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Roundup

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    4/15/2021

    Why the Hope for Peace is Waning in Northern Ireland

    by James Waller

    "The Troubles, the decades-long Catholic uprising against British rule starting in the 1960s, began with Catholic frustration over a government that would not leave. If widespread violence returns, it will be because of Protestant frustration over a government that would not stay."

  • SOURCE: London Review of Books
    4/15/2021

    The Gatekeeper

    by Adam Tooze

    Paul Krugman's career as a politically influential economist has reflected the political dead end of the Clinton-era ideal of technocratic governing. His new book suggests that the intellectual authority of the economics profession may no longer prevent active government or deficit spending. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    4/14/2021

    Registering Women for the Draft Wouldn’t be a Big Departure from the Past

    by Kara Dixon Vuic

    An odd alliance of the ACLU and the antifeminist National Coalition for Men is petitioning the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling exempting women from registering with the Selective Service and potentially being drafted into the military. Many voices have long advocated this change. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    4/13/2021

    Stacey Abrams’s Fight against Voter Suppression Dates Back to the Revolution

    by Karen Cook Bell

    "The roots of Black women’s activism can be traced back to the Revolutionary Era, when thousands of Black women protested with their feet and ran away from their enslavers." This act would shape the demands of radical Black politics in the ensuing decades.

  • SOURCE: CNN
    4/12/2021

    Are you ready for the Roaring '20s?

    by Nicole Hemmer

    The end of the pandemic may portend a repeat of the "roaring 20s" a century later. But anyone anticipating a wild party should recall the nativism, racism, and rampant inequality of the era. Can the individual desire to live life to the fullest support a politics of inclusion and equality? 

  • SOURCE: NBC News
    4/14/2021

    Virginia Police, Army Lt. Caron Nazario and America's Bloody Traffic Stop Catch-22

    by Matthew Guariglia

    The incident of Lt. Caron Nazario illustrates the argument of 1960s Black radical activist Robert Williams that violence against Black people has always been part of maintaining the social order; recognizing nonviolence as a tactic of civil rights activism should not obscure the constancy of violence from the other side. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    4/13/2021

    Return the National Parks to the Tribes

    by David Treuer

    "The idea of a virgin American wilderness—an Eden untouched by humans and devoid of sin—is an illusion" that has hidden the forced removal of Native people from the lands converted to national parks. Native people should tend and protect the land again.

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    4/13/2021

    Slaughter Central: The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine

    by Tom Engelhardt

    The American armanents industry is profiting from the sales of weapons of potential planetary destruction, mass shootings, and all manner of violence in between. We should understand the gun industry as a global public-private partnership of death.

  • SOURCE: Contingent
    4/5/2021

    The Strange Case of Booker T. Washington’s Birthday

    by Bill Black

    A history teacher's saga of the verification of a seemingly simple fact shows that sources may not always be reliable, and that our knowledge of many facts is the product of historians' labor. 

  • SOURCE: Hedgehog Review
    4/10/2020

    Left Behind: The Trouble with Euphemism

    by Nancy Isenberg

    A historian of white rural poverty says that the cultural phenomenon of JD Vance's book "Hillbilly Elegy" is just the latest deployment of the "left behind" euphemism to obscure the nature of poverty in the United States. The rural poor are and have been part and parcel of the American economic order.