Every once in a great while an unprecedented unpredictable pop culture moment organically happens and takes the world by storm. This was the cast last week when, after an incredibly lack luster summer blockbuster season at the box office, two films Barbie and Oppenheimer dropped on the same day. We’ve known this was coming for…
Category: History
e223. The Cultural Impact of Ms. Marvel on Disney+
This Wednesday saw the season finale of Ms. Marvel on Disney+, a show that we have been thoroughly enjoying. However, there’s been a weird bit of reaction to Ms. Marvel and the MCU in general as of late. While the critical reviews of Ms. Marvel are overwhelmingly positive (it currently sits at a 98% on…
e222. So, The World’s On Fire… Everything is Fine…
It’s been a while since we spent the show just talking about the state of the world. Mostly because… well, the state of the world kinda sucks right now… and we sort of didn’t want to deal with it. But this is a show about culture and the culture in the world right now, particularly…
e202. To Kill a Mockingbird… and a Maus — Censorship & Book Banning
Every once in a while the world of weekly pop culture and the world of literary academia collide so totally that the world notices even outside of our show. Last week was one of those weeks. A school board in Tennessee voted to remove Maus, the critically acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize winning Holocaust memoir graphic novel,…
e186. Wayne, Hannah, Mav & Jehnie’s Infinite Mixtape
Have you ever made a mixtape? We’re sort of willing to guess that if you’re listening to our show, at some point or another you have. But… did you actually do it on “a tape” or was it a mix CD? Was it a playlist in the cloud? Does this matter? Are all of these…
e178. Pop History vs. Public History
How do we learn history? The easy answer is to say we learn it from history books, but is that true? How many of us ever read a history book after 10th grade? It’s more likely that we get the majority of our history either from museums or from historic entertainment… things like Hamilton… or,…
CFC: Pop vs. Public History — Why Do We Love Nonfiction?
From Monica: I want to talk about Seabiscuit. Being an archetypal precocious horse girl, at age 9 Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit (1999) was the first nonfiction book I remember reading. It was the first time I was conscious of the popular weight attributed to the New York Times bestseller list, and for once my childhood interests…