Category: Past and Present
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Photograph from 1959: harvesting potatoes on a collective farm near Kyiv.
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WPA poster promoting public hygiene: “Keep Clean” by Erik Hans Krause, ca. 1936–39.
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“The Children Were Watching,” dir. Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, USA 1961, 25 min. — This documentary doesn’t feel as old to me as I wish it did. In part that’s because I watched it in Trump’s America during an especially difficult year, but something deeper is at play. The…
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Photo: Men sitting on park benches in Haddon Heights, NJ, 1934. The Great Depression hit many people like this hard, not just economically but also physically and mentally.
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I watched “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) last night. Despite the many differences to today’s world and the oversimplification of the state political machine, the politics in the film strike me as relevant to our own time. Thing is, though, it would probably resonate with Americans regardless of ideological…
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Via JSTOR Daily, which describes an 1840 pamphlet advocating “a four-pronged approach to public healthcare that sounds remarkably like our own.”
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Quotation: Alex Ross on the United States that let Thomas Mann in and then later drove him away.
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Poster for Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” in play form, presented in New York City by the WPA Federal Theater.
