By Lisa Hix — Compared with the sophisticated technology Russia employed to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election, the Soviet propaganda in "Brutal Bloc Postcards," published by FUEL Design and Publishing, seems downright quaint. Many of these postcards, published by governments of the U.S.S.R. between the 1960s and 1980s, depict the bland, 1960s five-story concrete-paneled apartments known as "khrushchyovka" as if to say, "Look at the modern wonder of collective worker housing!" To Westerners, the boxy...

United States of Protest: A Citizen's Guide to 250 Years of Resistance

By Lisa Hix — Two black men walk into a coffee shop, ask to use the restroom, and are denied. They sit down at a table, and within two minutes, the store manager calls the police. The officers immediately arrest the men and lead them out of the store in handcuffs. It might sound like a scene from a civil-rights sit-in at a lunch counter the South in 1960, but if you've been following the news, you know it took place at a Philadelphia Starbucks in April 2018. The men, who had a business meeting at the...

Pushing Buttons: In Our Divided America, Political Pinbacks Give Anyone a Voice

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — In this modern age of political polarization, we Americans increasingly surround ourselves with friends, neighbors, and news sources that reinforce our worldviews rather than challenge them. As we spend more of our days online, such divisions are heightened by algorithms that feed on our unchecked desire for affirmation, conveniently hiding opposing perspectives. But amid these isolating echo chambers, the success of political pinbacks offers a small beacon of hope—a quaintly analog way of...

Black Panther Women: The Unsung Activists Who Fed and Fought for Their Community

By Lisa Hix — The 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was thrust into the mainstream early in 2016, when Beyoncé paid tribute to the revolutionary group during her performance of “Formation” at Super Bowl 50 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The pop superstar and her dancers were decked in leather costumes, with the dancers wearing characteristic black berets and the singer herself sporting crossed bandoliers. Not only did Beyoncé honor a defiant radical organization, she also...

The Politics of Prejudice: How Passports Rubber-Stamp Our Indifference to Refugees

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Following the attacks in Paris on Friday, November 13, media across the globe reported the discovery of a Syrian passport found near the body of one of the suicide bombers. “It remained unclear if the passport was authentic,” wrote the "New York Times." Regardless of legitimacy, the document's presence immediately stirred debate on the permeability of Europe's borders, renewing calls to keep refugees out. "Nearly every country that was occupied by German forces contributed or remained...

How America Bought and Sold Racism, and Why It Still Matters

By Lisa Hix — Today, very few white Americans openly celebrate the horrors of black enslavement—most refuse to recognize the brutal nature of the institution or actively seek to distance themselves from it. "The modern American sees slavery as a regrettable period when blacks worked without wages,” writes Dr. David Pilgrim, the Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion and a sociology professor at Ferris State University and the author of , who has spent his life studying the artifacts that have...

The Struggle in Black and White: Activist Photographers Who Fought for Civil Rights

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — July marked the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Yet after half a century of adjustment to a world where such discrimination is illegal, the United States still hasn’t overcome its legacy of racism. Photographs and videos taken in Ferguson, Missouri, during the past few months bear a chilling resemblance to the images of protests, riots, and police clashes in...

What America Can Learn From Berlin's Struggle to Face Its Violent Past

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — On the edge of a small park in central Berlin stands a slightly oversized kitchen table and two matching chairs centered on a parquet floor, all cast in bronze. One of the chairs has toppled over backwards—the only sign of something amiss. Along the edge of this domestic scene is the text of a poem, which begins “...Oh the houses of death, invitingly appointed” and ends with "the body of Israel going up in smoke." Known as Der Verlassene Raum, or The Deserted Room, it’s a quiet and moving...

Trailing Angela Davis, from FBI Flyers to 'Radical Chic' Art

By Ben Marks — On August 18, 1970, Angela Yvonne Davis's name was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for kidnapping, murder, and interstate flight. Davis was already a darling of the left for her membership in the Communist Party and outspoken support for the Black Panthers, which caused then-California governor Ronald Reagan to personally orchestrate the 26-year-old's dismissal from a teaching post at UCLA. Being hunted by J. Edgar Hoover for a crime she clearly did not commit took Davis's celebrity...

The Mao Mango Cult of 1968 and the Rise of China's Working Class

By Ben Marks — For 2,000 years, the peach was the iconic fruit of China, an auspicious symbol of good health and a long life. But from August of 1968 until roughly the fall of the following year, the mango was China’s most revered produce item, whose meaning was unwittingly bestowed upon it by none other than Mao Zedong. “Apparently, Mao didn’t like fruit. It was an easy re-gift." Now an exhibition about the mango's short-lived sanctification has opened at Museum Reitberg in Zurich, Switzerland....

War on Women, Waged in Postcards: Memes From the Suffragist Era

By Lisa Hix — "Do hormones drive women's votes?" That headline is not from a newspaper published in 1892 or 1922, but from CNN online in 2012. Posted just last week, the story survived all of seven hours, weathering ridicule from the blogosphere, before the news hub "determined that some elements of the story did not meet the editorial standards of CNN." "Should women with school-age children work? Should men co-parent? We're having the same debates." No kidding. Check out the lead: "There's something...

Why Would Anyone Collect Nazi?

By Ben Marks — When we started inviting people to post items from their collections on Show & Tell, we knew that sooner or later we'd be faced with a Nazi swastika. At first, we simply followed the lead of eBay and deleted anything with a Nazi swastika on it that was not a coin or a stamp. But then we noticed that the handful of people who were uploading these World War II medals, helmets, and badges appeared to be sincere militaria collectors, not neo-Nazis trying to sneak an offensive image onto our...

Vicious Vintage Campaign Buttons

By Collectors Weekly Staff — Think current U.S. political campaigns are nasty? The attack-pinback has long been a tool of partisans and politicos. Today, President Obama finally produced his long-form birth certificate, rendering this button (above, right), and a central complaint of presumptive presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign, obsolete. In 1968, candidate Richard Nixon promised to bring the troops home from Viet Nam. Two years later, as the war escalated, anti-Nixon forces accused the president of...