08 June 2011 – Allison Marsh 1
The summer TV season is just around the corner, and I can’t wait. It’s a guilty pleasure that I don’t usually brag about to my academic colleagues, but I adore summer TV. Summer television, like beach reading, is supposed to be entertaining – romance and intrigue without the burden of a challenging plotline. Read More
02 June 2011 – Melissa Prycer
When I was a kid, I spent most of my time in the nineteenth century. It all started with the “Little House” books. My grandmother read them to me, and they became the very first chapter books that I could read all by myself. Read More
24 May 2011 – Zachary McKiernan
On September 21, 1976, former and now deceased Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet brought international terrorism to the U.S. capital. As part of a plot to eliminate opponents of the military regime which took power in a bloody U.S.-backed coup on September 11, 1973, Pinochet’s crosshairs targeted Orlando Letelier, Chile’s one-time ambassador to the US under President Salvador Allende from 1970-1973.04 May 2011 – Anett Ytre-Eide
From the early 1900s on, the interest in genealogy has been fairly widespread in Norway. Lately though, there has been an explosive increase in interest. This can be contributed to two main factors. One is the series “Who do you think you are? Read More
11 April 2011 – Cathy Stanton 2
Car ads are like little zeitgeist-meters. They’re amazingly responsive to all kinds of social anxieties, which they instantly repackage in ways that allow us to continue feeling good about driving. Feeling nationally or personally emasculated? Concerned about the transition into being a soccer mom? Read More
22 March 2011 – Suzanne Fischer 5
Many unlikely and whimsical projects flourish on Twitter, the popular microblogging service just celebrating its fifth birthday. Big Ben strikes the hour (“bong bong bong”), encounters with near-earth objects are automatically updated (the most recent one missed the Earth by about three million kilometers), a parody account for a politician becomes a compelling scifi short story and the Field Museum’s T-Rex, Sue, turns out to have a wicked sense of humor. Read More
08 March 2011 – Anne Gehr 2
I am obsessed with a chicken coop.
On a long and poorly charted road trip this past summer, I wandered into Lake Solano Park campground, located on the quiet banks of Putah Creek just off California Highway 128. The campground is on land originally populated by Patwin Indians, then homesteaded in 1875 by Daniel Tucker who managed a cattle and sheep operation and quarried limestone from local hills for area building foundations. Read More
12 February 2011 – Mary Rizzo 1
The process of gentrification is often linked with public history in varying ways. Urban planners and developers, for example, market neighborhoods through reference to their historic character, which can include anything from events that occurred in the far-distant past to interesting architecture. Read More
14 January 2011 – editors 3
In this post, Vintage Roadside’s first for “Off the Wall,” we’d like to introduce ourselves by touching on our motivation for launching our preservation-themed business followed by a brief review of a symposium we presented this past summer on Aquarama, a wonderful 1960s mermaid attraction once found on Lake of the Ozarks in Osage Beach, Missouri. Read More
06 January 2011 – Lori Byrd Phillips 8
This January Wikipedia will be celebrating its ten year anniversary, and it’s safe to say that in the past decade the editable encyclopedia has challenged the academic and cultural sectors in a number of ways. A recent post on Off the Wall has already discussed the shifting role that Wikipedia plays in academia, specifically noting its potential for historiography. Read More