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nostalgia

“You can’t hold onto anything in this world. That doesn’t mean you can’t squeeze it all so tightly to your heart that it hurts.”

John Fea   |  March 28, 2025

I recently put Will Bardenwerper’s book Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America on my reading list. After reading Timothy Carney’s review of the book at the Washington Free Beacon I moved it to the […]

The Author’s Corner with Sarah Kornfield

Rachel Petroziello   |  October 21, 2024

Sarah Kornfield is Associate Professor of Communication and Affiliated Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Hope College. This interview is based on her new book, Invoking the Fathers: Dangerous Metaphors and Founding Myths in Congressional Politics (Johns Hopkins University […]

The Author’s Corner with Anthony J. Stanonis

Rachel Petroziello   |  October 14, 2024

Anthony J. Stanonis is an independent historian of the American South. This interview is based on his new book, New Orleans Pralines: Plantation Sugar, Louisiana Pecans, and the Marketing of Southern Nostalgia (LSU Press, 2024). JF: What led you to […]

Trumpism is straight out of the 1980s

John Fea   |  August 13, 2024

Maybe when Trump says “Make America Great Again” he has the 1980s in mind. Here is a taste of Michael Grasso’s Jacobin piece, “Donald Trump and the ’80s Aesthetic“: When Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea stood onstage at the Republican National […]

Republicans love the 1950s

John Fea   |  May 25, 2024

When Donald Trump says we need to ‘make America great again,” most Republicans think about the 1950s. According to Andrew Van Dam at The Washington Post, Republicans believe that the 1950s was the happiest, safest, most communitarian, and moral society […]

Image of the day

John Fea   |  May 18, 2024

Memories of the Jersey shore–specifically the boardwalk at Seaside Heights.

A case for 1950s nostalgia

John Fea   |  February 5, 2024

Today’s socialists are not longing for the days of Jim Crow. But, as Dustin Guastella of Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia argues, neither should they throw out the idea that the 1950s was a great time for the American worker. […]

Nikki Haley is running as a common sense conservative in a political party that has abandoned common sense

John Fea   |  June 25, 2023

Former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley was in Washington D.C. yesterday to speak to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference. Her walkout music was Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” Watch: Like some of the […]

Why do we long for a golden age?

John Fea   |  June 20, 2023

Is the United States in the midst of a moral breakdown? Should we support candidates who want to take us back to a golden age? Why do we want to “Make America Great Again” (Trump) or believe that “America is […]

The death of nostalgia?

John Fea   |  August 2, 2022

The Internet and social media is killing it. Here is Sam Leith at The Spectator: Nostalgia depends to a large extent on the ability to misremember. The canonical form of nostalgia, captured in the Portuguese loan-word saudade, is longing for a […]

“Evangelical”: I want that word back!

John Fea   |  October 28, 2021

I was recently a guest on the Truth Over Tribe Podcast. It is hosted by Keith Simon, pastor of The Crossing Church in Columbia, Missouri. Here are a few segments: Listen to the entire episode here.

What does this McDonalds booth have to do with the American Bible Society?

John Fea   |  June 18, 2021

Last weekend Joy and I were driving home from Providence, R.I. on Route 287 and we stopped at the McDonalds in Boonton, New Jersey. Until recently, my parents lived in the Boonton/Montville area. I was raised there, although the McDonalds […]

How do we have “thick” conversations when our mediums are so “thin”?

John Fea   |  April 14, 2021

Ezra Klein talks to University of North Carolina sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom. They cover a broad range of topics such as writing for public audiences, nostalgia, blogging, generational change, race, disabilities, moral panic, social class, status, blondness, smartness, and the […]