Activating Alternative Historical Narratives: The Black Arts Collective of Philadelphia Visits South El Monte

SEMAP Interview from Henry Pacheco on Vimeo. For Activate Vacant, the South El Monte Arts Posse invited artists to transgress space by creating installations in abandoned, un-used, and, often, fenced of lots. Carribean Fragoza’s two word self-titled poem installation/billboard “ay corazon,” made entirely of white plastic grocery bags, interrupted the monotonous landscape and functioned as an emotional holograph for El Monte’s commuters. Christopher Anthony Velasco’s “Let It Sparkle,” invited bus riders and the SEMAP team to cover the adjacent abandoned car garage and parking lot with yarn. Lastly, Jennifer Renteria’s rendering “The Uncultivated Park,” allowed residents …

The History Channel: Selling the Past in the Age of Reality TV

For a website dedicated to the concept of “historiography for the masses,” perhaps it was only a matter of time before the contemporary History Channel would be addressed. Once maligned for its excessive focus on World War II and military history, the History Channel of the past nonetheless remained fairly dedicated to its core concept. Historical documentaries, such as the Engineering an Empire series, The Crusades: Crescent and the Cross, The American Revolution, and Ancient Rome: Story of an Empire, tackled serious historical topics with sophistication and insight. However, following the tried and true model of channels like MTV and VH1, with their respective series the Jersey Shore …

Steel Towns, Motor Cities, and Cuban Refugees: Part III of the 2012 UHA Conference

Welcome to the third installment of ToM's four part coverage of the 2012 UHAs.  You'll detect a clear bias in favor of aged/renewed rust belt cities with a flourish of transnationalism at the end via the Cuban Revolution and post WWII Miami.  If you missed Part I click here and for Part II here. Panel – Rust Belt Cosmopolitanism Joshua Akers – Settling the City: Urban Homesteading and the Construction of Markets in Detroit “It stands out on the highway like a creature from another time/ It inspires the babies’ questions for their mothers as they ride/ But no one stopped to think about the babies or how they would survive/ We almost lost Detroit, this time.” - …

God Save the Village Green: Pastoralism in British Rock

As the pageantry and spectacle (or tragedy and treacle, all depending) of the Olympic ceremonies recede from memory, Danny Boyle’s vision of the history of Great Britain echoes many common sentiments felt by the British.  The cultural history of the Isles illustrates an ambivalence concerning modernity and its relationship with a notion of an idyllic Eden lost to the so-called “satanic mills” of industrialization, manifest in the shift from the agrarian hills to the smokestacks of Boyle’s production.  Martin Weiner’s English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 succinctly outlines this ambivalence within British culture, particularly its appearance in …

Subculture Rub: Tracing the Winding Path of Street Art

From our perch in the early 21st century, when multinational corporations hoover anything remotely hip, it is easy to forget how hostile the climate for hip once was. The church, the law, capital and mass opinion all lined up against hip, as against a disease.                                                                              -- John Leland, Hip: The History, 2009 When the image of scarf wearing, bespectacled black man in the vein of the famous 2008 Obama campaign poster began popping up around D.C., Prince of Petworth blogger Lydia DePillis wondered just who was responsible.  After a circuitous route …

Tropics of Meta’s Best of 2011

Our friend Kevin Baker recently wondered aloud whether 2012 would be the Year that Tropics Broke, after seeing our rundown of the best papers at this year's American Historical Association meeting posted by a colleague on Facebook.  2012 might very well be the year that we auto-tune or meme our way to national notoriety, but in the meantime we would like to offer a different kind of recap: a list of our favorite pieces from 2011.  From the Mountain Goats to Melancholia, and from the inspiring scenes of the Arab Spring to the ongoing antics of the Tea Party, we have tried to offer a semi-informed perspective on the unfolding of history over the last year.  Here are some of our …

Steel Dreams and Rusted Nightmares: Remembering Small Town Industrial America

Well they closed down the auto plant in Mahwah late that month Ralph went out lookin' for a job but he couldn't find none He came home too drunk from mixin' Tanqueray and wine He got a gun shot a night clerk now they call him Johnny 99 Down in the part of town where when you hit a red light you don't stop Johnny's wavin' his gun around and threatenin' to blow his top When an off-duty cop snuck up on him from behind Out in front of the Club Tip Top they slapped the cuffs on Johnny 99 - “Johnny 99” Released in 1982, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska remains one of his singular works. Even hipsters, many of whom dismiss Springsteen as maudlin, overly earnest and devoid of …

Our Path-Dependent Future: What Happens When Change and Habit Collide?

In 2007 and 2008, then Senator Barack Obama ran on a campaign slogan: “Change you can believe in.” Obama’s campaign asserted that his election would rectify the metastasizing wealth gap between the rich and the poor, address the high unemployment rate, and restore America to the “shining city on a hill” that it once was. While one can debate whether or not Obama used cynical sloganeering or if he earnestly intended to implement such change, the study of change in political science could have served President Obama well. Within the political science discipline there are several schools of thought regarding institutional change. Mahoney and Thelen and the broader rational choice …

Erasing Race: Whiteness, California, and the Colorblind Bind

Whatever their defects as historical analysis, [multiracial and multicultural] have become obligatory public gestures. Among breaches of propriety, defining race in 'bipolar' terms ranks well ahead of wearing animal fur. During a symposium at a university in southern California, a senior historian of white women rebuked me for emphasizing the historical origin of American racial ideology in the enslavement of Afro-Americans--not, apparently, because she judged the argument invalid, but because she thought it unseemly to make in California. – Barbara Fields Legendary Marxist and Columbia professor Barbara Fields sounds simultaneously bemused and frustrated by overly politically correct …

Learning from Tiny Tower: Mobile Gaming and the Post-Industrial Society

Ever since Wii came along and swept everyone from me to my seventy year old retired Teamster uncle into the world of gaming, I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that video games have become a tool by which our future robot overlords are retraining us to perform various tasks after the big takeover.* Big Brain Academy, in particular, reminded me of those later scenes in 1984, when the Party had smashed every bone in Winston’s hands and he had to learn to write again using a big pencil, like a kindergartener. 4423… 3244. Do-re-mi…mi-re-do. Memorize the faces and match the frog to the dog. When a game tells me to take an order on the phone and then tell it back to the game – “calzone, …