Livia Gershon is a freelance writer in Nashua, New Hampshire. Her writing has appeared in publications including Salon, Aeon Magazine and the Good Men Project. Contact her on Twitter @liviagershon.
The term “white trash” once was used to disparage poor white people. In the Civil Rights era, its meaning shifted to support business-friendly racial politics.
The neoliberal politics that developed in the 1970s created financial instability and fragmented cultural markets, helping to pave the way for Trumpism.
American newspapers portrayed members of immigrant groups as potential anarchists, linking the ideology to other anxieties and stereotypes about foreigners.
The popular musical poses Alexander Hamilton as a symbol of the value of immigrants brought to America, but over time, his party became increasingly xenophobic.
For both the Shawnee of North America and the Sámi of northern Europe, alcohol provided by colonizing powers was a symbolic and practical political issue.
Body weight is in some ways a trickier topic for sociology students than other stigmas. One professor explains how he approaches the challenge of discussing it.
Many ways of measuring the economy came about in the decades between the American Civil War and World War II. We’ve been arguing about them ever since.
The nineteenth-century colonial economy of Western Australia depended on unfree labor, whether from indentured workers, convicts, or Indigenous people.
In Mongolia, dogs are close companions to humans and a key part of a cosmology with Buddhist and shamanic influences. But they’re also seen as unclean.
Since the early days of African enslavement in Brazil, Black Brazilians have cultivated rituals that mix Catholic and African elements in the form of holy Samba.
In the late 1800s, German American singing festivals united German immigrant communities and brought new kinds of cultural activities to the United States.
Despite failing to break the Homestead Strike in 1892, the Pinkerton Agency demonstrated the extralegal threat paramilitary agencies created for Americans.
In the early 1800s, the Native people of the Plains region didn’t generally think about their land in terms of tribes, territories, or racial difference.
Immigrants from Quebec held a distinct position in an American labor landscape in which experts viewed different “races” as being suited to different kinds of work.
In seventeenth-century Europe, architects adopted styles from the Ottoman empire to create new kinds of social spaces including public baths and coffeehouses.
