Tag: consumer society

Celebrating Technology at the 1933–34 World’s Fair

~ Editors
Poster urging people to attend the Century of Progress International Exposition in 1933–34. The “bright” metaphor encompassed both the technological “progress” that was the focus of the fair and the diversity of resulting consumer goods presented in a striking array of colors. Source: Library of Congress, PPOC, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014646779/. On the “bright” metaphor, see Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., Bright Modernity: Color, Commerce, and Consumer Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Boys’ Life

~ Editors

Following up on Mischa Honeck’s interesting post, “Innocent Ignorance: Whitewashing an Empire with the Boy Scouts of America,” which includes a link to a 1914 Boy Scout Handbook, we have found a year’s worth of Boys’ Life from 1915 at the Internet Archive. This official BSA magazine contains stories, Scouting news, advice, photographs, advertisements, and more—some 580 pages of it in 1915. Below are four of the covers, one of them created by Norman Rockwell, an artist who was famous for capturing much that was ostensibly “innocent” about America.

Translating Sex: ‘Spartacus’ and the Gay Traveler in the 1970s

~ Christopher Ewing

Writing in the age of Yelp from Dupont, the historic center of gay life in Washington, DC, I can have trouble fully imagining the difficulty that many gay men had in accessing gay spaces. Even in the second half of the twentieth century, when gay scenes were expanding in major metropolitan areas across North America and Western Europe and gay rights movements were attaining increased visibility, access to specific gay locales remained largely dependent on local knowledge. This presented a particular challenge for the novice gay traveler, who might have possessed a vague sense that Schöneberg was the “gayborhood” of Berlin or the Marais functioned similarly for Paris, but have no idea which were the best bars, saunas, and so-called darkrooms, let alone whom to call if they ran into trouble with the police.

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