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Special Intern Edition
This month, we handed the keys to our summer social media intern, Naomi Baker, to curate the newsletter around her favorite finds over the course of her internship. Naomi comes to us from Barnard College where she serves as the Columbia Daily Spectator City News Deputy Editor and the Mellon Foundation where she works as an Undergraduate Research Fellow. Read on to hear about her top picks!
Greetings from the AAPB!
August has arrived, and the summer season is beginning to wind down. With the end of summer also comes the end of my internship. Working at the AAPB and helping oversee the archive’s social media platforms, I have had the chance to discover a lot of really unique material hidden in the archive. I am excited to share with you some of my favorites in this month’s special edition of the newsletter!
– Naomi Baker ( Summer ‘26 Social Media Intern)
My Top Four
Black Journal, as I have learned in these past few months, was a show ahead of its time. It was not afraid to discuss the topics white audiences shied away from, addressing questions we still look for answers to today. Sometimes the show, however, took it to another extreme, not just discussing the future, but predicting it.
Framed around the 1976 bicentennial, the episode pairs historian Dr. Edward Peters (author of a study on European witchcraft) with psychic Lillian Cosby for a conversation that’s part historical seminar, part fortune-telling session (wacky, I know).
Fifty years later, following another major American anniversary, it’s fun to look back on where we thought our country was heading. Today, it feels as though there are so many directions for our future that it’s hard to know which one to bet on.
In the spirit of psychics, my prediction for the next centennial is that we still won’t have flying cars, but someone will be very confident we’re getting them any day now.
The setup to this short film is relatively simple. The titular ‘Harold,’ a self-proclaimed Indigenous trickster, along with his band of ‘ warriors’, are attempting to swindle a white-run foundation out of grant money. They do so through a series of increasingly outlandish pitches – the most recent being a proposal to open a “pinch bean” coffeehouse chain across their reservation, claiming the conjured-up beans are a cure for alcoholism. To convince the foundation of their plan, they take the members on a long-winded tour of sacred “tribal places.” The itinerary includes sights such as a university Anthropology Department and a baseball game.
I LOVE this film. It reminds me of newer works like 2023’s American Fiction. Anishinaabe poet Gerald Vizenor’s writing exposes the absurdity of the American imagination surrounding Native peoples.
For example, while both the audience and the tricksters recognize the ridiculousness of an “Urban Dream” renaming ceremony held in a parking lot (where one contestant is given the name “Baltic”), the foundation members remain completely oblivious. As a result, we laugh with the tricksters rather than at them. The joke ultimately lands on the foundation members, whose colonial fantasies about Indigenous identity make them incapable of recognizing the performance for what it is.
Baking With Julia; #301; Martha Stewart
This summer, I’m living at home in Boston, a city notorious for unpredictable public transit. Unsurprisingly, I have been sequestered at home by an unfortunate train closure. With all this free time and no car, I have been spending many more hours in the kitchen than the average college student.
Usually, I am good with a microwaved meal and a bowl of ice cream, but the other day, I got a huge craving for something sweet and decided to go all out. I had just watched the 2009 CLASSIC Julia & Julia, so, of course, I checked the AAPB records.
For those fans of classic cooking television, what I found may be the ultimate treasure – if not, it never hurts to find a new obsession. Martha Stewart and Julia Child? That’s a crazy combination, in the best way possible, of course.
The recipes they give (for a three-tiered wedding cake and vanilla rum buttercream) are definitely too advanced for me. But that didn’t stop me from devouring the episode, as I slipped the box brownies into the oven. Especially with Stewart being a Barnard alumna (my college!), it was a treat to watch. We have plenty of other Julia Child recipes for you to check out, though (ranging in difficulty), so don’t worry if you also don’t have the ability to bake a tiered cake on a whim!
This recording is everything to me. It opens on an incredible group dance number to Whitney Houston’s Somebody to Love Me, and only gets better from there. The queens’ fashion and the song selections are just so quintessentially early ’90s (at least from my perspective; I wasn’t born yet!)
This is an intimate window into an important community. American Samoan understandings of gender have long been more expansive than the Western binary. The term faʻafafine refers to people who identify with a third gender. Translating to “in the manner of a woman,” faʻafafine are oftentimes assigned male at birth, but go on to inhabit more feminine qualities. These individuals are recognized by many in Samoan society and are often important members of their communities.
Honorable Mentions
- Let Them Eat Cheese – This 1983 KQED special examines the paradox of food insecurity in the United States, highlighting how government warehouses held massive food surpluses while millions of Americans struggled with hunger.
- Woman; 420; Masculine, Feminine, and Androgyny – Host Sandra Elkin discusses gender roles and binaries with psychologist Joan Bean, then the dean of Wheaton College. A surprisingly relevant conversation on androgyny!
- Mobile Mardi Gras – While many are familiar with the yearly Mardi Gras in Louisiana, many are less aware of the traditions in Mobile, Alabama. This documentary highlights the vibrant culture and community that has sprung up around the event.
- Villa Alegre; 164; Music, Music, Music – From featuring a mini-mariachi band to a drumming lesson, this episode is full of beautiful sounds and amazing performances. Like the rest of Villa Alegre, the content is bilingual, in English and Spanish!
A Few Final Thoughts
As a history major, I’ve always been interested in archival work, and working at the AAPB in this capacity has been incredibly fulfilling. Surprisingly, what I wasn’t expecting from my time here was how much I would come to love public television as a whole.
It’s not that I had never encountered it before (I grew up watching programs like Anne of Green Gables and Arthur); it’s more that I hadn’t realized the scope of what was out there. Public broadcasting’s community-focused approach lets each station tailor programming that feels alive in a way national networks rarely capture. The people and stories I found in the archive weren’t always big or noteworthy in the traditional sense, but they mattered deeply to the communities that made them. That’s why it is so important to preserve everything, not just the moments history remembers, but the small, ordinary ones too.
While my time at the archive is over for now, I will continue to be excited for what comes next, and you should too!
