Menu
Idea

metaphors

113
Filter by:

Filter by published date

rattlesnake

How the Rattlesnake Almost Became an Emblem of a Nascent America

On the centuries-long historical evolution of a serpentine symbol.
by Stephen S. Hall via Literary Hub on April 24, 2025
Coral polyps.
partner

Will the Sun Ever Set on the Colony?

Tracking the history of a curious scientific term.
by Whitney Barlow Robles via HNN on February 13, 2024
Portrait of a girl wearing a red coral necklace.

The Labor of Polyps and Persons

The meaning of coral jewelry in nineteenth-century America.
by Michele Currie Navakas via Lapham’s Quarterly on July 12, 2023
A 1938 poster from the Women’s Field Army of the American Society for the Control of Cancer.

Should We Abandon the Idea That Cancer Is Something To ‘Fight’?

Is the century-old battle metaphor doing more harm than good to doctors and patients alike?
by Elaine Schattner via Aeon on May 9, 2023
Abandoned and burned-out buildings in the East Village in 1986.

Edifice Complex

Restoring the term “burnout” to its roots in landlord arson puts the dispossession of poor city dwellers at its center.
by Bench Ansfield via Jewish Currents on January 3, 2023
Walt Whitman.

What Walt Whitman Knew About Democracy

For the great American poet, the peculiar qualities of grass suggested a way to resolve the tension between the individual and the group.
by Mark Edmundson via The Wall Street Journal on April 15, 2021

Metaphors and Malignancy in Senator McCain’s Cancer Diagnosis

How does one talk about cancer, something so unpleasant that is almost always linked with death, and where do metaphors come in?
by Agnes Arnold-Forster via Nursing Clio on July 31, 2017
Detail from the Russian poster for the 1957 Polish film Kanal, directed by Andrzej Wajda and set during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Photo by Getty

The Strange Political History of The ‘Underground’

Subterranean metaphors have been a powerful tool of political resistance. Today, is there anywhere left to hide?
by Terence Renaud via Aeon on December 14, 2016
The shark approaches the boat in a scene from the film Jaws.

The Undeniable Greatness of Jaws

Jaws is a landmark hit, but also a sharp 1970s film shaped by political ire, social critique, and realist cinema’s lasting influence.
by Eileen Jones via Jacobin on July 24, 2025
Donald Trump speaking at a rally

Witch Hunt Nation: The Endurance of a Metaphor That Burned

A brief look at the usage of "witch hunt" in American politics through the centuries.
by Alexis Coe via Study Marry Kill on May 28, 2025
An iMac computer displays the starry night screensaver.

Recurring Screens

Reflections on memory, dreams, and computer screensavers.
by Nora Claire Miller via The Paris Review on May 20, 2025
Abraham Lincoln

Was the Civil War Inevitable?

Before Lincoln turned the idea of “the Union” into a cause worth dying for, he tried other means of ending slavery in America.
by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on April 21, 2025
Political cartoon of men chopping down the tree of slavery.

The Root and The Branch: Working-Class Reform and Antislavery, 1790–1860

On the robust influence of labor reform and antislavery ideas and movements on each other from the early National period to the Civil War.
by Rosemary Fuerer, Sean Griffin via LaborOnline on April 9, 2025
The title card of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

George Romero’s Pittsburgh

City of the living dead.
by Victoria Timpanaro via The Metropole on February 20, 2025
Sheet music for W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues, 1925, featuring blue and white images of Louis Armstrong.

Imani Perry’s Blue Notes

Her new book tells the story of Black people through an exploration of the color blue.
by Mychal Denzel Smith via The New Republic on February 5, 2025
A drawing of an angry, long-haired cat holding a sign that reads "Vote for Shes."

A Purrrrfect Political Storm

Crazy cat ladies have come to dominate this election season. It’s hardly the first time.
by Natalie Kinkade via JSTOR Daily on September 25, 2024
Carbinari seal of a woman holding a liberty cap.

Lady Liberty in Restoration Italy? Crime, Counterfeit, and Carbonari Revolutionary Politics

Following Napoleon’s fall, international secret societies emerged promoting dissent from absolutist forms of power and sharing ideologies and iconographies.
by Giuseppe Perelli via Age of Revolutions on June 3, 2024
Cover of "James" by Percival Everett

Gulp Fiction, or Into the Missouri-verse

On Percival Everett’s “James.”
by Matt Seybold via Cleveland Review of Books on March 25, 2024
Boxes with Black American history inside

The Black Box of Race

In a circumscribed universe, Black Americans have ceaselessly reinvented themselves.
by Henry Louis Gates Jr. via The Atlantic on March 16, 2024
A still from The Exorcist of Chris, played by Ellen Burstyn, standing next to a priest.

Exorcising American Domestic Violence

The Exorcist in 1973 and 2023.
by Eleanor Johnson via Public Books on December 13, 2023
"Spy vs. Spy" pointy-headed characters facing each other

Rethinking Spy vs. Spy: A Hand From One Page, A Bomb From Another

Like the spies themselves, the image we have of something is often what gets us in trouble.
by Gyasi Hall via Longreads on September 12, 2023
Car interior with Chuck Berry reflected in side view mirror.

An Anthropologist of Filth

On Chuck Berry.
by Ian Penman via Harper’s on May 4, 2023
"Sinners In The Hands of an Angry God" title page.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: Annotated

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.
by Ed Simon via JSTOR Daily on February 20, 2023
"White Zombie" in white font on green background, with illustration of eyes over the text and clasped hands below the text

Colonialism Birthed the Zombie Movie

The first feature-length zombie movie emerged from Haitians’ longstanding association of the living dead with slavery and exploited labor.
by Livia Gershon, Jennifer Fay via JSTOR Daily on October 31, 2022
A painting by Alfred Touchemolin showing French army recruits being inoculated with cowpox to protect them from smallpox, circa 1895

The Deep Roots of Vaccine Hesitancy

Understanding the battle over immunization—from the pre-Victorian era onward—between public health and the people may help in treating anti-vax sentiment.
by Mark Honigsbaum via New York Review of Books on December 14, 2021
Pen sketch of Robert Frost.

Frost at Midnight

A new volume of Robert Frost’s letters finds him at the height of his artistic powers while suffering an almost unimaginable series of losses.
by Dan Chiasson via New York Review of Books on November 24, 2021
Illustration by Molly Crabapple

Racial Metaphors

If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed nothing.
by Nikhil Pal Singh via Dissent on August 30, 2021
Abstract painting titled 'Constellation' by Helen Gerardia

A New Planet in the System

Early Americans conscripted the universe into their nation-building project.
by Gordon Fraser via Lapham’s Quarterly on July 8, 2021

History As End

1619, 1776, and the politics of the past.
by Matthew Karp via Harper’s on June 8, 2021
A pile of trash at a landfill behind a member of the Army Corps of Engineers.

The History of New York, Told Through Its Trash

In 1948, the landfill at Fresh Kills was marketed to Staten Island as a stopgap measure. No one guessed that it would remain open for more than half a century.
by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein via The New Yorker on April 24, 2021
View More
30 of
113

Filter Results:

Suggested Filters:

Idea

Person

brought to you by
© Bunk History