News at Home 
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3/20/2023
H.W. Brands on Ben Barnes's "Revelation" about the Iran Hostage Crisis
"In effect, Connally and Casey were telling the Iranians not to do something the Iranians had no intention of doing."
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3/19/2023
The Nixon Library's Vietnam Exhibition Obscures the Truth about the War's End
by Brian Robertson
The exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords chooses its sources selectively to present the negotiations as the product of Nixon's grand strategy, ignoring the role of domestic political machination.
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3/19/2023
Keri Leigh Merritt on the Politics of Grief and the Power of Historians' Witness to COVID
Three years since the public became aware of the seriousness of the COVID pandemic, a recent collection of essays turns the skills of historians toward reflection on grief, survival, and connecting understanding of the past to a better collective future.
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3/5/2023
Another Casualty of the Academic Job Market? The Relatable Professor
by Elizabeth Stice
As the academic job market demands a degree of excellence and achievement in young scholars that was unknown for earlier generations of faculty, are the shrinking ranks of the faculty being filled with professors who struggle to relate to their students?
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3/5/2023
The Defiant Woman at the Center of New York's First Abortion Battle
by Alan J. Singer
Carolyn Ann Trow Lohman, better known as Madame Restell, defied the authority of the medical establishment and moral crusaders to help women obtain abortions. Justice Alito's misuse of history to justify the Dobbs decision shows the need to remember her.
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2/26/2023
What Airports Can Tell Us About Histories of Regional Development
by Eric Porter
From the perspective of travelers, airports appear as generic "non-places." But for people who aren't just passing through—entrepreneurs, activists, and especially workers—their particularity makes them sites of struggle that shape the life of a region. Historians have much to learn from them, too.
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2/26/2023
Kara Walker Disrupts the Visual History of the Civil War in New Exhibition
by Allison Robinson and Ksenia M. Soboleva
The artist Kara Walker's 2005 series of prints merged the historical illustrations that shaped Americans' understanding of the Civil War in its immediate aftermath and in the 1890s with her original subversive take on the tradition of silhouette art to highlight the erasure of Black experiences of war. Two curators are putting Walker's work in context in a new exhibition.
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2/22/2023
Can Rebellion Be Too Big To Fail? Reflections on Jefferson Davis and Trump
by Wallace Hettle
If Jefferson Davis's release on bail in 1867 and pardon before trial in 1868 seemed to signal his diminishment as a national figure, the rise of the Lost Cause mythology with Davis as its martyr showed it was a serious mistake to excuse insurrection.
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2/22/2023
America Fought Its Own Battle Over Books Before it Fought the Nazis
by Brianna Labuskes
The Armed Services Editions paperback books were wildly popular among World War II servicemembers. But they became symbols of American freedom to read in the war against fascism only after a bitter domestic battle about the works and topics that would be permitted.
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2/19/2023
Why a Spy Balloon Inspires Such Fear and Fascination
by Alison Byerly
The ambiguity of our response to the Chinese spy balloon reflects the fact that balloons have always combined elements of technological innovation, spectacle, and surveillance. Today, they may be an unsettling visible symblol of the vast, mostly invisible, surveillance we live under.
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2/12/2023
Between Perpetrating a Hoax and Charging One: American Politics in the Waste Land
by Jed Rasula
The centenary of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land reminds readers of the rumors that the poem was published as a hoax. While pulling off a hoax takes cleverness, invoking the word to dismiss inconvenient facts is an abdication of responsibility that plagues political culture today.
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2/12/2023
The Case For Calling the Language "American"
by Ilan Stavans
The history of pragmatic adaptation that built the American form of English is reflected in its present status as the world's second language. It's not jingoistic, just accurate, to declare the particularity of the American tongue.
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2/6/2023
The Heroes of Ripley, Ohio
by David Goodrich
David Goodrich bicycled 3,000 miles along the routes of the Underground Railroad, encountering the places of history from a new perspective. This excerpt follows him through the Ohio-Kentucky borderland and across the river that marked free territory.
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2/6/2023
Historians Mobilize to Fight Back Against Right-Wing Attacks
by Margaret Power
Historians for Peace and Democracy condemns recent legislation restricting the content of history classes and libraries and censoring the freedom to teach and learn about racism and LGBTQ history. The group urges college faculty to join with their local K-12 educators and librarians.
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1/29/2023
Latino Activists Changed San Antonio in the 1960s
by Ricardo Romo
San Antonio in the 1960s faced many of the same challenges of cities throughout the South; its emerging Mexican American political leadership helped steer the city in a progressive direction.
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1/29/2023
No Golden Anniversary for the Paris Peace Accords
by Arnold R. Isaacs
While the West observes January 27 as the anniversary of the agreement, it was already January 28 in Vietnam when the accords took effect, a telling symbol of the disjunction between American and Vietnamese views of the conflict and its stakes that contributed to their tragic failure.
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1/22/2023
The US is a Procedural, Not a Substantive, Democracy
by Van Gosse
"The United States is well on its way to becoming a strictly procedural democracy, wherein legal and constitutional norms are observed, but the core requirements for democratic decision-making—the rule of the majority, the right of all citizens to vote without hindrance—are ignored."
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1/22/2023
As the Progressive Era Ideal of Regulation Vanishes, What Will Stop the March of AI?
by Walter G. Moss
If capital decides that artificial intelligence is sufficiently profitable to put in charge of driving our cars, writing our essays, or even teaching our history classes, what is left to stop it, even if the products are terrible or even dangerous?
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1/22/2023
Why CRT Belongs in the Classroom, and How to Do It Right
by Stacie Brensilver Berman, Robert Cohen, and Ryan Mills
"If classroom realities matter at all to those governors and state legislators who imposed CRT bans on schools, they ought to be embarrassed at having barred students in their states from the kind of thought provoking teaching we witnessed in this project."
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1/15/2022
One Term, Two Presidencies: Biden's Prospects under Divided Government
by Michael A. Genovese
If recent patterns prove out, the second half of Biden's term will be marked by executive orders with little prospect of significant legislation.
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