Historians in the News

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.

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• SOURCE: The Guardian
  5/22/2022
  

  "We're Still Here": Past and Present Collide at a Native American Residential School

  What is the experience of Native American students at one of the few surviving government-run indigenous residential schools in the United States? 

• 
• SOURCE: American Historical Association
  5/18/2022
  

  Historians on Teaching with Integrity in the Face of "Gag Laws"

    Leonard Moore, Katharina Matro, Julia Brookins, Kathleen Hilliard, James Grossman, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and James Sweet describe how their ability to examine the past honestly and students' freedom to learn support democracy. 

• 
• SOURCE: National Geographic
  5/17/2022
  

  The Complicated History of Abortion and Abortion Law in the United States

  Many scholars, including Carla Spivack and Lauren MacIvor Thompson have challenged Samuel Alito's historical research and argue that for much of American history abortion was neither outlawed nor particularly controversial. 

• 
• SOURCE: KVUE
  5/17/2022
  

  Discovery of Earliest Known Record of Mayan Calendar

  A fragment discovered at the Las Pinturas pyramid site in San Bartolo, Guatemala connects the ancient site to a calendar system used by indigenous Mayan people today. 

• 
• SOURCE: NBC News
  5/18/202
  

  Buffalo Shooting Centuries in Making, Say Historians of Slavery and Reconstruction

  Manisha Sinha and Bernard Powers link the mass killing to longstanding repression of Black political power, and the justification of violence for that purpose. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  5/15/2022
  

  Isaac Chotiner Interviews Kathleen Belew on White Power and the Buffalo Mass Shooting

  "The idea is simply that many different kinds of social change are connected to a plot by a cabal of élites to eradicate the white race, which people in this movement believe is their nation."

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  5/17/2022
  

  What if Mental Illness Isn't All In Your Head?

  by Marco Ramos

  A historian of mental health reviews two new books and concludes that pharmaceutical and neurological approaches to mental health have failed and it's time to turn the lens onto society.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/16/2022
  

  Nursing Clio Project Connects Health, Gender and History

  “The personal is historical,” the blog’s authors declare — and its lineup of historians and authors proves that point again and again.

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  5/13/2022
  

  Historian Leslie Reagan on the History of Abortion and Abortion Rights

  Leslie Reagan explains that there's more to the history of abortion rights than the laws cited by Samuel Alito criminalizing the procedure. 

• 
• SOURCE: Mellon Foundation
  5/17/2022
  

  Mellon Foundation Event: Chinese American History, Asian American Experiences (May 19)

  Historians Erika Lee and Mae Ngai discuss the history of Chinese Americans in the context of Asian American history and American multiculturalism with Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander on May 19. 

• 
• SOURCE: Harvard Gazette
  5/16/2022
  

  Harvard Peabody Museum Returns Sacred Scrolls to White Earth Tribe

  Professor Philip Deloria praised the repatriation of the artifacts as a "rebalancing" of accounts between the tribe and the university. 

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  5/8/2022
  

  How the Evangelical Movement Embraced the Abortion Issue

  Kristin Kobes Du Mez discusses how Evangelical Christians came to drive the abortion debate in the US in the context of a backlash against feminism and a growing infrastructure of conservative voter mobilization.

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  5/16/2022
  

  Kathleen Belew: Buffalo Massacre Likely Driven by "Great Replacement" Myth

  "A man accused of killing 10 people in Buffalo, New York was allegedly motivated by a racist doctrine known as 'replacement theory.' It's just a new name for an old set of racial hatreds, Kathleen Belew told NPR."

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  5/17/2022
  

  AAIHS Statement on Buffalo Mass Shooting

  by Robert Greene II

  "Black Americans and other marginalized groups in America and around the world have found ways to resist this reprehensible violence. We will all continue to do so. For now, AAIHS wishes to express its condolences to those harmed by the tragedy in Buffalo."

• 
• SOURCE: The Baffler
  

  Review Essay: The Bloody Business of the British Conquest of Nigeria

  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
  

  Lily Geismer on the Dismal Legacy of the "New Democrats"

  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
  

  The Rent is Too Damn High(ly Central to Modern Economies)

  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 Anti-Abortion Movement's Pre-Roe Roots

  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
  

  Virtual Event: Scholars Discuss Free Speech at American Writers Museum May 18

  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
  

  Abortion Historian Gillian Frank on Religious Leaders who Once Helped Women End Pregnancies

  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.