A Different Season on the History of Raqs

One of the things that gave me a perspective of the mainstream views of "belly dance", when I first started my interest, was digging through The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, back when it was just a yearly "big green book", for references to the form. It's a fascinating bit of work, if you have the spare time, to do the same; I think I went back as far as the 50's, using terms like "belly dance", "oriental dance", and the like.
Of course, now we have much of this computerized; most libraries have an online subscription to catalogs that'll do the work for you, no need to dig through dusty tombs. And now Google makes the research even easier. There's a Google News Archive that goes pretty far back, decades in some cases, to make it easy-as-pie to see not only the history of raqs shaquri from a mainstream POV, but also it's ups and downs. I've long maintained that you can map the interest in the dance by the articles in mainstream publications, and I daresay the Google News Archive entry for "Belly Dance" is a cool way to do some interesting research along those lines.
What's nearly as interesting when you read around is how we, as dancers, talk about the dance. We are getting farther and father away from the language of fantasy, and more references to the reality of the form are present in the articles coming down the pike today. Sadly, the old prejudices and biases pop up as well, from poorly-thought-out reporting on "lascivious hips" and "heaving bosoms", to dancer instructors being quoted as blindly reciting one of the "Belly Dance Origins" where they've clearly not done any research, or even credible reading. There's a lot of work to do.