The uber-digital generation may think that Internet traditions began with them, or at least no further back than their parents. For example, anyone spending time on political blogs or in […]
Category: american history
Throwbacklist Thursday
It is National Peanut Butter Month. Who knows why. Probably Skippy and Jif paid for the next twenty years of November. Anyway, we’ll play along. Let’s salute the pioneers who […]
“Everybody likes stories”
Daisy Turner, the shotgun-wielding centenarian, was someone Jane Beck was anxious to meet. Beck, the Executive Director Emeritus and Founder of the Vermont Folklife Center, recounted her first encounter with Daisy […]
Winning the War for Democracy wins Missouri book award
Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946 by David Lucander has won the 2015 Missouri History Book Award, given by the State Historical Society of Missouri. […]
Throwbacklist Thursday
Academic publishing often forces one into the unappreciated but necessary job of Killjoy. It comes with the territory of challenging convention and shoveling the cultural/historical b.s. out of the barn. Having […]
The Boy Who Was Traded for a Horse
Black media pioneer Richard Durham was never an on-air star or featured player. Yet the poet, activist and script writer had a huge influence on how African Americans could be […]
The King of the Cannibal Islands
Pirates. They have a bad reputation. The robbing. The kidnapping. The walking of planks. But how about the positive things pirates have done? The contributions to fashion. The government-sanctioned predatory […]
Throwbacklist Thursday
George Hamilton IV departed the world two years ago today. Unrelated to the actor and tanning phenomenon of the same name, IV, as he was sometimes called, ambled out of […]
1812 and all that
When you get down to it, a lot of wars deserve the moniker “the forgotten war.” Of late, and in the U.S., it most often shows up in association with […]
From Cincinnati to Grizzly Flats
Today marks an auspicious day in music history: the first recorded performance of Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susannah,” the earliest hit song in U.S. history. Foster’s smash debuted in a Pittsburgh saloon. […]
Brotherhood
This day in 1925, activist A. Philip Randolph led the organization of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a campaign Randolph declared nothing less than “a significant landmark in the […]
The world’s a nicer place
In the 1800s, crowds flocked to watch balloon ascensions for many of the same reasons they go to stock car races. You got to see an odd vehicle do amazing […]