The Roundup Top Ten for December 10, 2021
Today's Culture Wars are Playing Out on Plantation Toursby Kelley Fanto Deetz"Museum professionals at plantations hear it all and must balance viewpoints that are diametrically opposed to one another, such as the romanticized notion of antebellum gentility and the constant fear of terror and violence of the enslaved." |
Forget "Ghost Guns" and other Media Panics. Gun Capitalism is the Problemby Andrew C. McKevittA long series of moral panics over the dangers of specific guns (and their imagined users) has hidden the real danger to Americans: the profitability (and legality) of selling deadly weapons. |
History Helps Discern Putin's Ukraine Agendaby Kathryn DavidRussia today uses the ideological work of Soviet-era historians that claims a fundamental unity between Russian and Ukrainian people to justify its expansionist aims. |
Eighty Years Ago, Japan Assaulted More Than Pearl Harborby Mindy L. KotlerMemorializing the attacks on the American military base at Pearl Harbor often obscures the attacks against the wider Pacific launched by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, attacks with consequences that endure today. |
Historians are Soft Targets in the Culture War. They Need to Fight Backby David Olusoga"Historians should repeatedly point out that the 'rewriting of history' is not some act of professional misconduct but literally the job of professional historians." |
How the Black Country Star Charley Pride Became an Unlikely Hero in Northern Irelandby Walker MimmsPride's "Crystal Chandeliers" didn't chart when he released in in the US in 1967; a decade later it was a unity anthem for Northern Ireland residents hoping for peace. |
The Second Skeletonby Mabel Rosenheck"Museums construct knowledge. As a historian of museums this is what I study. But museums don’t just construct knowledge through architecture, collecting, arrangement, or labeling. They construct knowledge by constructing objects—literally." |
Facial Surveillance Has Always Been Flawedby Amanda LevendowskiToday, artificial intelligence startups are scraping the web to build massive face-recognition databases, without any pretense of consent by the public. The technology may be new, but the intrusive assertion of surveillance has a long history. |
A Descent into Textual Paranoiaby Christopher S. Celenza"Doing one's own research" in an environment of proliferating information and few gatekeepers isn't new to the internet age. |
Are We Forever Captives of the Forever Wars?by Karen J. GreenbergThe Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress after 9/11 has been expanded from fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan to justify action in at least 19 countries. Repealing it is the first step to freeing Americans from the Pentagon's Forever Wars. |