Why’s my kids’ daycare so damn expensive? Turns out that anti-communist fears of Soviet–style government-run childcare play a role. How strange it that Donald Trump is blasting NFL players on Twitter? Well, it might be a stupid use of a president’s time, but it’s not new for politics and race to be intertwined with football. Did social media get people so interested in #eclipse2017? Nope, “eclipse madness” is real in America, dating back to at least 1878.
The disparate stories above have something in common: They wouldn’t be found in most textbooks, but they all relate to how a better knowledge of history can help us understand the present. That’s the goal of Bunk, a new site run out of the University of Richmond and originally envisioned by its former president Ed Ayers, who’s also one of the hosts of the popular history podcast BackStory.
Ayers teaches a history class for freshmen, “Touching the Past,” that he also sees as a lab to see what students…
