Jeff Melnick

Jeff Melnick

Contributor

Jeff Melnick has been thinking about the Manson Family since first encountering the book and mini-series Helter Skelter in the 1970s. Melnick is a professor at University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of 9/11 Culture: America Under Construction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Black-Jewish Relations on Trial (University Press of Mississippi, 2000), and A Right to Sing the Blues (Harvard University Press, 1999). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Clio Reads

Between a Soft Rock and a Hard Place: A Review of Karen Tongson’s Why Karen Carpenter Matters

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Early in her new book Why Karen Carpenter Matters, Karen Tongson reports that a karaoke machine in the Philippines once presented the key phrase from the Carpenters’ 1970 song “We’ve Only Just Begun” as “whiteness and promises” instead of “white lace and promises.”1 Sometimes, Tongson suggests, getting something “wrong” can be a very powerful mode… Read more →

Killing Clio

“Charlie Says” and the Santa Cruz Prison Project

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Joan Didion, Again “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969.” This ubiquitous Joan Didion quotation, from her essay “The White Album” (1979), appears in approximately one gazillion accounts of the Manson Family murders, and now it serves as the opening title card to the 2019… Read more →