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: Washington Monthly
11/8/2021
Celebrity religious conversions link the public politics of religious affiliation and the internal motivations of faith. Historian Rebecca L. Davis's new book examines three prominent celebrity conversions and how they shed light on 20th century America.
Source: Boston Review
11/4/2021
by Justin H. Vassallo
Terence Renaud's history places the international New Left movements that emerged in the 1960s, and today's left activism, in the context of radical traditions that have sought to avoid hierarchy and rigidity. Questions remain about how ideals and ethics can combine with organizing to change institutions.
Source: KCRW
11/6/2021
The historian of environmental movements discusses how those movements have evolved and been pushed toward examining racist legacies.
Source: Los Angeles Times
11/7/2021
On a recent August day, Frank Cruz, now 82, thought to himself as he had dozens of times before: “Pendejo, you better do something about those films. It might be too late.”
Source: New York Times
11/9/2021
by Jake Silverstein
The continuing debate over the 1619 project shows that what we call "history" is inseparable from the process of historiography, which has never been free of bitter conflict and disagreement.
Source: New York Times
11/9/2021
by Jamelle Bouie
The writings of Oliver Cromwell Cox challenged the midcentury liberal conception of racism as a caste problem by linking it to capitalist exploitation and material inequality. He profoundly influenced Martin Luther King Jr.'s social critique and offers a way out of the dead end of "wokeness" and "identity politics."
Source: Orange County Register
11/8/2021
The recent movement to reconsider Confederate monuments represents a kind of synthesis of public and academic histories with a moral component, which Benjamin Cawthra encourages his public history students to investigate.
Source: Daily Beast
11/9/2021
While the sources do show Washington's personal repugnance at slavery, he never made a principled, public statement opposing it or a practical plan to end it.
Source: Dallas Morning News
11/8/2021
Texas’ House Textbook Investigating Committee held hearings across the state in 1962, which were suddenly halted after they became so rancorous and the lawmakers received threats.
Source: The Guardian
11/7/2021
Historians have generally been unimpressed by claims made by Stephen Pinker that humanity is enjoying a period of peace.
Source: New York Times
11/7/2021
The Chinese Communist Party's newest official history elevates Xi as a figure of historical significance alongside Mao and Deng Xiaoping, making the country's history an instrument of political power.
Source: The Nation
11/1/2021
by Steven Hahn
"Ages of Capitalism" is one of the first synthetic accounts of the relationship of capitalism and American politics and society, and provides an important vocabulary for a developing field of inquiry. It also, oddly, resonates with the older consensus history that assumed capitalism as a core part of American life.
Source: Bloomberg CityLab
11/5/2021
Peter Baldwin offers context for how American cities haltingly adopted and quickly abandoned public toilets, a story that encompasses the racial, gender and class politics of how people interact in urban space.
Source: Forward
11/3/2021
Deborah Lipstadt's testimony featured discussion of the historical content of antisemitism; her cross examination by defendant Christopher Caldwell included crass questions about Holocaust jokes.
Source: New York Times
11/2/2021
In a 48-page report she prepared for the trial, Lipstadt wrote that “this fear of active replacement by the Jew, derived directly from the historical underpinnings of antisemitism, is a central feature of contemporary antisemitism.”
Source: TIME
11/1/2021
Historian Timothy Snyder recounts his role in a November 2020 presentation to business leaders about the authoritarian danger reflected in Trump's lies about the "stolen" election. Did a potential coup fail because CEOs thought it was bad for business? Or is there a change afoot in corporate citizenship?
Source: Los Angeles Review of Books
11/3/2021
by John Reeves
A reviewer concludes that Allen Guelzo's new biography succeeds in evaluating Robert E. Lee's military career but misses in its assessment of his relationship to slavery and his legacy.
Source: The Atlantic
11/3/2021
In one century, whalers killed at least 2 million baleen whales, which together weighed twice as much as all the wild mammals on Earth today. New research suggests this has impacted the ecology of the oceans significantly.
Source: The New Republic
11/3/2021
by Chris Lehmann
Historian Leigh Eric Schmidt chronicles the decline of American secularism; the fate of Thomas Paine's looted corpse stands as a tidy metaphor for the mismatch of secular rationality with the desire for communal ritual.
Source: Philadelphia Tribune
11/1/2021
"It all goes back to when I was a child growing up in White Plains," said Mamie Hillman, executive director of the museum. "I always wanted to know — how did I enter into history?"
