Departments

;

News at Home

  • 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? 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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.

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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."

  • 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."