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: New York Review of Books
4/7/2022
by David Cole
Is an all-or-nothing view of constitutional rights at the root of growing cultural clashes pitting civil rights against the free exercise of religion? A new book suggests alternatives.
Source: The Baffler
4/6/2022
by Clinton Williamson
Neither utopian nor cataclysmic predictions about the effects of automation made in the 20th century have come exactly to pass; technology has changed, but not replaced, work. Several new books try to connect the past and future of work.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
4/5/2022
by Steven Mintz
Zachary Schrag's new Princeton Guide to Historical Research is a fresh update to discussions of historical method that meshes with the urgent pursuit of relevance in the discipline and the involvement of history in public political debate.
Source: CNN
4/2/2022
Peter DeSimone, Timothy Snyder and Ian Ona Johnson discuss the errors of logistics, diplomacy, and treatment of civilians that have hindered the achievement of Russia's goals in Ukraine.
Source: HuffPost
3/31/2022
"Black youth say they feel squarely in the crosshairs of the latest culture wars engulfing America’s schools — seeing themselves as collateral damage in a political firestorm."
Source: Codastory
3/30/2022
"Seen from an American perspective, Germany is often portrayed as the wise and capable professor of remembrance; the U.S its difficult student."
Source: The Atlantic
4/4/2022
by Xochitl Gonzalez
The Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers' Organization encouraged its college-educated members to take on industrial work to support a labor union movement in crisis; the moment encouraged a broader sense of who is a worker. Today, are workers in health, service, and logistics coming to a similar recognition?
Source: The Atlantic
4/4/2022
by Daniel Immerwahr
"Whatever else the Second World War was about, it was, on both sides, a war for empire."
Source: Dissent
4/1/2022
Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts's new book argues that the child welfare system has historical roots in campaigns of oppression against Black and Native Americans; combined with the financial incentives of privatized social services, the system encourages abuse and exploitation today.
Source: Boston Review
4/4/2022
by Alan Wald
As the political thought of the Italian marxist is increasingly used and misused in popular discourse, including in right-wing attacks on "cultural Marxism," has the time come for this generation's biography of Antonio Gramsci?
Source: Jacobin
4/4/2022
"If you find out that, very early on, there’s somebody advocating emancipation, it just makes the narrative a little bit messier."
Source: The Nation
4/4/2022
Academics and activists on the left in Eastern Europe say the American left views the Ukraine war through a lens of criticizing American imperialism, which leads to a skewed assessment of responsibility for the war.
Source: Austin American-Statesman
3/31/2022
"Staley turned the archives into a global powerhouse that rivals the collecting achievements of Harvard University, Yale University and the British Museum."
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
3/31/2022
by John Samuel Harpham
"Like all ideas, race has a history. There was a time before it. In turn conceptions of it have shifted over time, and it has been charged with different meanings in different settings." Gates and Curran have identified a little-studied collection of 1739 essays on race that mark a key shift in the idea.
Source: The New Yorker
3/28/2022
Historian Elizabeth Elkins's new book on the British Empire "contends that Britain’s use of systematic violence was no better than that of its rivals. The British were simply more skilled at hiding it."
Source: Jewish Currents
3/24/2022
by David Klion
"This is a tragedy, and Vladimir Putin is mainly responsible for it, but the world that will emerge from this war in Ukraine will be poorer, more divided, and more heavily armed."
Source: The Atlantic
3/26/2022
Bret Devereaux is trying to lead fellow historians to understand the influence a number of popular strategy games have for students understanding of both historical fact and the "mechanics" of historical change.
Source: Washington Post
3/25/2022
by Drew Gilpin Faust
Hirshman focuses on the complex character of abolitionist editor Maria Weston Chapman, whose combination of moral fervor and racial prejudice pushed Frederick Douglass from the moralistic Garrisonian camp to a pragmatic and more effective strategy of political activism.
Source: The New Republic
3/24/2022
by Dexter Fergie
Sam Lebovic's book "A Righteous Smokescreen" seeks to explain how the cultural globalization of the 20th century was a one-way exchange of American culture that left Americans dominant but isolated from and ignorant of the rest of the world.
Source: The Chatner
3/29/2022
by Daniel Lavery
"It’s the most prominent example of a type of book that fascinates me: The amateur/popular history of an entire field that’s largely beloved (or at least successful) outside of said field and widely loathed within it."
