Alex Sayf Cummings's Blog, page 6

Tornado: A Global History of Hmong in the Central Valley

The Fourth of July Hmong Freedom Celebration, known simply by attendees as J4, is the largest gathering of Hmong people in the United States. Since the late 1970s, tens of thousands of Hmong from across the United States and the world gather in St. Paul, Minnesota for the annual summer sports and culture festival.

The Perils of Thoroughness for Ph.D. Students

My close friend who lived to 81 worked on a Ph.D. in history until five months past her […]

Panic at the Sick Ward: Plague Comes to 1970s Echo Park

Panic in Echo Park provides a fascinating slice-of-life take on 1970s LA, as well as Hollywood’s awkward effort to be more inclusive and with-it.

Sometimes a Spaceship Is Not a Spaceship

They say that comedy is tragedy plus time; one could say the same for nostalgia, but in any case, the key ingredient is time.

Collapsing Pluralism: The Bosnian War Three Decades Later

“Yugoslavs have a blurred conception of themselves,” the Serbian journalist and native Yugoslavian Dusko Doder wrote in 1978. […]

History Matters: Hence, Colonialists’ Futile Attempts to Erase It

When the Spanish conquered central Mexico in 1521, the gold-loco conquistadores burned the codices of the Aztecs and destroyed their […]

Daenerys Targaryen: Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Chains, Queen of the Andals, and Keeper of the Lesbian Void

I look for the slightest bit of sapphic tension in every piece of media I interact with. Last […]

The Long Bike Ride Home: A Nurse on Surviving the Early Days of the Pandemic in NYC

With nurses in New York City out on strike, we look back at our December 2020 interview with Tanya Martinez.

More Than a Slave: Embedding Dimension into Enslaved Narratives

Classical playwright Terence and his present-day counterpart Branden Jacobs-Jenkins construct worlds that provide humanistic dimension to the lives of enslaved people.

All Lost in the Supermarket: Noah Baumbach’s ‘White Noise’

Baumbach's ambitious adaptation of a book by a difficult-to-adapt author comes up short.