Tag: history

• Your monkey’s on fire (July 13, 2026)

  Mimi Smartypants discovers this mid-century cartoon on a coaster in an antique store. She writes how she was initially stopped short by its seeming complete nonsense, and then decoded it with some amount of effort and deep-cultural recall—but at the risk of it all falling apart again if you analyze it too far past that point.

• Cursed weapons (August 31, 2025)

  In A Haunting Relic From America’s Past, Wright Thompson describes his encounter with the Army-issued pistol that was used to beat and murder 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Thompson located the gun while writing a book about the context and legacy of that murder. Subsequently, the person who had inherited it—a local crop duster—donated it to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, where it just went on permanent display.

• A stone in Portland (August 19, 2025)

  An inscribed paving stone found in the East End neighborhood of Portland, Maine:

• Your flag is what you fly (August 13, 2025)

  Posting this amidst a two-week vacation in Freeport, on the Maine coast. I can report that the 1901 Maine flag, with two simple shapes on a plain background, is ubiquitous on souvenir merchandise here. In shop after shop I see it embroidered on caps, screened onto T-shirts, and carved into coasters. People here are proud of the design, and visitors clearly love it too, buying every sort of representation to take back home. I shall be among them.