
Specialist in the history of former Yugoslavia and in 1997-98 was a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. He has published articles and op-eds in the South Slav Journal, Serbian Studies, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Indianapolis Star. His next project is a book-length history of the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics.
Six months after its American introduction in 1985, the Yugo was a punch line; within a year, it was a staple of late-night comedy. By 2000, NPR’s Car Talk declared it “the worst car of the millennium.” And for most Americans that’s where the story begins and ends. Hardly. The short, unhappy life of the car, the men who built it, the men who imported it, and the decade that embraced and dis
To most observers, the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, were an unmitigated success. That year, the unlikeliest of candidate cities in the unlikeliest of candidate countries did what many had thought impossible: it hosted an international sports competition at the highest level, housing and feeding hundreds of athletes and thousands of tourists while broadcasting a positive image of s
Friday Night Lights meets The Bad News Bears in “a brisk, warmhearted reminder of how professional sports can occasionally reach stunning unprofessional depths” (Publishers Weekly): the first two seasons with the worst team in NFL history, the hapless, hilarious, and hopelessly winless 1976–1977 Tampa Bay Buccaneers.Long before their first Super Bowl victory in 2003, the Tampa Bay Buccanee
by Jason Vuic
Rating: 4.2 ⭐
Florida has long been a beacon for retirees, but for many, the American dream of owning a home there was a fantasy. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called "installment land sales industry" hawked billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida a graded hom
Two heartbreaking tales of small-towninjustice revealing America’s struggles with AIDS and racial bias in the 1980s In the1980s, the tiny town of Arcadia, Florida, was “fifty miles and fifty years fromSarasota.” With its cowboy roots, low-wage agricultural industries, and violentfrontier history, Arcadia was a curious m