Pasts Archives - Ex-Plain

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One Free Ride: When Texas Prison Inmates Became Rodeo Cowboys

For more than fifty years, the Texas Prison Rodeo turned incarceration into public entertainment, drawing massive crowds to Huntsville to…

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In 1974, Soviet authorities used bulldozers, arrests, and violence to destroy an unsanctioned outdoor art exhibition, only to ignite an…

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Two thousand years before concrete brutalism, this ancient Roman tomb built to honor a former slave appears staggeringly modern, but…

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A stolen white Porsche 911 in 1970s Yugoslavia turned an ordinary car thief into an urban legend. For several nights,…

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We're doing a new regular feature where we collect all of the strange and wonderful things we find thanks to…

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To the left of the main entrance of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City stands a controversial bronze door that…

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Between 1979 and 1989, photographer Christopher John Ball documented the people of Blackburn, the Lancashire industrial town that shaped his…

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In the postwar era, pharmaceutical print advertising, especially for psychiatric drugs, was blunt, graphic, and often disturbing, using fear and…

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Moving to West Berlin, David Bowie and Iggy Pop found unexpected inspiration in German Expressionism, most notably in the form…

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Beginning the 80s, Japanese photographer Shoichi Aoki has quietly built one of the most revealing visual records of London street…