America’s Underground River: Case 1, Will Geer, actor As a child growing-up in small-town Missouri, weekends spent “out in the country” visiting grandparents were special treats. Saturdays were spent fishing, climbing cherry trees, chasing grasshoppers and lightning bugs, or just sitting on an old rail fence beside the smokehouse, talking to “Bessie”, the […]
Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were ripped to death in a hail of automatic rifle and shotgun fire on a dusty road in Louisiana in May of 1934. Their bloody end was befitting the wider American sense of mythic justice still common today – “live by the sword, die by the sword“, or “an […]
Is anthropology a legitimate “science”? Or is anthropology more like history? A personalised interpretation of data, where the things we see are often merely the things others choose to reveal? Or perhaps the things we were looking for in the first place? What true inferences can be drawn from studying the cultural behaviours of […]
“Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponents will do it for you.” Mark Twain The family tree of virtually every American family descended from “non-elites” is riven with mysteries, questions, dead ends, and dubious claims of lineage. By “non-elite”, we mean people with little access […]
1929. Imagine being born into a dirt-poor Shawnee family in North Carolina in the first year of the Great Depression. Imagine getting sent away to fight in Korea at the age of 21, where you manage to contract tuberculosis. Imagine having a lung removed in your 20s, and being told that you will never sing […]
There is a meme seen on social media, showing a large deer in the middle of a road enclosed by woods. Under the photo are the words “The deer is not crossing the road. A road is crossing his forest.” I often come back to this idea when considering American history. What we are […]
Dorothea Lange‘s photographic series Migrant Woman is easily THE most recognised series of iconic images documenting and representing the misery of the Great Depression in Dustbowl Oklahoma nad the American West. These were the people forced onto the road, with thousands living in tent cities along dusty highways. For many, those highways led west. California […]
In the USA, having a publicly accepted and respected “self identity” is a privilege often enjoyed only by those people with access to the levers of power. Property. Money. Education. Social connections. Weapons. The right skin color. A man called J. D. Vance (his own name the product of a selected identity) wrote […]
The map on the left was compiled during the Civil War era. The map on the right is the recent result of Google Analytics data. Most people inclined to think about it have always seen the Civil War in terms of a simple North/South divide. The literary-minded among us grew up aware of The […]
This blog will almost certainly never have a massive audience. This is not a complaint – merely a statement of probability. We live in a world of clickbait headlines, sound-bites and memes. Social media favors “content producers” who churn out regular and easily digested snacks. Scroll-through and swipe left/swipe right. Social media rewards content […]
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