engaged with farm and manual labor than ever before.
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SOURCE: Christianity Today
9/20/2022
"Passion Plays": The Overlap of Sports Fandom and American Christianity
by Paul Emory Putz
A reviewer notes that a new book by a leading interpreter of American evangelical culture may raise important awareness about the wonderment and faith inherent in sports fandom, but leaves out some discussion of how sports support an increasingly masculinist Christianity.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
9/14/2022
The Historical Roots of "Florida Man"
by Julio Capó, Jr. and Tyler Gillespie
The internet meme "Florida Man" signals a caricature of the presumed recklessness and ignorance of the state's population. But these stories have a long history of justifying colonialism and profiteering in the Sunshine State, and stand in the way of progress today.
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9/11/2022
Arena Rockin' The Vote?
by George Case
Dismissed, derided, or even deplored by critics, and out of step with the trends, arena rock acts still pack them in in much of America. Is it the sonic key to understanding Trumpism?
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9/11/2022
Songs for Sale: Tin Pan Alley (Excerpt)
by Bob Stanley
American popular music didn't start with Elvis. It emerged when musical fads onstage converged with a new mass market for in-home record players to make song publishing big business.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
8/27/2022
Sorry Zoomers, Gen X Invented the "Quiet Quit"
"Strivers, grinders and hustlers hate them, but quiet quitters, slackers and work-to-rulers are treasured antiheroes in American folk culture."
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
8/29/2022
Historians Ask what the Decline of Nude Beaches Tells Us about the Internet's Influence
Historians of naturism Sarah Schrank and Stephen L. Harp believe that the panoptical nature of social media is eroding a longstanding divergence between European and American attitudes about nudity in public spaces, particularly among young women.
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8/28/2022
Uncancel Wilma Soss
by Robert E. Wright and Janice Traflet
Wilma Soss defied norms as a woman who became independently wealthy through her PR agency and her investments, but the circumstances of her marriage and her outspoken advocacy for shareholders against corporate waste led to her erasure. Her biographers hope to correct that.
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