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 Times
8/21/2021
Historians of numerous colonial and imperial misadventures – from Indochina to Algieria to Afghanistan – suggest that American goals should have been recognized as incompatible with the reality of Afghan society.
Source: Public Books
8/20/2021
by Michael Mirer
Two recent books, by Tyler Stovall and Annelien De Dijn, interrogate the history of the idea of freedom and the question of whether western liberal democracy can be freed from its historical roots in exclusion and domination of others.
Source: New York Times
8/16/2021
A roundup of new books in the history of espionage covers Asian Americans in the WWII OSS, the early Cold War, and an examination of the roots of Putin's aggressiveness against dissidents.
Source: WBUR
8/17/2021
Historian Robert Crews joins Here and Now to discuss the Islamist movement in Afghanistan and their history.
Source: New York Times
8/18/2021
“Schools are particularly fraught spaces because they represent a potential challenge to the family and the authority of parents,” said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, an associate professor of history at the New School in New York City.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
8/13/2021
"Many faculty members across the country are concerned that in this politically polarized environment, some students or outside groups could come looking for trouble. The threat of students recording classroom conversations and posting snippets online out of context is not new, after all."
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
7/9/2021
by Paul Ham
If Curtis LeMay's firebombing broke the will of the Japanese public, nobody remembered to tell the Japanese. Malcolm Gladwell's praise of LeMay suffers from overlooking the Japanese side of the bombing campaign.
Source: Washington Post
8/14/2021
"History teaches, after all, that it is not the rebels, the iconoclasts, the curious, the dissidents who endanger a democratic society but rather the accepting, the unthinking, the unquestioning, the docile, the obedient, the silent, and the indifferent.”
Source: Boston Review
8/16/2021
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Celebrations of multiculturalism obscure the country’s settler colonial history—and the role that immigrants play in perpetuating it, argues Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in a new book excerpted here.
Source: Los Angeles Times
8/11/2021
"It’s complicated. But I think it’s a narrative that’s mediated by white mainstream media that deliberately pits us against each other."
Source: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
8/11/2021
"Teachers do not deliberately set out to make students feel bad about themselves. The problem this bill seems to identify, that Wisconsin's teachers intentionally or otherwise want to make students feel bad, is simply not real," said Jeremy Stoddard, a University of Wisconsin-Madison curriculum and instruction professor.
Source: Ms.
8/11/2021
Enforcement of bans on teaching "critical race theory" are likely to lead to threats to employment and even harassment that impacts women and faculty of color most.
Source: New York Times
8/17/2021
"Though the maps were internal documents that were never made public by the federal government, their ramifications were obvious to Black homeowners who could not get home loans that were backed by government insurance programs."
Source: WBUR
8/16/2021
Military historian Andrew Bacevich speaks with host Robin Young about what the fast fall of the government in Afghanistan means for the U.S. after 20 years of war in that country.
Source: CNN
8/17/2021
Robert Crews, a historian at Stanford University specializing in Afghanistan and central Asia, tells CNN's John Vause he believes the Trump administration's 2020 deal with the Taliban played a role in the group's takeover of the country.
Source: Smithsonian
8/16/2021
by Julie Flavell
"Jane was convinced that her husband had embarked on a humanitarian errand. She believed the British war machine that carried him to New York was not intended to drive the Americans to desperation, but to force them to the negotiating table."
Source: National Post
8/16/2021
Columnist Barbara Kay supports Canadian historians who have dissented from the Canadian Historical Association's statement that Canadian treatment of First Nations peoples was genocidal.
Source: New York Times
8/16/2021
by Fredrik Logevall
"It will be up to historians of the future, writing with broad access to official documents and with the kind of detachment that only time brings, to fully explain the remarkable early-morning scene at Bagram and all that led up to it. But there’s much we can already learn — abundant material is available."
Source: The Guardian
8/16/2021
The decision is seen as a victory for historians and academic freedom in a Polish political climate where denying Polish complicity in the Holocaust is part of right-wing politics.
Source: Los Angeles Times
8/10/2021
As political pressure brings down Confederate statues, the question of what replaces them becomes more urgent but remains unanswered.
