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: Tom Dispatch
  8/11/19
  

  Historian Tom Engelhardt Revisits His First Piece of Critical History – 48 Years Later

  by Tom Engelhardt

  How Hollywood created a spectacle of slaughter at the movies in which colonial and imperial history was flipped on its head.

• 
• SOURCE: Raw Story
  

  Heather Cox Richardson: Trump isn’t the first president to compare himself to Jesus — the last one who did ‘planned to lead his white supremacist supporters to victory’

  According to historian Heather Cox Richardson, however, Trump isn't the first president to compare himself to Jesus, whom Christians believe was the son of God.

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  8/19/19
  

  Historians' archival research looks quite different in the digital age

  by Ian Milligan

  Our society’s historical record is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Think of all the information that you create today that will be part of the record for tomorrow. 

• 
• SOURCE: Roll Call
  8/21/19
  

  Senate Historian Daniel S. Holt Featured on Political Theatre Podcast

  Holt discusses duels, bathtubs and other Senate mysteries.

• 
• SOURCE: American Association for State and Local History
  8/21/19
  

  The Way We Do the Things We Do: Making History-Making Visible

  by Benjamin Filene

  Three museums in Stockholm demonstrate how can historians “pull back the curtain” and reveal the process of history-making in action. 

• 
• SOURCE: Harvard Magazine
  Accessed 8/20/19
  

  Historian Elizabeth Hinton Profiled in Harvard Magazine: Color and Incarceration

  Historian Elizabeth Hinton probes the roots of a gathering crisis.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  8/14/19
  

  'Clearly, he did not take part in our curriculum': Historians bash Ken Cuccinelli's revised Statue of Liberty Poem

  Cuccinelli’s off-the-cuff edit befuddled and concerned immigration historians who saw his comments as a distortion of one of the nation’s most symbolic ideals. 

• 
• SOURCE: NY Times
  8/7/19
  

  The Increasing Popularity of Hotel Historians

  Part reference librarian, part gossip columnist, the hotel historian has become an increasingly popular figure in high-end hotels or inns with actual history. 

• 
• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  8/12/19
  

  If You Call It History, You’ve Got to Do History’: Historians Chafe at a Video That Omitted Their University’s Whites-Only Origins

  Segregation is not mentioned in a nine-minute video about the institution’s 125-year history, posted last week on YouTube.

• 
• SOURCE: AP
  8/17/19
  

  Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum gets grants to help publish Abraham Lincoln papers

  The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum has received more than $400,000 in grants for a project that aims to publish every document written by the nation's 16th president.

• 
• SOURCE: Tablet
  8/14/19
  

  Is the U.S. Constitution Pro-Slavery?

  A review of Sean Wilentz's No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  8/16/19
  

  Brenda Wineapple Reviews WOMEN’S WAR: FIGHTING AND SURVIVING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR 
by Stephanie McCurry

  Who wrote women out of Civil War history?

• 
• SOURCE: Vox
  8/19/19
  

  Stephanie Jones-Rogers gives interview on how white women’s “investment” in slavery has shaped America today

  The author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South explains why white women were not bystanders to slavery.

• 
• SOURCE: NY Times
  8/19/19
  

  Myrna Katz Frommer, 80, Dies; Oral Historian of Catskills and Brooklyn

  She collaborated with her husband, Harvey, on “It Happened in the Catskills” and other histories told in the voices of the people who were there.

• 
• SOURCE: New Yorker
  8/12/19
  

  Kendi's "How to Be an AntiRacist" and the Fight to Redefine Racism

  by Kalefa Sanneh

  In “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely encompassing term of description.

• 
• SOURCE: Chris Riback's Conversations
  Accessed 8/9/19
  

  2 New Podcast Episodes Discuss How the Republican Party became the Party of Trump and CIA "Black Sites"

  Chris Riback in conversation with Tim Alberta and Philip Mudd.

• 
• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  8/6/19
  

  ‘Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution’ Review: On the Marxist Question

  by Jonathan Rose

  A new biography presents him not as a clockwork economic determinist but rather as a flexible analyst of capitalism.

• 
• SOURCE: Good to Go
  7/16/19
  

  Tony Platt Reviews Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age

  by Tony Platt

  I’m encouraged that Schama thinks crime and punishment is a sufficiently important topic to bookend his 700-page tome.

• 
• SOURCE: Huffington Post
  8/6/2019
  

  Professor Breaks Down U.S. Racism, Trump’s ‘Ugliness’ In 3 Powerful Minutes

  Trump is “a manifestation of the ugliness that’s in us,” Princeton’s Eddie Glaude Jr. told MSNBC.

• 
• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  8/4/2019
  

  ‘Charles I's Killers in America’ Review: Regicides on the Run

  Among the men who signed a king’s death warrant were two who, in the American colonies, met with admiration and ambivalence.