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: AMERICAN CULTURE
When the Economy Shifted From Production to Consumption, How You Spent Money Mattered More Than How You Earned It
by David G. Schwartz
May 2, 2019
Today legal gambling in the United States is widely accepted and more prevalent than ever. But as recently as the 1950s, gambling was seen as a fundamentally un-American way to make a living. This shift in attitudes towards gambling—which took about a half-century to achieve—spoke to generational shifts in American beliefs about morality and capitalism.
While Americans have always loved to gamble, the 19th century saw a strong pushback against the lottery promoters and bookmakers who had made gambling possible. The …
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From Little Rock to L.A., Learning to See Colors Beyond Black and White
By Myah Genung
July 13, 2017
I lived most of my childhood convinced that my grandfather, Calvin Muldrow, was Superman. On summer evenings, I’d perch atop his knee as we sat on the creaky back porch of his red brick house in North Little Rock. He’d weave elaborate tall tales about his magical excursions gliding over the jungle canopies of Sierra Leone, or wrestling boa constrictors, or floating aloft past my bedroom window at night to check up on me.
Grandaddy had a way of blending …
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The Marquis de Lafayette's Name Graces More City Parks and Streets Than Perhaps Any Other Foreigner
By Laura Auricchio
June 22, 2017
If you live in the United States, you’ve probably come across a county, city, street, park, school, shop, or restaurant named for Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), the most beloved French hero of the American Revolution. In New York City, my home town, I’ve spotted three different Lafayette Avenues, one Lafayette Street, a Lafayette playground, and four public sculptures of the Marquis. Although there’s no official count, Lafayette probably has more American locations named for him than any …
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A 16th-Century Folk Art Was Her Passport from Sicily to Upstate New York
By Kathleen Garrett
June 8, 2017
The winter rains had subsided for the moment, but the coastal night air remained chilly and damp. My rent-controlled apartment, with its lack of insulation, mirrored the outside evening temperature, as I sat at my desk struggling to meet a self-imposed deadline. Shoes aren’t allowed in my home, not even for me, and with porous window seals in this old building and its wooden floors, my cold feet needed something warm to cover them.
I’d been away from Santa Monica …
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The Tragedy of Treating People as Property Has Left Only Scattered Scraps to Hint at Their Cultures and Communities
By Sean Kelley
August 18, 2016
For the past eight years I’ve been living with 72 people. These 28 men, 25 women, 12 girls, and seven boys are long dead—they were Africans sold into captivity and shipped to America in the mid-1700s. It’s generally accepted that a factual account of their experience—like almost all Africans enslaved in America—is beyond recovery. Even Roots blended fact and fiction into something its author referred to as “faction.”
But thanks to laborious archival research and the linking of two rare and …
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Being a Teenager in L.A. During World War II Meant Blackouts, Rations, and B-17 Bombers
By Manuel H. Rodriguez
August 11, 2016
That Sunday, as on most Sundays, the family was gathered around the kitchen table listening to the radio. It was too early in the day for drama and comedy programs so we listened to a music show. The date was December 7, 1941. I was 11 years old.
“We interrupt this program to bring you this important news bulletin, ‘The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor by air, the White House announces!’”
The world war that followed was …
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Why a Contemporary Canadian Author Fell in Love With the Tall Tales of the Famous Frontiersman
By Alix Hawley
August 9, 2016
I’m not American. My childhood social studies curriculum covered Canada’s geography and indigenous peoples, in French (le Saskatchewan, les Iroquois).
So I didn’t grow up learning about Daniel Boone and his exploration of the frontier around the time of the American Revolution. If I’d heard of him at all, I probably thought, like many people, he was fictional. But go back to my British Columbia elementary school and there he is, in a 1985 copy of National Geographic on the …
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