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: Contingent
9/15/2020
by Marc Reyes
Contingent Magazine assembles a discussion of Kevin Gannon's teaching manifesto "Radical Hope" and urges us to think about how the work of teaching can make a better future.
Source: National History Center
9/14/2020
Author Fredrik Logevall discusses his new political biography of JFK in a virtual seminar with the National History Center.
Source: JSTOR Daily
9/15/2020
The designation "Hispanic" came about through the desire of Mexican American civil rights organizations to gather authoritative data about the status of the group in society. The political work engaged Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and other allies, bringing distinct ethnic groups under a common identifier.
Source: Environmental History Now
9/8/2020
by Natascha Otoya
A primary document from the developing Brazilian oil industry demonstrates that the country's transition from slavery to "free labor" was anything but clear-cut.
Source: Slate
9/13/2020
by Rebecca Onion
Historian Jacqueline Wernimont explains that the rise of quantification helps to obscure the human beings behind the numbers and makes the COVID-19 toll seem more acceptable.
Source: KERA
9/14/2020
American Studies professor Justin Gomer, author of "White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights" discusses the political impact of Hollywood's treatment of race.
Source: The Metropole (Urban History Association)
9/10/2020
by Courtney Rawlings
Courtney Rawlings argues that a recent documentary on public housing has a blind spot for the politics that make decent housing precarious or even unavailable to millions.
Source: New York Times
9/11/2020
The response to the settlement of fewer than 1,000 refugees in New York State roused fierce opposition and often ethnic prejudice as the United States was fighting fascism in Europe.
Source: The New Yorker
9/14/2020
The world of classical music is overdue for a reckoning with racist gatekeeping by institutions that have excluded Black composers and musicians.
Source: The New Yorker
9/14/2020
The Warren Harding presidency promised a return to normalcy after war, pandemic, political unrest and racial violence. The promise proved illusory.
Source: Journal of the Civil War Era
8/25/2020
The Journal of the Civil War Era urges historians to mobilize on September 26 to correct the misinformation delivered by public monuments and memorials.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Educationn
9/10/2020
A Pennsylvania history professor's criticism of his college's reopening plans drew a reprimand and potential censure by the administration. What are the limits of professors' freedom to criticize administrative decisions?
Source: Library of Congress
9/11/2020
The Library of Congress's September 11, 2001 Web Archive is a vital resource for understanding the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks.
Source: Black Perspectives
9/11/2020
by William Sturkey
Lawyer and activist Pauli Murray undertook the arduous task of identifying racially discriminatory laws across the United States, and published a volume cataloguing them in 1950 as a took for attorneys working to dismantle Jim Crow. A University of North Carolina project uses technology to complete that task and demonstrate the historical pervasiveness of racism in the law.
Source: Black Perspectives
9/9/2020
Robin Mitchell's book "Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France" examines how sexualized descriptions of Black women contributed to French racism.
Source: New York Times
9/8/2020
Read an excerpt from Fredrik Logevall's new biography of John F. Kennedy touching on the collegiate Kennedy's observations of Europe as World War II began.
Source: New York Times
9/4/2020
Historians Pascal Blanchard and Pap Ndiaye say that the hot-button term "ensauvagement" reflects France's unrecognized history of colonialism and the prevalent belief that the French helped elevate the people they colonized; the present-day right wing uses the term to imply that immigrants from France's former colonies require control and repression.
Source: The Atlantic
9/10/2020
"The WEIRDest People in the World" is the latest addition to the Big History category. The outstanding feature of the genre is that it wrangles all of human existence into a volume or two, starting with the first hominids to rise up on their hind legs and concluding with us, cyborg-ish occupants of a networked globe.
Source: New York Review of Books
9/10/2020
Hari Kunzru's review essay examines the current vogue for white antiracism (and antiracist training) through the history of whiteness as a political and academic concept, concluding that many of the most popular books and multicultural pieties strip the idea of its structural elements and reduce it to a question of personal purification.
Source: New York Times
9/4/2020
Charlotta Bass led a remarkable life as a journalist and activist that, in many ways, helped lay the foundation for a figure like Harris, the first Black woman and first person of Indian descent to be nominated on a major-party ticket.
