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“Help Me, Rhonda”: The Beach Boys and the Labouring of Popular Music
By Grant Wong (@wongpopscholar) The Beach Boys’ 1965 album Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) looks and sounds like your typical early Beach Boys record. Its tracks, hits like “California Girls” and “Help Me Rhonda,” celebrate the simple joys of being a teenager in postwar America. Its album sleeve beams with summer fun, depicting the Beach…
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22. Disney’s America Park Map
By Maddy Culpepper (@exlibrismaddy) In 1993, The Walt Disney Company announced a new theme park that never would be. Disney’s America was a $650 million, 3,000-acre project in Virginia that would have centered on a singular theme: American history. [1] Its announcement was quickly met with furious debate, leading to congressional hearings, environmental reviews and an…
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12. A Corned Beef Sandwich in Space
By Lauren Evans (@lauren_evans99) In March 1965, the landmark Voting Rights Act worked its way through Congress in the United States, the Beach Boys topped charts with “Help Me, Rhonda”, and a corned beef sandwich found its way into low earth orbit aboard the Gemini 3 spacecraft which launched from Cape Canaveral on March 23.
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10. Erich Mielke’s Breakfast Order
By Caroline West (@Caroline_N_West) The archives of the East German Ministry for State Security (known as the Stasi) are vast. The holdings contain 111 kilometers of documents on the ministry’s operations – and perhaps most significant, its comprehensive and detailed recordings of the private lives of East German citizens. In 1989, aware that public support…
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Twilight of the Idols: The Critical Race Theory Scare and the Collapsing Dream of a Colour-Blind America
By Thomas Cryer As the Republican campaign against critical race theory accelerated in 2021, America’s culture wars descended into guerrilla skirmishes, empowering private actors to wage the Democratic-Republican struggle within local school boards across America. By November, nine states passed deliberately vague laws stamped as ‘anti-CRT’, prohibiting dialogue about America’s increasingly apparent racial inequities in…
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