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History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Roundup Top 10!

The troubling history behind Ralph Northam’s blackface Klan photo

by Rhae Lynn Barnes

How blackface shaped Virginia politics and culture for more than a century.

Why we keep looking at the Northam photo

by Jonathon Zimmerman

Because we all know — in our hearts — that racism is America’s original sin.

Why it’s shocking to look back at med school yearbooks from decades ago

by Elizabeth Evans

They offer jaw-dropping examples of the sexism and racism that shaped professional cultures.

Eric Lott on Ralph Northam and the History of Blackface

by Isaac Chotiner

In an interview, Eric Lott discusses the subject of blackface and its historical role in American politics, culture, and racism.

How the Trump administration’s Title IX proposals threaten to undo #MeToo

by Ruth Lawlor

The changes would make campus sexual assault harder to punish, while increasing the burdens on black men.

When the Suffrage Movement Sold Out to White Supremacy

by Brent Staples

Historians like Glenda Gilmore, Martha Jones, Nell Irvin Painter and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn have recently revised the whitewashed depiction of the women’s rights campaign by rescuing black suffragists from anonymity.

The mistake NATO was formed to correct — and how President Trump is repeating it

by Gregory Mitrovich

Allies abandoned one another in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1940s, they paid the price.

A New Americanism

by Jill Lepore

Why a Nation Needs a National Story

How to Make Graduate School More Humane

by David M. Perry

There's a mental-health crisis among graduate students, and it bears particularly hard on those with disabilities. Fixing it requires specific mental-health supports—and broad cultural change.

Is a history degree only accessible to students at elite universities?

by Eric Alterman

For the past decade, on American campuses, history has been declining more rapidly than any other major, even as more and more students attend college. But at Ivy League schools, the major is thriving.

Why You Should Dig Up Your Family’s History — and How to Do It

by Jaya Saxena

Learning your history is forced reckoning, asking you to consider whose stories you carry with you and which ones you want to carry forward.

Kruse and Zelizer: Watergate's lesson? If Democrats want to heal America, Trump must be held accountable

by Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer

Accountability is essential to the long-term health of our democracy, more important than even healing the nation’s partisan divisions.

As a historian, my instinct was to preserve Confederate monuments, but I changed my mind

by W. Marvin Dulaney

After taking a closer look at them and the historical lies that they present and perpetuate, and the reverence that they hold upon the nation's landscape I was convinced that all of them need to come down.

Don’t Let Democrats Become the Party of War

by Trita Paris and Stephen Wertheim

The gambit to out-hawk Trump is a dangerous one.