Handwritten magazine index

‘Index, A History of the’ Review: List-O-Mania

At the back of the book, the index provides a space for reference—and sometimes revenge.
Silver medalists Karen Chen and Nathan Chen pose for a photo after the team event in the figure skating competition at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Feb. 7, 2022, in Beijing.
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The ‘Miracle on Ice’ Shaped the Olympics Coverage We’re Seeing Every Night

How rooting for American athletes became part of Olympic TV coverage.
Edit of Grammarly language change suggestions

Why Grammarly’s New Language Suggestions Miss the Mark

Slavery’s a sensitive subject, but so is the question of who gets to be an authority about language.
Richard Nixon giving a press briefing.
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Presidents v. Press: How the Pentagon Papers Leak Set Up First Amendment Showdowns

Efforts to clamp down on White House leaks to the press follow a pattern that was set during the Nixon era after the publication of the Pentagon Papers.
Willow, the Biden's brown cat

A Brief History of Cats in the White House

The Bidens' new cat Willow will be the first feline in the White House since the George W. Bush years, but is part of a long tradition.
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Best History Writing of 2021

Bunk's American History Top 40.
screenshot of primary source archive with "slut" in search browser and primacy source results listed below

Sluts and the Founders

Understanding the meaning of the word "slut" in the Founders' vocabulary.
Still of three characters from Young Frankenstein, parodying horror tropes.

Dun, Dun Duuun! Where Did Pop Culture’s Most Dramatic Sound Come From?

Did the iconic three-note sequence come from Stravinsky, the Muppets or somewhere else? Our writer set out to – dun, dun duuuun! – reveal the mystery.
A bronze statue of Civil War soldiers on horseback, in front of the U.S. Capitol building.

How Twitter Explains the Civil War (and Vice Versa)

The proliferation of antebellum print is analogous to our own tectonic shifts in how people communicate and what they communicate about.
Watercolor painting of enslaved people walking barefoot on a forced march, with white men on horseback at the front and back of the line.

Reparative Semantics: On Slavery and the Language of History

Scholarly accounts of slavery have been changing, but these correctives sometimes say more about historians than the historical subjects they're writing about.
Screen frame from the television program Home Improvement, depicting parents chastising their teenage son.

In the ‘90s the U.S. Government Paid TV Networks to Weave “Anti-Drug” Messaging Into Their Plot Lines

These storylines portrayed those addicted to drugs and alcohol as lunatics whose only cure can come from punitive measures, abstinence, and “tough love.”
What history tells us about the dangers of media ownership | Psyche Ideas

What History Tells us About the Dangers of Media Ownership

Is media bias attributable to corporate power or personal psychology? Upton Sinclair and Walter Lippmann disagreed.
Women wearing bathing suits and sashes stand in a row on the Atlantic City boardwalk in 1921, competing in a pageant.

How the Swimsuit Showdown Shaped the Miss America Contest

A new behind-the-scenes book, “There She Was,” and a Smithsonian collecting initiative celebrate the pageant’s centennial.
Man dressed as a clown with face paint, bald on top with big tufts of hair on the sides, and a bulbous nose.
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The Strangely Enduring Appeal of Bozo the Clown

How a clown won over several generations of children.
Illustrations from Twelve Years a Slave, by Solomon Northup, 1853, depicting an African American man hugging his family.

A Dark Cloud over Enjoyment

Refusing myths of joy and pain in slave narratives.
A European style woman standing in front of a complex crossword puzzle.

A Brief History of Word Games

Crossword puzzles may be a recent invention, but since we've had language we've played games with words.
Television camera operator at work.
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Latino Empowerment Through Public Broadcasting

How Latinos have used public radio and television to communicate their cultures, histories, hopes, and concerns.
Print announcement for Florida CB personality "Bow Weevil," featuring a photo of a Black man's face on a drawing of a bowl weevil holding a microphone.

How Black CB Radio Users Created an Audible Community

CB radio was portrayed as a mostly white enthusiasm in its heyday, but Black CB users were active as early as 1959.
A police officer standing over a victim of the Sharpeville Massacre, South Africa, March 21, 1960

The Etymology of Terror

For more than 150 years after it was coined, “terrorism” meant violence inflicted by the state on its people. How did the word come to mean the reverse?
Screen shot from Oregon Trail gameplay showing Conestoga wagons and people on a western-style main street. Text reads: "Now loading the wagon..."

Let Us Now Enjoy the Incredibly Pure Tale of the Teacher Who Invented The Oregon Trail

He didn’t make a penny.
Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers celebrates after an NFL game.
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Aaron Rodgers Isn’t the First Big-Name Wisconsin Anti-Vaccine Voice

But the media is treating him differently than it treated Matthew Joseph Rodermund more than a century ago.
Action shot of the Detroit Lions playing the Chicago Bears in 1934.

How the NFL Popularized Thanksgiving Day Football

The NFL holiday tradition took off in 1934, when the Detroit Lions hosted the unbeaten Chicago Bears in a game broadcast nationally on radio.
Charlton Heston (left), then president of the NRA, meets with fellow leaders Wayne LaPierre (far right) and Jim Baker (center) on April 30, 1999, ahead of the NRA's annual meeting in Denver. Around the same time, leaders discussed how to respond to the shooting at Columbine High School in nearby Littleton, Colo. More than 20 years later, NPR has obtained secret recordings of those conversations.

A Secret Tape Made After Columbine Shows the NRA's Evolution on School Shootings

In 1999, NRA leaders agonized over what to do about Columbine, paving the way for the group's approach to mass shootings ever since.
Front page of the Saturday Evening Post

The Persistence of the Saturday Evening Post

When George Horace Lorimer took over as editor of the Saturday Evening Post, America was a patchwork of communities. There was no sense of nation or unity.
Poster of American flag asking people to pledge allegiance and silence about the war.

World War II’s “Rumor Control” Project

How the federal government enlisted ordinary citizens to spy on each other for the war effort.
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Epistemic Crises, Then And Now: The 1965 Carnegie Commission As Model Philanthropic Intervention

How the commission that led to the creation of the U.S.’s public television and radio systems can serve as a model for countering disinformation today.
Collage: a pair of arms wraps around collections of newspapers reporting on AIDS and plays guitar strings.

An AIDS Activist's Archive

June Holmes was in her late twenties, working as a social worker on Long Island, when she first heard about “this thing called AIDS.”
Label of 16″ transcription disc of the March 13, rehearsal of “Who Knows? Bill Cook Collection, Library of Congress.

Who Knows? Radio and the Paranormal

A radio drama series from 1941 based on Dr. Hereward Carrington's case records of psychic phenomena.
The full chart of television genres from 1945 to present.

Television Genres Over Time

Here’s how the distribution of genres has changed since 1945 up to present.
Photo collage of Republican men, with Donald Trump at the center.

A Short History of Conservative Trolling

On the laughing emptiness at the center of the Republican Party.