Category Archive: 1980s

America Needs a Definitive History of Dead Kennedys… And Here’s Why It Won’t Happen

I pledge to laugh At the Flag Of the United States of America And to the lies for […]

R.E.M.’s Lifes Rich Pageant and the First Shadows of the Reagan Dusk

We often tend to mistakenly think of the 1980s in ways that paint it as uniformly conforming to […]

The Other Freestyle: Recovering 80s Latinx Dance Music

I was wandering through a street fair off Canal Street a few years ago when I came across […]

Dog Days Classics: Digging Joan Didion in the Age of Feelings

In her review of 2015’s The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty’s biography of famed writer Joan Didion, Meghan […]

Greenberg to Koufax to Valenzuela: Ethnicity, Identity, and Baseball in “Chasing Dreams”

The 1965 World Series would prove groundbreaking. It marked the first time that two professional baseball teams from […]

Black History Month Part IV: Compton as bellwether for urban America

Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy performance of “The Blacker the Berry” and “Alright”, with its #BlackLivesMatter theme and political overtones, struck […]

Black History Month Part III: Race, Taxes and Schools in Compton, CA

“To be educated in my Baltimore mostly meant always packing an extra number 2 pencil and working quietly,” […]

Privatizing the All Volunteer Army: Gender and Families in the 1990s and Early Aughts

[Editor’s note: This is the final installment in ToM’s three part series on social welfare policies in the […]