Fake News: A Media Literacy Reading List
Compiled by graduate students in a 2016 course on “Activism and Digital Culture,” at University of Southern California.
The Beatles Got Started in Hamburg. There’s a Reason for That.
The Beatles first played Hamburg's pleasure zone in 1960, in a former strip club near the infamous Reeperbahn.
Black Journal and Liberatory Television
Underrepresented in the country's newsrooms, Black journalists found an outlet on public affairs shows like Black Journal.
When Black Celebrities Wore Blackface
A Black Bohemia flourished in New York before the Harlem Renaissance and with it a new type of self-determined, contradictory Black celebrity.
The Rec Room Party Where Hip-Hop Was Born
Thinking quickly and reading the dance floor, an innovative DJ began playing the funkiest parts of every record.
The First Black Woman to Perform at the Grand Ole Opry
Linda Martell made the switch from R&B to country music in the late 1960s. Her star then shined on country's biggest stage.
Choosing Love over Eugenics
Some writers see contagion as a metaphor for community—proof that we exist within an interdependent network and not as autonomous disconnected islands.
How to Meme What You Say
The linguistic theories behind what we're trying to say when we adapt and share internet memes.
How the H-Bomb Led to a Reckoning in Japan
For years, the trauma of the atomic bomb was hardly talked about in Japan. The H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll changed that.
In Defense of Kitsch
The denigration of kitsch betrays a latent anti-Catholicism, one born from centuries of class and ethnic divisions.