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: Smithsonian
8/4/2022
Sylvia Barbara Soberton's new book argues that Jane Boleyn, long blamed for the accusations against her husband George and sister-in-law Anne that led to their deaths, has been unfairly scapegoated.
Source: The New Republic
8/9/2022
Rejecting the idea of a Jewish-led "Israel Lobby" Mead emphasizes the historical influence of American Christian zionists and militarists in tilting America's mideast policy toward the goals of the Israeli right.
Source: Hyperallergic
8/1/2022
The architects who envisioned early shopping malls as common spaces were overwhelmed by the imperatives of exclusion and surveillance in spaces made safe for mass consumption, argues architecture critic Alexandra Lange.
Source: Nursing Clio
8/9/2022
by Donna J. Drucker
The documentary combines an endorsement of conspiratorial suspicion of pharmaceutical contraception and scientifically questionable fertility management under the guise of "empowerment" with a dose of financial conflict of interest thrown in.
Source: The Baffler
8/4/2022
by Joshua Craze
"One might think that becoming a god is a quick route to an easy life. The problem is that gods are beholden to their believers, and worshippers tend to have plans for their deities."
Source: Harvard Kennedy School
7/28/2022
The Electoral Count Act imposed after the contested election of 1876 leaves potential loopholes for a minority faction to override the will of voters and hijack the electoral college. Is proposed bipartisan legislation enough to fix it?
Source: Washington Post
8/8/2022
"Mr. McCullough, long regarded as a master storyteller of American daring, endeavor and perseverance, died Aug. 7 at his home in Hingham, Mass. He was 89."
Source: The New Yorker
8/8/2022
Historian Ivan Jablonka's history of the idea of patriarchy suggests that feminists should recognize the current wave of male grievance as an opportunity to renegotiate the entire social compact of gender that has been built up over centuries of male power.
Source: Black Perspectives
8/8/2022
by Joseph R. Fitzgerald
As an activist with the Combahee River Collective and after, Barbara Smith helped define the attention to the relationships among racism, sexism and social class associated with the term "intersectionality." Here, she discusses the past and future of reproductive justice with her biographer.
Source: New York Times
8/3/2022
"This is not a new movement. It long preceded Trump. But the ideology is just becoming much more widespread as the movement has seized control, I believe, of the Republican Party."
Source: Texas Public Radio
8/1/2022
Today, the society itself and its beliefs are growing. North Texas is the center of its resurgence. Welch’s legacy continues to live on in modern day conservatism.
Source: The American Prospect
8/4/2022
by Paul Starr
Historian Michael Kazin and journalist Dana Milbank approach the nation's dire politics from the perspective of the two respective parties, Kazin examining the long conflicts within the Democratic party to create a broad and stable populist coalition, and Milbank examining the GOP's increasingly nihilistic efforts to break it up.
Source: New Books Network
8/4/2022
The political scientist's 2019 biography of the Justice comes in for new attention with Thomas's controversial judicial opinions (and the alleged actions of his wife on January 6).
Source: Los Angeles Review of Books
7/15/2022
by Johann N. Neem
In "This Earthly Frame," Sehat examines the way that activists in the 20th Century pushed the nation from an implicit privileging of Protestant Christianity toward a posture of "negative secularism" that separated the functions of government from doctrinal belief, and the transience of that victory.
Source: Religion Dispatches
8/3/2022
by Peter Laarman
A minister and activist argues that the novelist and essayist's defense of the New England Puritans as prototypical human rights heroes ignores the very clear limits that historians have identified for Puritanism's conceptions of social belonging.
Source: Washington Post
8/4/2022
While relatively little of Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America" became law, the House Speaker who rose to power in 1994 set the tone for the Republican Party's rigid partisanship and demonization of the opposition, a stance that justifies antidemocratic steps to keep power.
Source: Righting America
8/4/2022
"These textbooks, unlike the work of historians, dismisses much of human history and denigrates most human accomplishments. Only human efforts undertaken to support 'biblical truth,' meaning evangelical Protestantism, are godly and have any value; all others reflect sinful 'humanism'."
Source: Boston Review
8/4/2022
by Jonna Perrillo
The political upheaval of the Mexican revolution affected the politics of ethnic Mexicans on both sides of the border and transformed the political relations between both governments and the transnational working classes of the border region.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
8/1/2022
by Len Gutkin
Some critics have described today's battles over curriculum and inclusion as more focused on racism than the multicultural debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Are they, really?
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
8/1/2022
Marcia Bucur created a petition calling for the administration to publicly defend reproductive freedom and denounce the harassment of Dr. Caitlin Bernard after she described performing an abortion to aid a preteen rape victim.
