By Lera Toropin In flipping through old issues of Soviet Life, one finds a wide array of articles that present only the best that life in the USSR could offer: fashion, recipes, sports success stories, film reviews, detailed descriptions of beautiful travel destinations in Kislovodsk, Zheleznovodsk, and Naryan-Mar, all paired with colorful, enticing photographs. An […]
Food/Drugs
The Curious Case of the Thomas Cook Hospital in Luxor
Cross-posted from Chris Rose’s blog, where he regularly tells us Important and Useful Things and makes us laugh along the way. In addition to his many other accomplishments, Chris is the brains and motor behind our podcast, 15 Minute History. By Christopher Rose Over the weekend, the Thomas Cook company went bankrupt and shuttered operations, leaving hundreds of […]
What Makes a Good History Blog?
by Jesse Ritner I love food blogs. It’s true. The bad jokes. Exclamation marks run rampant. Mouthwatering photographs. The word chocolate, over 70 times in only 1,000 words. Unsurprisingly, my first foray into history blogs was through food. Websites such as Cooking in the Archive (which posts about antiquated recipes with pictures and all) were […]
Notes From the Field: Bulgaria’s Tolstoyan Vegetarians
by Mary Neuburger It seemed like a bad idea at the time, but I did it anyway. Maybe, just maybe, there was hope that the little museum in the Bulgarian mountain village of Yasna Polyana would be open. Established in 1998, the museum contained the intellectual remnants of the Bulgarian Tolstoyan community, who had created […]
Too Much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellín, Colombia
By Jimena Perry In 2013, a memory museum opened in Medellín, Department of Antioquia Colombia. Its founding was part of the Victim Assistance Program created by the city’s mayoralty in 2004. Known as one of Colombia’s most violent cities, due mainly to the drug cartel of Medellín led by Pablo Escobar, this urban area suffered […]
The Media Matters: Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Discovery of Hunger in the U.S.
April 11, 2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of a historical moment that is far more relevant today than we might wish: the discovery of hunger in the U.S. or, perhaps better put, the point in the late 1960s when severe poverty and life-threatening malnutrition in the world’s wealthiest nation suddenly soared into public view on the national political stage.
The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yogurt
by Mary Neuburger One evening this summer, I found myself careening down a country road at breakneck speed to the town of Studen Izvor on the Bulgarian border with Serbia. Stunning scenery enveloped a string of thinly populated towns, some peppered with socialist-era industrial ruins that somehow added to the charm. Edit, the wife of my […]
US Survey Course: Cold War
During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA.
Sowing the Seeds of Communism: Corn Wars in the USA
Today we often associate hybrid or genetically modified corn with agricultural monopolies, big business, and capitalism, in the early Cold War some feared that the rise of hybrid corn would sow the seeds of Communism in the United States.
Notes from the Field: From Feasts to Feats (or Feet) on the Coals
This summer I conducted research in, but also beyond, my regular haunts, namely the dusty old libraries and archival reading rooms of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. After several days in Sofia, I took to the mountains to follow the paths of ethnographers, tourists, and pilgrims who have written about this distant borderland of Europe over the past 200 years.