cultural history

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• SOURCE: The New Atlantis
  6/12/2023
  

  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. 

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• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  5/17/2023
  

  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. 

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• SOURCE: Forward
  5/15/2023
  

  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. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/15/2023
  

  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. 

• 
• 5/7/2023
  

  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. 

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• SOURCE: Harper's
  4/15/2023
  

  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. 

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• SOURCE: JSTOR Daily
  4/13/2023
  

  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. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  3/21/2023
  

  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. 

• 
• 3/19/2023
  

  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.

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• SOURCE: Jewish Currents
  3/14/2023
  

  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. 

• 
• SOURCE: Public Books
  3/1/2023
  

  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.

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• SOURCE: Peste
  2/21/2023
  

  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. 

• 
• 2/22/2023
  

  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.

• 
• 2/12/2023
  

  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. 

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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. 

• 
• 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. 

• 
• 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.