NEW YORK (AP) — It's all in the name. Bobble. Head.
It's what the tiny collectible figurines with the spring-laden oversize heads are known for: Give them a tap and watch their tops go, gyrating up and down or side to side. And any head can bobble - entertainers, athletes, politicians, animals, fictional characters, even your own if you get one personalized.
Kitschy, kind of funny, kind of clever, ubiquitous as giveaways at places like baseball games, who doesn't love a bobblehead? America most definitely does.
“I think they’re the ultimate Americana, sort of pop-culture icon,” says Phil Sklar, a bobblehead figurine aficionado who has parlayed that interest into founding the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum. The Milwaukee, Wisconsin, site offers visitors a chance to gawk at a vast array of the figurines as well as learn more about their history, and offers bobbleheads for sale. (Also very American? Spaces that celebrate highly specific interests.)
The dolls aren't an American invention. Sklar says there were head-nodding statues in China at least a few hundred years ago, seen by Europeans who brought versions back with them. Their popularity spread, and smaller versions were made, particularly in Germany.
But they reached their true head-bobbing potential in America, he says, first becoming popular in the 1960s by sports figures being given out at baseball games and then expanding to include a range of famous people, like the Beatles.
While there have been lulls over the decades in the level of public interest in the dolls, they've always been around, with whoever's in the public spotlight likely to become a bobblehead subject. Says Sklar: “They really have just been something that Americans have come to know and love."
Part of a recurring series, “American Objects,” marking the 250th anniversary of the United States. For more American objects, click here. For more stories on the anniversary, click here.
FILE - A promotional bobblehead showing Willie Mays is displayed during the San Francisco Giants baseball media open house in San Francisco, March 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)
FILE - This collection of file photos showing various bobblehead figures on different dates and locations. (AP Photos/File)
PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) — The deadlocked jury in the Lindsay Clancy trial went home without a verdict Thursday in a dramatic sixth day of deliberations. Her defense lawyer told the judge that the panel’s foreperson said in a note that a single juror won’t follow the court's instructions about reasonable doubt and was holding up a verdict.
The jury will return Friday to see if they can reach a decision on whether the Massachusetts mother is criminally responsible for killing her three children.
Before sending the jury home on Thursday, the judge refused the defense’s request to remove one of the jurors following heated discussions among the parties.
Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, doesn’t deny strangling her children in the basement of their home in 2023 before trying to take her own life. Her attorney argues that postpartum psychosis led to her actions, while prosecutors say she knew what she was doing when she killed Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy, ages 5, 3 and 8 months.
Clancy’s livestreamed trial has generated intense interest, with reporters and spectators packing the courtroom. The case has also sparked deep public divisions over her culpability and the issues around maternal mental health after childbirth.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.
Judge William Sullivan, after receiving the jury's note, brought in each juror individually and questioned them in private. The judge then reread his instructions on reasonable doubt before sending them back to continue deliberating on a verdict.
That prompted an angry objection from Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, who demanded that one juror be removed. Sullivan declined. This was the first time the jury indicated possible tension or acrimony in the deliberation room.
Throughout the trial, Clancy has received letters of support “from all over the world,” defense attorney Kevin Reddington said Thursday. “It’s just amazing. She reads them all.”
Sullivan explained to the courtroom on Wednesday that jurors were again at an impasse — a sign there’s a growing chance of a hung jury and the trial ending without a resolution.
Sullivan told the jurors not to abandon their own convictions just to reach a verdict, but urged them to seriously consider opposing views and reassess their positions if appropriate.
No one knows, he said, that another jury would be “more intelligent, more impartial or more competent to decide it than you are.”
If the jury ultimately can’t agree on a verdict, the judge could declare a mistrial. Prosecutors would then have to decide whether to put Clancy on trial again, drop the charges or try to negotiate a plea deal with her lawyer.
If the jury decides Clancy was criminally responsible for her actions, it could convict her of either murder or manslaughter. If she is acquitted, a judge could still order her confined to a mental health facility if an evaluation determines that she poses a danger to the public.
Jurors have heard testimony from relatives and doctors about how Clancy’s mental health declined in the months before the killings and how her treatment included several medications and a short stay in a psychiatric hospital.
Medical experts hired by the prosecution and the defense reached sharply different conclusions about her psychiatric state when she killed the children.
Patrick Clancy has said in interviews that he forgives his now ex-wife, whom he views as ill rather than evil.
Clancy strangled the children with exercise bands in their home’s basement, then jumped from a second-floor window. She remains paralyzed from the waist down. Her lawyers say she heard a voice telling her to kill the children so she could end her own life.
The prosecution argues she deliberately sent her then-husband on errands to get him out of the house, and prosecutors have questioned the seriousness of her suicide attempt.
The exterior of Plymouth County Trial Court building as jurors deliberate a verdict for Lindsay Clancy in Plymouth, Mass., on Thursday, Sept. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi)
Lindsay Clancy and attorney Kevin Reddington watch as Judge William Sullivan tells the jury to keep discussing a possible verdict after jurors said for a second time they couldn't agree whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible for killing her three children in 2023, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026, in Plymouth, Mass. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
A carton of letters for Lindsay Clancy from supporters sit in court on during Clancy's murder trial on Thursday, Sept. 3, 2026, in Plymouth, Mass. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
Judge William Sullivan looks over the courtroom at the start of the session during the Lindsay Clancy murder trial on Thursday, Sept. 3, 2026, in Plymouth, Mass. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
Lindsay Clancy looks at jurors as Judge Sullivan asks them to start deliberations for a sixth day during her murder trial on Thursday, Sept. 3, 2026, in Plymouth, Mass. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
Lindsay Clancy and attorney Kevin Reddington watch as Judge William Sullivan tells the jury to keep discussing a possible verdict after jurors said for a second time they couldn't agree whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible for killing her three children in 2023, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026, in Plymouth, Mass. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
