This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: The Onion
9/24/2020
"Members of President Donald Trump’s new patriotic 1776 Commission struggled Wednesday to find ways to improve upon the education system’s existing propaganda."
Source: Black Perspectives
9/21/2020
by Katie Donington
Debates over Eric Williams’s work have ebbed and flowed ever since he first published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944. His book inspired a body of historiography to which many historians of slavery and abolition have added their voices over the decades.
Source: Boston Globe
9/22/2020
Columnist Renée Graham cites Ruth Ben-Ghiat's history of Italian fascism as a warning about authoritarianism's growth.
Source: New York Times
9/23/2020
Historian Julian Zelizer says Trump has recently spoken aloud what many fear he has been thinking: he may refuse to hand over power willingly.
Source: The Atlantic
9/25/2020
“'We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans,' Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction." Today, American students' levels of ignorance about slavery suggests this too often remains true.
Source: Washington Post
9/24/2020
Franklin Roosevelt's efforts to expand the Supreme Court to overcome conservative hostility to the New Deal didn't go well for him, though patience paid off as his judicial antagonists retired or died during his presidency.
Source: BBC
9/23/2020
Journalist Richard Fisher examines the argument that the present--this moment--is the most important juncture in human history because human capacity to affect the planet outstrips human wisdom to direct that capacity.
Source: Austin Chronicle
9/25/2020
What makes the campus such a great teaching tool? "Nothing goes up on a college campus that hasn't been thought through," explains Gordon. "Everything that gets placed and gets named on a college campus has a meaning behind it."
Source: The New Republic
9/21/2020
by Bruce Bartlett
Friedman’s ardent libertarian faith was central to his monetarist thinking; like all libertarians, he was always extremely wary of anything that would cause the size of government to grow.
Source: American Historical Association
9/24/2020
The AHA only reluctantly gives air to such distraction; we are not interested in inflating a brouhaha that is a mere sideshow to the many perils facing our nation at this moment.
Source: Public Books
9/22/2020
by Pablo Pryluka
Although the Tennessee Valley Authority was a pioneering public works project, its alumni worked in Latin America to advance redevelopment projects that elevated the authority of big business, a model now associated with the neoliberal turn in the developed world.
Source: TIME
9/22/2020
The Rev. Al Sharpton honors Prof. Ibram X. Kendi as a scholar engaged with antiracist activism and an intellectual guide for this year's protest movements.
Source: Washington Post
9/23/2020
Historian Carol Anderson identifies Trump's ruling vision with the post-Civil War reaction led by Andrew Johnson, who was "really the president of a few people, not the American people." Interviews with some of Trump's close aides affirm that assessment, and even Trump's West Wing supporters concede that he is widely perceived as racist.
Source: CNN
9/20/2020
Historian Larry Glickman suggests that the pandemic has opened up discussion of a broader role for government in meeting people's needs during a crisis.
Source: New York Times
9/16/2020
by Theodore R. Johnson
Despite the political diversity within Black America, the political system's accommodation of bigotry and the political utility of appeals to white identity have pushed the overwhelming majority of Black voters to cast ballots for the same party.
Source: Muckrock
9/16/2020
Muckrock invites interested historians and history enthusiasts to participate in a project to make declassified Presidential intelligence briefings more widely accessible.
Source: Vanity Fair
As Trump’s fearmongering, demonization, and threats of violence have invited comparisons to Hitler’s rise, historian Peter Fritzsche separates fact from exaggeration on "The Hive" podcast.
Source: New York Times
9/18/2020
Stephen Cohen did not shy from controversy, either in his scholarly claims (made at the height of the Cold War) that the Bolshevik revolution contained true democratic potential before being corrupted, or in his criticisms of American efforts to influence post-Soviet Russia.
Source: Bloomberg
9/21/2020
It's difficult to quantify the financial cost to Black Americans of racism and segregation. But the destruction of property and denial of trade by white mobs in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919 was quantified by Ida B. Wells-Barnett; her findings can put the scope of a reparations program into some perspective.
Source: The New Yorker
9/20/2020
While the HBO series directed national attention to the Tulsa massacre, some Black descendants of the residents of the Greenwood district targeted by mob violence and arson were uncomfortable with their families' tragedy being mined for dramatic purposes.
