As many of you know, History News Network’s partnership with the George Washington University recently came to a close. Many of you have expressed your support and hopes that HNN would find a new supporting partner for its work of putting the news in historical context and boosting the voices of historians in the public sphere.

Now, we can announce that we have entered such a partnership.

We will be able to share more details soon, but for now the most important news is that this partnership will keep the HNN website online and preserve access to all of the previously published content that has appeared on HNN in 23 years. It will also allow us to make technical and design updates to the site that will make it easier for you to search, read and navigate that content.

HNN’s editor is working with HNN’s new partner on a plan to quickly resume developing and delivering new content to our readers, and to continue to curate news about historical discovery, the work of historians, and public discussions about the ways in which the past informs the present.

This is exciting news for HNN and we will share more information soon. In the meantime, we thank you for your continued support of our work.

One if by Land, Two if by Sea, and Three if by the Capitol Steps

On the first anniversary of the Capitol attack, and the 162nd of Longfellow's poetic canonization of the Boston patriot, Paul Revere's ride remains a contested and protean symbol for a nation in crisis. 

The Cult of the Lost Cause and the Invention of General Pickett (1/13)

George Pickett – Major General George E. Pickett – was our family’s marquee Confederate relation, distant cousin though he was. For a long time what I knew about him was pretty much what everyone learned in 8th grade.

As December progresses, we are continuing our annual reader fund drive. I'll get right to the point: HNN needs your support to keep bringing you historical perspective on current events and informed commentary by historians. Without your contributions, there won't be an HNN. 

I hope you agree that HNN is a valuable resource and a unique presence on the web. There isn't another site that does what we do. 

Beginning with the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the news didn't take a break in 2021 and neither did HNN. 

All year, HNN has been working to bring you original opinion essays by historians and other scholars offering historical perspective on the most urgent issues of the day. Just as a reminder, here are some of the top original opinion essays we published in the past year:

HNN also gathers stories from around the web in our news sections and our Roundup of opinion writing by historians and other scholars. We cover the web and social media to give our readers a one-stop shop for news about historians, historical discoveries, and the uses and abuses of history in the political arena. 

As the year closes, we need your help to support our work for 2022. 

You can visit our donations page to make a secure contribution to HNN. 

If you value what you read on HNN, and the unique historical perspective we provide on the news, please make a contribution. 

 – Michan Connor, PhD

Editor

Thanks to the invaluable resource of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, you can check out that inaugural issue (most images are, sadly, lost). 

I hope that this is a fun trip down memory lane for our readers who have been with HNN for the whole journey and for relative newcomers, myself included. 

It is absolutely the case that HNN has endured and thrived because of the support of our readers. We are the leading site on the web putting news in historical perspective because of our audience and our contributors, who make HNN a destination for informed commentary, a forum for incisive discussion, and, we believe, an asset to the community of historians. 

Our readers have also sustained HNN with financial support. Contributions from our readers are necessary to pay for our web hosting, staffing, media subscriptions, and other vital tools of our work. If you value HNN and want to see what we will do in the next 20 years, please consider making a contribution today. 

PUTTING THE NEWS IN PERSPECTIVE

For decades I harbored in the back of my office closet an archive I inherited from my father’s Alabama kin.  Wills bequeathing family oil portraits; yellowed newspaper clippings about antebellum homes-turned-museums; hand-drawn genealogical charts, held together with rusty paper clips, tracing my connection to high-profile Confederates from Gen. George Pickett to L.P. Walker, the first Secretary of War of the Confederacy. I nicknamed this trove “The Pile” and for years I kept it in quarantine.  If these bits and pieces told a story, I wasn’t ready to hear it. 

The idea that facing history is a path to justice has been advanced by Black thinkers from James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates to Bryan Stevenson. For a long while I resisted it, at least when it came to my own family.  For a long while I believed that the Civil War was over.  I knew it had a huge fan base – from the hobbyists who reenact favorite battles to history buffs who debate the fine points of military strategy. When I encountered members of these fervent and possessed subcultures on the Internet, I always felt like I was walking along the edge of a tar pit.   I didn’t want to get too close.

Then, after the 2016 election, the Civil War came for me, and there was nothing quaint about it.  As a reinvigorated white supremacy began sweeping the country, I knew it was time to take the Confederates out of the closet.

Ann Banks is author of the website "Confederates in My Closet," where she writes about race, history and her family. Her work has been published in the Smithsonian, the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and The Nation. First Person America, her anthology of oral histories from the Federal Writers Project was published by Knopf and Norton and she co-produced a National Public Radio series on the subject. She can be reached at confederatesinmycloset@gmail.com.

I have been deeply impressed by the initiative historians have shown in writing to help the public understand this eruption of political violence in the context of the nation's history. HNN will continue to repost, as quickly as we can, news stories informed by historical analysis and opinion writing by historians published around the web in our Breaking News, Historians in the News, and Roundup sections. Readers are also encouraged to check out historian Megan Kate Nelson's roundup of writing by historians. 

We will also be publishing opinion essays original to HNN on our site. Althugh HNN generally publishes a whole slate of articles on Sundays, the fast-moving nature of events this week demands a different approach. I will be publishing a small slate of essays today, and continue to update the site with new content as it is ready. If you're a contributor waiting to see your article online, I ask for your patience, and thank you for voicing your views. 

HNN will likely return to a normal publication schedule after next week, with the obvious caveat that events may dictate otherwise. 

HNN will be on year-end holiday between December 24 and January 3 as this period is a campuswide holiday for the George Washington University.

We will return with new content after the New Year. Until then, we wish you all the best for the end of 2020. 

Dear Readers,

As the year 2020 winds down, I'm sure many of us are taking (or hope to take) some time to reflect on the year that's passed and look ahead to the future. 

I joined HNN as editor in late February, excited to carry forward the site's missions of amplifying the voices of historians on current events, making historical knowledge accessible to the public, and presenting historical perspective on the news. 

Then the news happened. 

A novel coronavirus became a threat, then a pandemic, then a health, economic and political crisis. 

Police killings of Black Americans sparked protests, counterprotests, federal occupation of city streets, and calls for responses ranging from police abolition to martial law. 

Cities raced to take down Confederate memorials before protesters could, and a national and global conversation on monuments and teaching the past broke out.

And Americans elected a new president amid fears for the security of our democracy. 

By themselves, any of these story lines would have kept me busy and to be honest, following all of them has sometimes been exhausting. 

But despite the 2020 fatigue that I'm sure many of you share, it has been incredibly rewarding to be part of this community of historians and readers. 2020 showed how important history is for understanding the present, for practicing citizenship, and for thinking and talking about the big questions we face. We disagree about many things, but I'm sure we all agree about that. 

Which is why I'm here to ask you to support HNN with a financial contribution to carry out our work for the coming year. 

HNN has a target of $25,000 in reader contributions to our annual fund drive. 

To put those numbers in perspective, HNN readers visit the site about 300,000 times per month. If we got a dime for every time a reader clicked a link to HNN, we'd hit that target by year's end. If all of our readers decided each opinion essay or news article they read on HNN was worth just ten cents, HNN could be financially supported to cover whatever 2021 may bring. 

I know this time of year brings appeals for support from many worthy organizations and causes. I hope HNN will be in your giving plans. 

You may make a secure contribution by credit card via internet or telephone, or by mailing a check. Detailed instructions for all methods are located on HNN's Donations page (remember, HNN is now a project of the History Department at the George Washington University, so contributions to HNN go through GWU's donation system). 

Best wishes,

Michan Connor

HNN Editor

HNN will be observing the holiday by taking the week off. New op eds will return on December 6, and history-related news and opinion from around the web will be reposted starting on November 30. Newsletters for email subscribers will return on December 2. 

Also, HNN's annual fund drive will begin after Thanksgiving. The cajoling, badgering and hectoring will commence then. For now, I wish all of you a restful and safe holiday. 

--Michan Connor, HNN Editor in Chief

We apologize if any of you have had difficulty contacting HNN by email between Wednesday evening and the present time. Our email host is experiencing technical difficulties that have prevented HNN from receiving email on several of our accounts. 

We hope this situation will be rectified soon and appreciate patience for responses to emails and article submissions. 

UPDATE: We have started to receive new emails this morning. It remains to be seen if emails sent to HNN between 8:00 pm EDT Wednesday and 10:30 am Friday will be recovered. If you emailed HNN with urgent business during that time consider re-sending your message. 

I will be doing that at the end of this week and early next--taking a few days off to spend time outdoors. 

Readers can expect to see a slate of new op ed articles posted to the HNN homepage as usual on Sunday, July 12. HNN's triweekly newsletters will be released in slimmed-down form on Friday, Monday and Wednesday, and News Editor Chelsea Connolly will be posting items to the Breaking News and Historians in the News Sections. 

Greetings to the History News Network community. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing from some of you already, and am very impressed by readers’ devotion to the site as a forum for historians and people who love to learn about history and history’s importance for understanding our present. It’s a great honor to be able to carry forward such an important resource. I am very appreciative of the efforts of HNN founder Rick Shenkman, and the enthusiastic support of the history department at George Washington University. I am especially grateful to my predecessor Kyla Sommers, who diligently explained not only the nuts and bolts of the website, but its spirit. 

I came to HNN after a long path through (and out of) the minefield of contemporary academe.  I was always interested in history as a child in Massachusetts, and enjoyed how historical fiction (both books and movies) could challenge me to imagine life in a different time and place, to read more about it, and to understand what a story got right, or got wrong, or left out completely. 

As a first-year undergraduate student, I spent two terms slogging away at chemistry and calculus in pursuit of medical school admission, but was led astray by my courses in the humanities and joined an honors program in American studies. Living and studying outside of Chicago, I was inspired by the city’s physical form and the richness of its multiple artistic and musical traditions, but also troubled by its inequality, segregation and political dysfunction. My history classes on the American city and Black Chicago pushed me to ask about who made the city, how, and why. 

After a couple of years of fairly aimless but fun young adult life at the rough edges of one of Chicago’s gentrifying neighborhoods, I entered the new and dynamic PhD program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California in 2001. The 9/11 attacks shook the world in the second week of my graduate studies. In hindsight, I think those events shaped the way I looked at cities, including my new home of Los Angeles, as places where the contradictions, conflict, and violence of modern life are on full display, but where diverse people work to figure out how to survive and thrive together.  The key for me was understanding how those people and places were shaped by the imprint of the past. 

That perspective guided me through writing a dissertation on how city boundaries shaped racial dynamics in Los Angeles County, and researching and publishing articles about suburban secession movements in LA and metro Atlanta. Along the way I moved to Texas, spent a year in Atlanta as a fellow of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University, and started a family. I had the pleasure and challenge of designing and teaching courses that brought historical perspective to understanding policy problems like environmental injustice, economic insecurity, and racial inequality, and worked with incredibly diverse groups of students, who taught me that teaching history is about dialogue and communication.

Many readers of this site are no doubt aware that today’s universities are increasingly unwilling to support stable and long-term careers for scholars in fields like history, and I’m among the many who have sought a path outside of academe. If there’s a silver lining to this professional crisis, it is that historians have expanded their public engagement into new forms. I am very excited to be carrying on the legacy of HNN, which has long championed the idea that historians have important things to say about today. 

If you are a past contributor to HNN, I look forward to reading your future submissions. If you are a new contributor, and especially if you are a history graduate student or early career scholar looking to start writing to bring your expertise to the public, send your drafts to editor@hnn.us.