cultural history 
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SOURCE: New York Times
12/9/2020
Jill Biden Is a Teacher. And She’s Not About to Change That
Cultural historians Stephanie Coontz, Betty Boyd Caroli and Katherine Jellison discuss the historical roles occupied by First Ladies and the ways the position has and will change.
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
12/9/2020
What Attacks on Science Get Wrong
by Andrew Jewett
Reductive diagnoses of a "war on science" ignore the specific political and cultural stakes of controversies around vaccination, climate, or creationism.
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SOURCE: American Enterprise Institute
12/9/2020
From Fish House Punch to Bud Light: America’s Long, Complicated Relationship with Alcohol (Web Event, 12/17)
To mark the centennial of Prohibition, please join AEI’s Kevin R. Kosar for a conversation exploring how alcohol has influenced America’s economy, politics, and culture.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/8/2020
America’s Most Hated Garment
Atlantic writer Amanda Mull turns to fashion historians Marley Healy and Valerie Steele to place the growing social acceptance of sweatpants in a pattern of clothing standards changing in response to cultural influences and social conditions.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
12/8/2020
How Americans Came to Distrust Science
by Andrew Jewett
Scientists and their supporters cannot overcome the current moment of hostility toward their profession and rejection of their expertise unless they confront the cultural history of skepticism toward science, in both conservative and liberal forms.
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SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
12/1/2020
The Struggle to Document COVID-19 for Future Generations
by Pamela Ballinger
Images of suffering have been powerful spurs to humanitarian action in history, but the process has the potential to reinforce messages of fault, blame, and separation. Assembling a visual archive of the age of COVID must avoid those traps to be useful in the future.
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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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