Skip to main content

The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

Read More

Pumping iron becomes synonymous with being the "perfect Christian man."

1897

REL
EUG
GEND

As part of the evolution of eugenic thinking, images of Jesus change so that he is seen as a buff, super muscular white man. “Contending for the title of the most ubiquitous model of moral and physical manhood among white Protestant American men was Jesus. The contours of manhood...were rendered in contemporary depictions of Jesus as the model physical type" (Wills, 2022).

Called "Muscular Christianity," this depiction of "perfect maleness" as being visually muscular carry forward to this day, going so far as to include photoshopped images of Donald Trump as a muscular Rambo.