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Black and white photo of a 1920s flapper girl.
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Flappers: Precursors to Modern-Day Social Media Influencers?

A 1923 article in a fashion magazine shows the connection between flappers and social media youth organizers today.
Advertisement for a gold dredging machine from a 1920's magazine.

The Huckster Ads of Early “Popular Mechanics”

Weird, revealing, and incredibly fun to read.
Photo of two kids, on African American one white, at a computer ca. early 1980s.

Framing the Computer

Before social media communities formed around shared concerns, interests, politics, and identity, print media connected communities.
Cartoon illustration featuring Pauline Hopkins (center), Booker T. Washington (left), and John C. Freund (right)

Contending Forces

Pauline Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the Fight for The Colored American Magazine.
original

Best History Writing of 2021

Bunk's American History Top 40.
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.
Manhattan women's health rally
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Newsletters May Threaten the Mainstream Media, But They Also Build Communities

The platforms are new, but the form has been around for most of a century.
Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Other Obsession

Known as a master of horror, he also understood the power—and the limits—of science.
Photographs and a cover of Spectra, a literary magazine.
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Spectra: The Poetry Movement That Was All a Hoax

In the experimental world of modernist poetry, literary journals were vulnerable to fake submissions.
Collection of People's 50 most beautiful people magazines

Inside the Making of People's Iconic '50 Most Beautiful' Issue

Before People was the juggernaut of the celebrity media, it was a magazine “about people.”
black and white photos of children

The Magazine That Helped 1920s Kids Navigate Racism

Mainstream culture denied Black children their humanity—so W. E. B. Du Bois created The Brownies’ Book to assert it.
A collage graphic featuring men gazing at women as they walk by.

How the 'Girl Watching' Fad of the 1960s Taught Men to Harass Women

In name, 'girl watching' is long gone. In practice, the trend lives on.
A collage featuring early feminists.

Pointing a Way Forward

The history of suffrage in the South—indeed, the nation—is messy and fraught, and more contentious than is typically remembered.
A printed advertisement for "The Bookman" depicting a fish reacting to "The Bookman" on a hook.

The Power of Flawed Lists

How "The Bookman" invented the best seller.
An illustration from a book of homes published by a Pennsylvania lumber company in 1920
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The Latent Racism of the Better Homes in America Program

How Better Homes in America—a collaboration between Herbert Hoover and the editor of a conservative women’s magazine—promoted idealized whiteness.

The True Story of the Awakening of Norman Rockwell

The artist’s Saturday Evening Post covers championed a retrograde view of America. In the 1960s, he had a change of heart.
Writer Dorothy Parker sitting.

When Dorothy Parker Got Fired from Vanity Fair

Jonathan Goldman explores the beginnings of the Algonquin Round Table and how Parker's determination to speak her mind gave her pride of place within it.

Pornotopia

In the mid-20th century, Playboy wasn't just an erotic magazine. It was an architectural movement as well.
John H. Johnson

The World-Class Photography of Ebony and Jet is Priceless History. It's Still Up For Sale.

There's a lot more than money at stake in the impending auction.
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How America Thought About Refugees 70 Years Ago

And other gleanings from the 1949 run of the Saturday Evening Post.

How Zine Libraries Are Highlighting Marginalized Voices

The librarians who are setting out to make sure the histories of marginalized communities aren't forgotten.

“It Was Us Against Those Guys”: The Women Who Transformed Rolling Stone in the Mid-70s

How one 28-year-old feminist bluffed her way into running a copy department and made rock journalism a legitimate endeavor.

New York City, the Perfect Setting for a Fictional Cold War Strike

On Collier’s 1950 cover story, “Hiroshima, USA: Can Anything Be Done About It?”

The Lost World of the Middlebrow Tastemaker

Journalist Elizabeth Gordon had unsparing opinions about the inadequacy of both mainstream and elite notions of design.
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When Salad Was Manly

Esquire, 1940: “Salads are really the man’s department... Only a man can make a perfect salad.”
Timor residents in traditional dress look at a National Geographic photographer demonstrating his camera.

National Geographic Has Always Depended on Exoticism

With its race issue, the magazine is trying a different direction. Can it escape its past?

How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip-Hop Into a Literary Movement

Looking back at the golden era of rap writing.

#MeToo? In 80 years, No American Woman Has Won Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ by Herself

The history of Time's 'Person of the Year' exemplifies the problem that led to this year's winner.

Jewish Heroes and Nazi Monsters

The many lives of ferocious cartoonist and illustrator Arthur Szyk at a jewel of a show at the New-York Historical Society.

Hugh Hefner Was Never The Star of Playboy

Perhaps the only true generalization to make about Hefner is that he is given too much credit for his role in American history.

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