The Latest 
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Forget "Finding Forrester"—Our Best Teaching Can Be Ordinary
Elizabeth Stice
Hollywood loves to tell the stories of singularly brilliant students pushed to greatness by similarly singular mentors with unconventional methods and unaccommodating personalities. This ideal won't help anyone teach the real students in their classrooms.
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Stronger Global Governance is the Only Way to a World Free of Nuclear Weapons
Lawrence Wittner
The war in Ukraine and escalating tensions between the PRC and Taiwan are just two examples of the resurgent danger of nuclear war. A revived movement for true international governance is needed to ensure that the unthinkable becomes impossible.
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AI the Latest Instance of our Capacity for Innovation Outstripping our Capacity for Ethics
Walter G. Moss
The words of General Omar Bradley are as prescient as ever: "Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner."
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Blog
John de Graaf on his Powerful Documentary on Stewart Udall, Conservation, and the True Ends of Politics
Robin Lindley
A documentarian discusses his efforts to highlight the forgotten contributions of former Interior Secretary to the environmental and conservation movements, a mission that touches on deeper questio...
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The "Critical Race Theory" Controversy Continues
Florida's legislature is working to implement the agenda laid out by Governor Ron DeSantis, including eliminating Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives and putting control of faculty hiring in the hands of university presidents, not faculty.
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The Right's Political Attack on LGBTQ Americans Escalates
Historians discuss the escalating attacks on LGBTQ Americans.
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Mifepristone, the Courts, and the Comstock Act: Historians on the Politics of Abortion Rights
HNN Staff
Conflicting court rulings leave the future of access to a widely used abortion medication in doubt, antiabortion activists openly discuss using a 150 year-old antiobscenity law to enforce a national ban, and Republican politicians face the fallout of unpopular policies.
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The Roundup Top Ten for May 19, 2023
The top opinion writing by historians and about history from around the web this week.
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Contemporary Pundits Need a Refresher on Populism's History
Steve Babson
"Elites who tar their critics in the U.S. with the sly pejorative of 'populist' count on our collective amnesia. They’d rather the real Populists remained forgotten, along with the potential they represented."
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Political Pundits, Apply the "Resentment" Label with Caution
Robert A. Schneider
As the brief respite between two Trump-Biden races reaches its end, "resentment" is once again the go-to political explanation. But too often the term is used to describe voters as irrational and unhinged while obscuring some real causes of moral aggrievement in contemporary society.
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Brandon Johnson Built a Coalition to Win in Chicago. Can He Keep it to Govern?
Gordon K. Mantler
When Brandon Johnson takes office on Monday as Chicago's mayor, he will experience the same challenge that his political predecessor Harold Washington did in 1983: turning a winning electoral coalition into a durable governing coalition. It won't be easy, but progressive change in the city depends on it.
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Mary Wollstonecraft's Diagnosis of the Prejudices Holding Back Girls' Education Remains Relevant Today
Victoria Bateman
Since Wollstonecraft's 1792 condemnation of the strictures of modesty and sexual purity as unjust impediments to the education of girls and women, they remain principal justifications for keeping girls out of school.
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How a Little-Known Anti-Vietnam Protest Reverberates Today
Gary B. Ostrower
A 1968 disruption of an ROTC ceremony at Alfred University in 1968 involved just 15 students and 2 faculty. It won't be remembered with Berkeley or Columbia in the annals of student protest, but it made a significant impact on the legal requirements placed on universities' policies for dealing with student protest.
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Blog
Slowing Our Roll on Silicon Valley
Skipped History with Ben Tumin
Silicon Valley's story isn't heroic visionary entrepreneurship. It's a long tale of dispossession, discrimination, and failing forward in California, according to Malcolm Harris.
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The Roundup Top Ten for May 12, 2023
The top opinion writing by historians and about history from around the web this week.
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The First Campgrounds Took the City to the Wilderness
Martin Hogue
The growing popularity of the Model T put wilderness excursions within reach of ordinary city dwellers, bringing trash, fire, and pollution with them. The solution, mass campgrounds, made camping more accessible at the cost of rendering the experience more orderly, rule-bound, and urban.
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Buried Footage Helped Chicago Police Get Away with Killing 10 Labor Activists in 1937
Greg Mitchell
Paramount's newsreel division shot footage of the murderous attack on a steelworkers' march in 1937. They sided with the bosses by burying the footage. Even after Senator Robert LaFollette pushed for the film's release, cities banned it from the screen as Chicago prosecutors ruled the killings justifiable. A new documentary tells the story of the film.
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“Of the East India Breed …”: The First South Asians in British North America
Brinda Charry
The known records of the first south Asian people in Virginia are not voluminous, but they direct our attention to the complexities of racial identity in early America and the global networks of trade and labor that would make the British Empire.
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"An Inconvenient Truth" Shows the Missed Opportunities to Act on Climate Change
Robert Brent Toplin
Al Gore's documentary project was more influential on the public than on the political system when it came to advancing awareness of climate change. One wonders what might have been if Gore had been advancing his message from the Oval Office 20 years ago.
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Carolyn Woods Eisenberg on Nixon's War Deceptions
James Thornton Harris
A new history of Nixon and Kissinger's Vietnam policy shows a president driven by the abstract goal of credibility instead of concrete steps to conclude the conflict, at the cost of tens of thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives.
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Blog
No, You Shouldn't Be Surprised Biden's Running for Re-Election
Stone Age Brain | Rick Shenkman
From my study of the presidency one thing has become clear: Presidents above all else are driven. Case in point: Dwight Eisenhower.
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Let Us Now Praise R. DeSantis
Marc Stein
"I can’t believe it’s taken this long to have a political leader take a stand against gender and sexuality!"
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The Roundup Top Ten for May 5, 2023
The top opinion writing by historians and about history from around the web this week.
News
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- Paul Watanabe, Historian and Manzanar Survivor, Makes Sure History Isn't Forgotten
- Massachusetts-Based Historians: Book Bans in Florida Affect Us, Too
- Deborah Lipstadt's Work Abroad as Antisemitism Envoy Complicated by Definitional Dispute
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