Hometown Histories
The Shadow Of Chemical Valley
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Sarnia has been growing and dying in cycles for a hundred years.
Shorts
Deference and Doomposting
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Ironically, Chevron deference — which the conservative Supreme Court scrapped last month — began as a conservative legal tool.
Turpentine in Time
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Each community had an overseer who supervised the operations and the commissary. He also enforced the law.
In Solidarity—And Sometimes, In Tandem
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What is possible when white activists heed the call of the Black radical vanguard.
Historians as Parents
Historians As Parents: Podcasting Through It
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The thing that I thought would be easiest to drop became something of a lifeline for me.
Historians as Parents
Historians As Parents: My Father’s Memory
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Whatever I write and record could be important for my children and future generations.
Revive Your Darlings
The Great Leg Show!
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Hot pants served as a sartorial riposte to the fashion industry’s relentless campaign for the midi.
Shorts
In Their Own Voices
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The New Bedford Sunday Standard-Times announced: “Indian Nuns Invade College”
Jose Chung's December Issue
The Lone Gunmen Who Came in from the Fringe
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The weirdo researchers were explaining fringe theories to a prime-time audience of millions.
Jose Chung's December Issue
Caught on Camera
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The X-Files plays on our fascination with the camera — and our fear of it.
Jose Chung's December Issue
This Has Something To Do With Computers, Doesn’t It? The Internet?
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It seems strange to think of the 1990s as history; it was only 30 years ago, after all.
Jose Chung's December Issue
Past Lives
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Who wants to watch a show whose characters never make real moral choices?
Jose Chung's December Issue
A Nice Trip To The Forest
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With so many crop dusters, somebody’s bound to see a UFO.
Jose Chung's December Issue
A Beautiful Mutation
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This is all wrong. This is not how the story is supposed to end.
Contingent Book & Article Lists
2023 Literary Studies Book and Journal Article List
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A companion list for lit studies scholars.
Revive Your Darlings
The Castle on the Hill
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“We asked for Central High School but they think it is too good for us.”
Historians as Parents
Historians As Parents: Sex Education
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Parenting is a humbling reminder that knowledge does not just magically appear.
Historians as Parents
Historians As Parents: Playlist Challenges
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In a cruel twist of fate, my children suffer from having a historian for a mother.
Historians as Parents
Historians As Parents: Raising Twins
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I first learned I was pregnant immediately after passing my Ph.D. qualifying exams. A few weeks later I discovered I was carrying twins.
Historians as Parents
Historians As Parents: Introduction
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I can tell that they find it both fascinating and frustrating to have a historian as a parent.
Revive Your Darlings
The Prophecy of Rani Gaidinliu
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The Empire launched a massive manhunt to capture her.
Shorts
When Witches Take Flight
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I was quickly surprised to find that flight — a defining feature of the modern image of the witch — figured relatively little in the earliest medieval sources.
How I Do History
How Canden S. Arciniega Does History
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“Why do the best ideas come while I’m driving?”
Shorts
A Profession, If You Can Keep It
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Imagined meritocracies mean little to extractive institutions.
History & Mystery
The Song of the Dying Composer
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Attaching a mystery to a famous musician or work gives us something to hold onto.
History & Mystery
The Mystery of the Social-Climbing Copywriter
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Smoke your way to a peaceful working-class life.
History & Mystery
The Plot of the Dime Store Dostoyevsky
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The master of the psychodrama mystery was Jim Thompson.
History & Mystery
The Clue in the Old Lace
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Fashion history is rarely as straightforward as Nancy Drew led me to believe.
Contingent Book & Article Lists
2022 Literary Studies Book and Journal Article List
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A companion list for lit studies scholars.
Contingent Book & Article Lists
2022 Contingent Journal Article List
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A companion to our 2022 book list.
Contingent Book & Article Lists
2022 Contingent Book List
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When you’re shopping for books this season, consider a contingent scholar.
Shorts
Dellwood: An Elegy for My Cat
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I’m an animal historian — I know the dog always dies in the end.
Science
A Social Network Born Of Social Distancing
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Scholars of science, technology, and medicine who are building a new community from the ground up.
Shorts
Hotline Suspense
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The entire plot of Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire turns around getting people on the phone.
Shorts
Man of Smoke
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“I was trying to write the life of a man who had no life. What other options did I have?”
How I Do History
How Steven D. Booth Does History
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“Archival work involves building relationships.”
A Thing Of The Past
The Papier-Mâché Mask
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We can intuitively interact with the history of an artform even when we aren’t explicitly aware of that history.
Contingent Book & Article Lists
2021 Literary Studies Book and Journal Article List
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A companion list for lit studies scholars.
A Thing Of The Past
The Persian Rug
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Still in her concentration camp uniform, Olga found her Persian rug.
A Thing Of The Past
The Government Pen
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As a child, I thought it was extremely cool that working for the U.S. government meant that you could get a pen that said “U.S. Government.”
A Thing Of The Past
The Second Skeleton
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Museums construct knowledge by constructing objects—literally.
Shorts
A Special Memorialized State
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Facebook was assigning me a place in the past, a place for the dead.
Them, Or Me, Or Us?
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They created a space to share their own experiences, and found their experiences were shared by others.
Shorts
On The Road With The WPA
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Pick any stretch of road and you can find along it a history of the nation.
Shorts
The Great History of Small Things
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If I’m being honest, Dan was probably my best friend all those early years in Newtown.
Entertainment & Recreation
How Canons Are Formed
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Many Progressive Era playwrights were women. So how did they become “invisible” in the canon?
Shorts
The Committee to Keep Dick Tasting
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Hi, any chance you might have sent Richard Nixon a dick joke fifty years ago?
Shorts
The Olympic Paradox
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The Olympics has always relied on two antithetical forces: nationalism and internationalism.
Shorts
From the American People
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How did human rights and development come to be so intertwined in U.S. foreign policy?
Shorts
Colony of Cobblestone
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The blue cobblestones of Old San Juan look nice on a postcard, but they also tell a long history of exploitation.
Shorts
How To Make An Oligopoly
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A seven-point memo proposing control of the global insulin market.
Shorts
Organize or Perish
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The pandemic has shown what happens when universities assume they don’t need to answer to graduate students.
Shorts
Public Health
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Loving an alcoholic who is a renowned expert on substance abuse is debilitating.
Shorts
Country Before Dog
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Though American children could not serve in the war themselves, they could vicariously serve through their dogs.
Shorts
Where Is Dorsey Foultz?
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When the D.C. Metropolitan Police failed to catch a murder suspect, white residents criticized and mocked. Black residents worried.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Turnips
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“For my family, boiled turnips became a reminder of my grandmother’s suffering.”
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Dorayaki
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“I don’t need to fit perfectly into one culture to feel like I truly belong.”
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Jell-O
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Jell-O remains an easy, popular way to enter the domestic realm.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Wilbur Buds
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It was the only dark chocolate my grandmother liked.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Wacky Cake
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A cake made without milk or butter? Don’t tell the Minnesota Dairy Industry Committee!
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Stuffed Cabbage
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My great-grandmother Sylvia’s stuffed cabbage held an out-sized role in my culinary imagination.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Instant Coffee
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I suppose it really is addiction. But I’ve quit most of the other fun ones.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: Instant Noodles
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As a picky eater, I ate oodles of instant noodles growing up.
Personal Pan Histories
Personal Pan Histories: պանիրով հած
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It might be a simple dish, yet it’s one I hold close to my heart—and a symbol, for me, of the Armenian immigrant experience.
Shorts
2020 Contingent Book List
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When you’re shopping for books this season, consider a contingent scholar.
Featured in Category
History of The Present/Contemporary History Resources
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A history of the present is by its nature a speculative exercise.
Shorts
The Strange World of AP U.S. History
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Born out of the Cold War, the course has a great contradiction at its heart: why do we teach history?
Shorts
The Electoral Punt
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It can be hard to know what the founders intended when they didn’t know, either.
Shorts
How-to Booke
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How-to books, including those which promise the secret to wealth, are not a modern invention.
Shorts
What About The Bad Job Offers?
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After finishing a doctoral program, the goal for many has always been a tenure-track job offer. But what about really terrible offers?
Shorts
Selling Splitnik; or, Aunt Olga Goes to Moscow
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She was there to promote a way of life that little resembled her own.
Shorts
Bowling For Suburbia
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By adopting middle-class aesthetics, the bar-basement bowling alley became the “poor man’s country club.”
Shorts
Queen of Heaven, Empress of Hell
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In late medieval texts, the Virgin Mary was a skilled debater–and a dab hand with a club.
Shorts
This Is The Night
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Performed once a year, the Exsultet features rich descriptions of sights, sounds, scents—and bees.
Shorts
The Trouble with Triscuits
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Though the “electricity biscuit” thesis is plausible, killjoy historians need more evidence.
Shorts
The Pitfalls of Fandom for Women of Color
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What happens if we demystify fandom as a haven for female desire?
Shorts
Bats and Snakes and Dogs and Things Like That
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Regulation, not culture, is the key to understanding the novel coronavirus.
Shorts
Lovers Under an Apple Tree
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Why did the priest and the choir singer die, and what was the nature of their love?
Shorts
This Is A Permanent Book
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Behind Dover Publications’ eclectic 10,000-title catalog lies a remarkable story of 20th century innovation.
Shorts
guys (etc)
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I had never seen a mustache like that before—so blond and full and pin-neat, as it had to be for the power company.
Shorts
The Work of Getting Clean
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“An ex-addict without employment is an ex-addict without cure.” Or so the mantra went.
Shorts
What to the Droid Is Life Day?
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The Rebel Alliance fought for freedom, but this freedom was predicated on the automation of labor — on droids.
Shorts
Far, Far Away?
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The line between cultural influence and cultural appropriation can be blurry.
Shorts
I’ve Never Seen Anything
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How could the Jedi Order vanish from public memory in less than a generation?
Shorts
From A Certain Point Of View
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By denying access to the original cuts of the saga films, George Lucas has left us without the critical cultural documents needed for understanding the franchise’s power.
Shorts
2019 Contingent Book List
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When you’re shopping for books this season, consider a contingent scholar.
Shorts
Embroidery as Record and Resistance
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The association of embroidery with the feminine has led many to overlook its history as a subversive medium.
Shorts
Who Was Tank Kee?
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He wanted to be an ally of the Chinese immigrant. By pretending to be one himself.
Shorts
Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?
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Is philosophy uniquely hostile to trans people? No. It is hostile to marginalized people in general.
Shorts
A Brief History of Trans Philosophy
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Philosophy has long been something done to trans people, not by them.
What is Contingent?
Celebrating the Contingent Community
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This magazine is much bigger than its staff, or even its writers.
What is Contingent?
History Is For Everyone
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For all our planning and grand designs, Contingent’s success has rested entirely on having support from others.
What is Contingent?
Showing the Work
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Sharing the products of historical inquiry isn’t enough—we’ve got to show our work.
Shorts
Roads by Other Names
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Renaming streets and erecting statues aren’t nothing—but they aren’t enough, either.
Shorts
What They Don’t Want You to Know About Jesus Christ and the Seer of Poughkeepsie
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150 years before the Da Vinci Code, there was a man who said he could talk to spirits.
Shorts
In Memoriam: Panbabylonianism
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Was ancient Mesopotamia the ur-text of the “West”? Is that even a good question?
Shorts
It Was History All Along, Mom
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Flowers, a day at the spa, a biography of Andrew Jackson? A meditation on mothers, history, Mother’s Day gift-giving.
Shorts
“No One’s Ever Really Gone”
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It is easy to forget, even for historians, that the future does not exist.
Shorts
Cooking with the Time & Talents Club
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The classic Parsi cookbook has changed much over the decades, yet remains curiously old-fashioned.
Shorts
I Am A Historian I Make Exhibits
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Who are museum exhibits for, and what difference does that make?
Shorts
Selling Angola
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It is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. So who is going to its gift shop, and why?