Popular Culture
Laundry Day (Not the Band)
In my last post, I made a casual reference to just how hard it was to do laundry in the mid-nineteenth century, but I didn’t bother to elaborate.* Time to correct that oversight. Laundry in the mid-nineteenth century was a difficult job, one that most households undertook no more than once a week.** Washing machines…
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Wanda Gág, Printmaker with a”Grimm” Aesthetic
Until a few weeks ago, the name Wanda Gág meant nothing to me, but it turns I was very familiar with her most famous work. I discovered Gág while I was happily reading a book about professional women artists in the first half of the twentieth century who had all been students of a single…
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The Celestials’ Last Game
I’ve been following Ben Railton on social media for a long time now, first on the site formerly known as Twitter (back in the good old days) and now on Bluesky, where he is @americanstudier.bluesky.social Among other things, he curates a fabulous list, #SundayScholar, of people to follow and stuff to read. I always find…
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