Of course it had to be the 1980s. We humans are prone to our periodic outbreaks of mass insanity—and there were no lack of those over the 20th century—but perhaps only the 1980s could have brought together the most garish fringes of popular culture and a repressed but growing fear of the horrors lurking beneath the increasingly preppy surface of Western society…
Between 1955 and 1991, Disneyland ran a Tobacco Shop on Main Street U.S.A. A model of the wider American society outside the groomed insularity of the Anaheim theme park, Main Street boasted an assortment of shops that mirrored the small towns that would vanish over the course of the twentieth century…
On July 5, 1987, the day after Independence Day, a year and two days after President Reagan’s centennial rededication of the Statue of Liberty, and at the height of the Iran-Contra hearings, a monumental story appeared in the Miami Herald. Penned by investigative reporter Alfonso Chardy, the piece claimed to expose the workings of a “secret government” in place during the first six-and-a-half years of the Reagan Presidency…
This pair of campaign buttons illustrates the turmoil within the Democratic Party during the 1980 U.S. presidential election. Incumbent Jimmy Carter faced an insurgent, left-wing opponent in the form of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy…
