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 Baffler
by Adewale Maja-Pearce
Self-serving stories of the civilizing mission of British Christianity paper over the brutality of colonialism.
Source: The New Republic
5/16/2022
A reviewer calls a new book on the 1990s a sobering look at the effects of tying social policy to the market.
Source: The Baffler
5/4/2022
by Trevor Jackson
Historian Trevor Jackson reviews Brett Christophers's book on rent, which places the power of the rentier class at the center of the inequality and dysfunction of modern capital and brings Marx's original investigations into the 21st century.
Source: NPR
5/4/2022
The professionalization of medicine in the 19th century empowered male doctors to usurp the personal judgment of pregnant women about when "quickening" of a fetus had taken place, and set in motion growing efforts to restrict abortion.
Source: PEN America
5/4/2022
This event looks at historical moments where strident expressions of political thought, widely perceived to be anti-democratic in their own place and time, provoked new strictures.
Source: The Editorial Board
5/4/2022
Faced with the toll of injury and death from their congregants desperately seeking illegal abortions, individual priests, ministers and rabbis in significant numbers were an unlikely but important source of help in obtaining safe abortion before Roe.
Source: MSNBC
4/29/2022
Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale University and author of "Bloodlands," talks with Rachel Maddow about the manipulative power of a "Big Lie" and why it's so difficult to untangle a person from a Big Lie once they've bought into it.
Source: NBC News
4/27/2022
Richard White and Brad DeLong consider how the megabillionaire's bid for Twitter stacks up against other efforts by the ultra-rich to build media empires – is it more about attention and less about advancing financial interests?
Source: Washington University Center for the Humanities
4/25/2022
A new book examines the relationship of sexuality, residential segregation, and class and racial inequality in the AIDS epidemic.
Source: WBUR
4/26/2022
Historian Anne Wingenter and law professor Erica Chenoweth discuss the relationship between fascism and patriarchy and the way that women's rights are a signal of the health of democracy.
Source: NPR
5/1/2022
Historian Peter Linebaugh explains that the international day of labor solidarity has always sat uneasily with American nationalism.
Source: America
5/2/2022
Shannen Dee Williams offers a history of Black nuns at a time when the American church is grappling with its history of discrimination and exclusion.
Source: The Atlantic
4/28/2022
Science Historian Michael Worboys explains that the Victorian craze for dog breeding enshrined both a focus on dogs' outward appearances and the idea that heredity was all-important to a dog's quality, leading to frequent disappointment for owners who find their pets don't fit expectations.
Source: The Nation
5/2/2022
by David A. Bell
The belief in History as a force driving events toward greater enlightenment has long allowed people to punt on making judgment and taking action to future generations. Joan Scott's book examines the seductive power of this faith.
Source: Black Perspectives
4/27/2022
by Robert Greene II
Academics who plan to catch up on their reading this summer can look here for suggestions.
Source: Fortune
4/23/2022
One lesson seems clear: there is no neat two-year timeline for pandemics, and viruses can circulate at a low profile for a long time.
Source: The Atlantic
4/27/2022
Reporter Amanda Mull links a new book by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and the work of some outside-the-box fitness influencers to examine the mismatch between how big business sells fitness and how Americans want and need to move their bodies.
Source: The Atlantic
4/22/2022
by Sarah A. Seo
Anne Gray Fischer's book shows that police policy toward sexuality in public space changed in ways that made Black women's public lives subject to increased control and that entrenched the discretion of police to stop people for suspected minor offenses that is associated with "broken windows" policing today.
Source: The New Republic
4/21/2022
by Andrew Lanham
Brian Hochman shows that the white backlash to civil rights and racial justice protests helped to undermine longstanding civil libertarian opposition to electronic surveillance and normalize the idea of the government spying on Americans.
Source: Jacobin
4/26/2022
Journalist George Lowther Steer broke the news that the German Luftwaffe had provided the aerial destruction of the town, in what became a training ground for future Nazi attacks.
