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 New Yorker
10/17/2022
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
A quarter century after publication, "Scenes of Subjection" still shows how Americans have embraced emancipation as a national expurgation of the sin of slavery, without stopping to consider the substantive meaning of freedom.
Source: New York Review of Books
10/15/2022
"Today, we have lived through two terms of a Black presidency and the highest concentration of Black elected officials in Congress and beyond in American history. So the question of whether we can vote our way into liberation is no longer an abstraction."
Source: ChalkBeat
10/12/2022
Historians and teachers argue that tying limited space for Holocaust and genocide education in the curriculum to a crusade against leftist politics is distracting and an antisemitic hijacking of education by politics.
Source: Academe
10/18/2022
Historians Jennifer Mittelstadt and Davarian Baldwin discuss how universities must reject the "ivory tower" model to be contributors to the well-being of the communities around them as well as to maintain their intellectual vitality.
Source: NPR
10/18/2022
While a book by the former AP Mexico City bureau chief shows the depth of corruption and political violence in Mexico, it also shows the integrity and courage of Mexican citizens and journalists who dare to demand better.
Source: The Atlantic
10/19/2022
by Tom Nichols
Tom Nichols interviews presidential historian Steve Knott, who discusses how the JFK legacy has shifted with political trends and how the JFK Library has sometimes put politics over history.
Source: Jewish Currents
10/19/2022
The tendency of many Conservative Jewish leaders to eschew partisan politics isn't a reaction to recent polarization, it's the result of a century old effort by influential donors to the Jewish Theological Seminary to marginalize radical immigrants from American Jewish life.
Source: National Geographic
10/13/2022
In centuries where Europe was plagued by war, famine and plague, the supernatural became luridly appealing. Unlike more common trials for witchcraft, werewolf prosecutions remain more of a historical mystery.
Source: NPR
8/18/2022
In a case that involves both the history of voting rights and exclusion and changes in the Census's recognition of complex ethnic identities since 1980, the Supreme Court may reverse a longstanding assumption about which voters are properly understood to be Black.
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
10/11/2022
The University of Pennsylvania embraced an origin story involving George Whitefield as a way to claim to be older than rival institutions. When it came to acknowledging Whitefield's advocacy for slavery, the university raised its Quaker roots as a shield. Kathleen Brown and students are trying to change the story.
Source: Columbia News
8/13/2022
Although it tells the story of American protagonists, Prof. Lien-Hang Nguyen worked with the producers to ensure accuracy and avoid stereotyping in the depiction of Vietnamese characters in the film; she susggests that there are many more Vietnamese stories to tell.
Source: NPR
10/16/2022
"All of the last 10 years has been about making sure, as you might put it, that it's Xi Jinping's China. It's Xi Jinping's party, everyone else is just living in it."
Source: NPR
10/16/2022
From the actions of Soviet naval officers to the real-time recommendations of Robert F. Kennedy, the official story of the 1962 crisis is due for some updates according to historians who've published recent work on the subject.
Source: The New Republic
10/18/2022
Adam Hochshild's book details the intersection of patriotism and legal repression that stifled the broad left in the United States, and explains how the war to "make the world safe for democracy" evinced an impoverished understanding of the term.
Source: New York Times
10/13/2022
Although the belief that Chaucer was accused of the crime spurred a significant wave of feminist critical studies of sex and power in his writing, scholars have recently argued that the documents used to support the charge have been misinterpreted.
Source: The Atlantic
10/10/2022
The climate crisis is pushing some historians and folklorists to reconsider indigenous societies' origin stories of flooding and geographic cataclysm. Should science take this perspective into account?
Source: The New Republic
10/11/2022
by Claire Potter
After a long dance with the far right, the Republican party lost – or abandoned – its desire to control the fringe, shifting from an institutional party to a set of media platforms running on a political platform of pessimism and anger, argues Nicole Hemmer.
Source: New York Times
10/12/2022
Beverly Gage says the surveillance was par for the course under J. Edgar Hoover's leadership, when Black figures with any suspected links to civil rights or militant politics was a target.
Source: The Progressive
10/10/2022
Do militant worker actions signal a wave of mass organizing like occurred in the 1930s, when workers established unions regarded as unorganizable took matters into their own hands? Labor historian Erik Loomis and scholar Marilyn Sneiderman discuss how to turn anger into strategy and strategy into organization.
Source: Boston Review
10/12/2022
by Alberto Polimeni
A leading historian and theorist of populism looks beyond psychology or brainwashing as explanations for the appeal of such movements, but still focuses on the ways elites can better lead the people instead of what people may want.
