Historians in the News 
This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
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SOURCE: TIME
2/1/2023
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham on the AP Af-Am Studies Controversy
by Olivia B. Waxman
The Harvard historian, one of the principal evaluators of the AP curriculum, says that the most prominent public statements about the pilot course reflect misunderstanding or deception about what its contents really are.
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SOURCE: African American Studies Faculty in Higher Ed
1/31/2023
600 African American Studies Faculty Sign Open Letter in Defense of AP African American Studies
"We categorically reject DeSantis’s autocratic claim to knowing what college-level material should be available in an AP African American Studies course. There is no precedent, of which we are aware, for him or the Florida Department of Education to claim expertise on any other subject matter for AP course adoption."
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SOURCE: Organization of American Historians
2/1/2023
Organization of American Historians Statement on AP African American Studies
"The OAH further rejects the characterization of these scholars and their scholarship as examples of “woke indoctrination,” and instead recognize them as central to the interdisciplinary research and teaching of African American history and culture, as well as American history more broadly."
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SOURCE: WAMU
2/1/2023
Historians on DeSantis and the Fight Over Black History
Experts including education historians Adam Laats and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela discuss the controversy over Florida's rejection of the Advanced Placement course in African American Studies.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
1/31/2023
How the Right Got Waco Wrong
by Paul Renfro
Historian Paul Renfro reviews Kevin Cook's new book, which seeks to explain how the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian cult's Waco compound became a totem for the right while also decrying the aggressive law enforcement tactics that escalated the situation toward mass death.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
2/1/2023
A Reading List of Authors Removed from the AP African American Studies Course
The College Board has made revisions to its pilot African American Studies course that appear to follow the criticisms made by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Here's a collection of essays by many of the scholars representing diverse Black intellectual traditions whose ideas will not be part of the course going forward.
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SOURCE: LitHub
Zachary Shore: the Struggle Between Vengeance and Virtue in WWII
Zachary Shore discusses the contrasting decisions to drop atomic bombs on Japan and rebuild Germany.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
1/21/2023
Julia Schleck on The Function of the University Today
by Michael Meranze
Julia Schleck's work ties the idea of academic freedom to the social role of the university and its internal labor practices, which threatens scholars with attacks from inside and outside the campus.
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SOURCE: The Nation
1/31/2023
The Bitter, Contested History of Globalization
Tara Zahra's book places the conflicts of the middle of the 20th century in the context of profound global debates about how interconnected the world should be, and on whose terms.
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SOURCE: WTTW
1/27/2023
Prof. Hasan Kwame Jeffries on Consulting for Hip Hop at 50 Documentary
The Ohio State professor served as a consultant for the four hour documentary produced by Public Enemy's Chuck D, which begins January 31.
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SOURCE: Jacobin
1/28/2023
Glenda Gilmore's Bio Shows Artist Romare Bearden Reckoning with the South
"Gilmore sets a timeline, critiques some striking artworks, and leaves the reader wondering why hardly anyone writes about art this succinctly."
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SOURCE: Washington Post
1/24/2023
Erika Lee and Carol Anderson on Myths and Realities of Race in American History
"The problem we have in the United States is that we use these myths as a way to diminish the humanity and the citizenship of large sectors of our population and to then craft policies based on myths."
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SOURCE: Substack
1/23/2023
Banished Podcast: Sunshine State's Descent Into Darkness
by Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
Two historian podcasters evaluate the effort to politicize the history curriculum in Florida's K-12 schools and public colleges.
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SOURCE: Smithsonian
1/26/2023
Caroline Dodds Pennock on The Indigenous Americans Who Visited Europe
by Karin Wulf
In contrast to the stock story of the "Age of Exploration," Indigenous Americans often traveled to Europe afte 1492. A new book looks to this history to examine the origins of a cosmopolitan world.
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SOURCE: The Nation
1/24/2023
Why Can't the Democrats Build a Governing Majority? (Review of Timothy Shenk)
by Kim Phillips-Fein
In an implicit response to Richard Hofstadter's finding of the continuity of a narrow "American Political Tradition," Timothy Shenk examines the ways that activists have occasionally disrupted the political order and convinced people to "take a leap into an unknown future."
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
1/25/2023
Victimhood and Vengeance: The Reactionary Roots of Christian Nationalism
by Linda Greenhouse
Three books offer illuminating and distressing insight on the eruption of Christian nationalism, a "deep story" in American cultural history that, when its adherents feel denied the power they expect, guides potentially violent vengeance.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
1/17/2023
Kidada Williams on The Reconstruction that Wasn't
In the new "I Saw Death Coming," Williams describes a "shadow Confederacy" that refused to cede freedom or dignity to African Americans who often lived far from the reach of a federal government that was unreliably committed to their protection.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
1/22/2023
How the Russian Jews Became Soviet
The novelist Gary Shteyngart, who emigrated from the USSR to the US as a child, reviews Sasha Senderovich's "How the Soviet Jew was Made," a work that gives short shrift to neither the "Soviet" nor "Jewish" sides of the question.
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SOURCE: National Library of Medicine
1/22/2023
National Library of Medicine Announces 2023 History Talks
NLM History Talks promote awareness and use of NLM and related historical collections for research, education, and public service in biomedicine, the social sciences, and the humanities.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
1/23/2023
A Former Inmate Reviews an Oral History of Riker's Island
by John J. Lennon
"Leaving Rikers feels like a better chapter of your life is about to begin—even if that next chapter is a prison sentence."
News
- Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham on the AP Af-Am Studies Controversy
- 600 African American Studies Faculty Sign Open Letter in Defense of AP African American Studies
- Organization of American Historians Statement on AP African American Studies
- Historians on DeSantis and the Fight Over Black History
- How the Right Got Waco Wrong