1980s

Fast Car Rewind: Taking a Look Back at Tracy Chapman and the Women’s Music Movement

The recent controversy over country singer Luke Combs’s surprise hit cover obscures the deeper history of Chapman and her cultural movement in powerful ways.

Daniel Schorr and Nixon’s Tricky Road to Redemption

Nixon long portrayed himself as a victim of the press. However, from the 1952 Checkers speech to his post-presidency PR offensives, Nixon proved himself an able manipulator of the media.

Neoliberalism with a Stick of Gum: The Meaning of the 1980s Baseball Card Boom

Before beanie babies and Pogs, small rectangles of cardboard were the errant investments of a stratifying American society.

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 […]

The Complexity of US Soccer Fandom: “Eurosnobs,” MLS, and Generation X

Sometimes it seems American soccer fans can’t win. “The problem is your soccer obsessives. By my reckoning, they […]

White Racial Innocence Goes to War: Forrest Gump at 20

1994—it wasn’t that long ago.  Or was it?  It was a time before iPhones, YouTube, Monica Lewinsky, WMDs, […]

Rethinking the Replacements: The Production of Cultural Memory in the Aughts

Here come Dick, he’s wearing a skirt Here comes Jane, y’know she’s sporting a chain Same hair, revolution […]