Roundup

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• 5/22/2020
  

  The Roundup Top Ten for May 22, 2020

  The top ten op-eds from around the web by historians (or about history) this week. 

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• SOURCE: Labor Online
  5/18/2020
  

  The Contagion and a Cure

  by Mark Lause

  Mark Lause looks at the 1793 yellow fever pandemic in Philadelphia from a working class history perspective, and finds it informs us today.

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  5/21/2020
  

  How White Backlash Controls American Progress

  by Lawrence Glickman

  Individual backlashes are part of a common strain of reactionary politics that rejects challenges to social hierarchies. 

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian Magazine
  5/19/2020
  

  Warren Harding Tried to Return America to ‘Normalcy’ After WWI and the 1918 Pandemic. It Failed.

  by William Deverell

  The lessons from his presidency show that a quick retreat to the past can be just a mirage.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/19/2020
  

  The Potential Risk of Chasing a COVID-19 Vaccine

  by Heidi Morefield

  Vaccine development is important to fighting viruses, but can’t come at the expense of other means of prevention.

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• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  5/19/2020
  

  Fundamentalist Pandemics

  by Juan Cole

  What evangelicals could learn from "The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam."

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/18/2020
  

  One of these Stories about Guns in Public Places is not Like the Others. Here’s Why.

  by Jonathan Blanks

  As guns have become an increasingly common sight at protests and government buildings, it’s clear that carrying them means different things — and presents different risks — for black and white Americans.

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• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  5/16/2020
  

  Ida Taught Me

  by Koritha Mitchell

  As the United States seems determined to repeat the horrors of the last turn of the century, I remain grateful for Wells’s example. Here is just some of what she taught me.

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• SOURCE: Jacobin
  5/19/2020
  

  There’s Nothing Good About Phyllis Schlafly

  by Eileen Jones

  "Mrs. America", the new miniseries about Phyllis Schlafly, doesn’t want us to come away with a harsh view of its subject. But we should: Schlafly’s right-wing views were consistently monstrous, doing untold damage to the country.

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• SOURCE: Nursing Clio
  5/19/2020
  

  A Complete Halt to the Liquor Traffic: Drink and Disease in the 1918 Epidemic

  by E. Thomas Ewing

  The most influential organization advocating for prohibition, the WCTU pressed for ratification of the 18th Amendment banning the sale of alcohol as influenza raged in 1918. But their celebration was short-lived.

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• SOURCE: TIME
  5/19/2020
  

  When the Economy Collapses, Talk Is Cheap—Just Look What Led Up to the Great Depression

  by Robert Dallek

  For American leaders, the Great Depression is as much a lesson in what not to do as it is in what to do.

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• SOURCE: TIME
  5/19/2020
  

  How the U.S. Navy’s First Black Officers Helped Reshape the American Military

  by Dan C. Goldberg

  The story of the Navy’s first black officers remains little known, overshadowed by the heroism of the Tuskegee Airmen and Patton’s Panthers.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/17/2020
  

  The West Is Relevant to Our Long History Of Anti-Blackness, Not Just The South

  by Walter Johnson

  The Missouri Compromise paved the path to the Civil War. But it also signaled what would follow: western settlement driven by the idea of expanding a country of, by, and for white men.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/18/2020
  

  Most Medical Professionals Aren’t Racist — But Our Medical System Is

  by Ella St. George Carey

  The medical profession perpetuates racial inequality in health outcomes in large part because medical training still treats white and nonwhite bodies as fundamentally different.

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  5/19/2020
  

  When University Leaders Fail

  by François Furstenberg

  A university governed by long timelines and long-term thinking grows conservatively and cautiously and prepares itself prudently for potential crises. If you turn a university into a giant corporation, on the other hand, it will rise and fall with the business cycle.

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• SOURCE: Jezebel
  5/20/2020
  

  Get in Shape Girl: A Century of Working Out from Home

  by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

  The home fitness industry grew by creating and addressing gendered insecurities about masculine strength and feminine attractiveness. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/15/2020
  

  The Postal Service Is the Most American Thing We’ve Got

  by Ted Widmer

  It would be difficult to think of a time when we have depended more on the United States Postal Service.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/18/2020
  

  7.7 Million Young People Are Unemployed. We Need a New ‘Tree Army.’

  by Collin O'Mara

  Today, there’s plenty to do for a revitalized conservation corps that would put young Americans back to work.

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• SOURCE: Forward
  5/18/2020
  

  Reform Judaism is a Wounded Giant. A Historian Explains Why it Got so Big.

  by Karla Goldman

  The Union for Reform Judaism faces a financial crisis because, while it shapes the religious practices of Reform Jews, many local congregations face their own financial difficulties and question the value of supporting a distant central organization.

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• SOURCE: Bitter Southerner
  5/15/2020
  

  Ahmaud Arbery Holds Us Accountable

  by Jim Barger

  Nobody belonged to the salt marshes of coastal Georgia more than Ahmaud Arbery. His family’s roots there run more than 200 years deep. A native of those same marshes writes about who Ahmaud was, how well he was loved, and what his community must reckon with in the wake of his murder.