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: National History Center
9/10/2020
The National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars host a virtual discussion today featuring Thomas Schwartz, author of "Henry Kissinger: A Political Biography."
Source: Black Perspectives
9/8/2020
by Natalie Shibley
Wendy Gonaver's book traces the relationiship between slavery and modern psychiatric medicine.
Source: War on the Rocks
9/4/2020
Lauren Turek, Ashlyn Hand and William Inboden discuss how, as Turek documents, in the late 20th century, the specific notion of human rights intersected with evangelical missionaries and their perceptions of the risks associated with communism and other important foreign policy questions, and were able to organize and influence U.S. foreign policy in a new and important way.
Source: ABC News
9/9/2020
Columbia University professor Christopher Brown says the number of slave shipwrecks that researchers have been able to confirm are the absolute minimum, and that the true number of shipwrecked slave ships are likely much higher. The work of a Florida diving group hopes to change that.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
9/9/2020
Scholars in multiple fields have taken part in a virtual teach-in, sharing expertise on racism and justice as part of the #ScholarStrike.
Source: Washington Post
9/5/2020
Paola De Simone succumbed to COVID-19 while teaching her world history course remotely. Students and colleagues say her efforts to teach despite illness showed her dedication and courage.
Source: WBUR
9/8/2020
The historian took an unexpected turn into researching the health system when he got suddenly, seriously ill in December 2019. He argues that the for-profit healthcare system exposes a dire conflict between capitalism and liberty.
Source: NPR
9/6/2020
Political theorist Jason Stanley discusses where the United States today fits into his definitions of fascism. Trump's claims to personally protect Americans from humiliation, the rise of conspiratorial thinking, and the fragility of democratic processes are not encouraging signs.
Source: Harvard Gazette
9/4/2020
"I came across one textbook that declared on its first page, “This is the White Man’s History.” At that point, you had to be a dunce not to see what these books were teaching."
Source: Jacobin
9/8/2020
A review of Anne Applebaum's "Twilight of Democracy" argues that the author focuses on the role of nostalgia and personality in driving authoritarianism and breaking up the center-right coalition, but ignores the fact that that the center failed to deliver an improved standard of living to the broad public.
Source: Los Angeles Review of Books
9/5/2020
A dialogue with a historian of Armenians in the United States shows that the boundaries of the "white race" have shifted historically and been determined not by biology but by politics played out in immigration courts.
Source: War on the Rocks
9/4/2020
Audrey Cronin's new book warns that terrorist networks are less likely to employ cutting-edge technology than to adapt widely-available tools to new destructive ends; security experts are still surprised by this repeating pattern.
Source: Smithsonian
9/8/2020
by Peter Manseau
The "Jefferson Bible," representing Thomas Jefferson's efforts to excise the supernatural and miraculous from the New Testament, is an important document of American religious culture. The story of its preservation by Cyrus Adler and John Fletcher Lacey is a remarkable tale as well that reflects changes in the political nature of American religion.
Source: The Atlantic
9/8/2020
by Adam Serwer
Atlantic writer Adam Serwer argues that people who want to understand this year should look not to 1968, but to 1868, when a moment of potential for establishing interracial democracy through government intervention seemed possible.
Source: The New Yorker
9/8/2020
Writer Robin Wright looks to historians Richard Kreitner and Colin Woodard to explain that the idea of a unified American nation has not been the historical norm.
Source: Smithsonian
9/8/2020
Historian Karin Wulf interviews Martha S. Jones, author of the newly-released "Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All," on the role Black women have historically played in advancing egalitarian politics.
Source: Forbes
9/6/2020
A social-media organized effort by professors represents a new effort to connect academic work to activism for justice.
Source: New York Times
9/8/2020
Fredrik Logevall's new book, the first of two volumes on the life of JFK, pushes back against perceptions of the young Kennedy as an accidental politician or intellectual lightweight, and describes the way world events shaped his worldview.
Source: Reason
9/7/2020
Journalist and historian of policing Radley Balko discusses the changing perception of police and police abuse in an interview with Reason's Nick Gillespie.
Source: The New Republic
9/8/2020
A review of Jill Lepore's "If Then," which finds the roots of contemporary political messaging in a 1960s company's pioneering efforts to apply computer modeling to voter behavior.
