Roundup 
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: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/23/2022
The Imminent Demise of Roe Signals More Christian Nationalist Attacks on Secular America
by David Sehat
Christian conservatives are targeting not just abortion or contraception, but the broader idea of a secular American republic.
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SOURCE: TIME
5/23/2022
How Violence Crushed the Achievements of Reconstruction
by Clyde W. Ford
Both the formerly enslaved and their poor white partners in governing pursued significant changes in the political economy of the south, but those they won were stripped away by violence.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
5/18/2022
Corporate Activism is a Dead End
by Joanna Wuest
Corporate support for LGBTQ rights cannot substitute for building sexual and gender freedom into a working people's movement for change.
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5/20/2022
The Roundup Top Ten for May 20, 2022
The top opinion writing by historians and about history from around the web this week.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/16/2022
What Everyone Gets Wrong about the Evangelical-Abortion Connection
by Gillian Frank and Neil J. Young
A widely-accepted narrative holds that conservative Christian leaders pushed their followers to oppose abortion as a galvanizing issue when their first concern, resisting school desegregation, became politically unpopular. This obscures the movement building at the grass roots as Christians considered and debated the issue.
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SOURCE: Politico
5/17/2022
The Undiscussed Backlash to Brown v. Board: The Sidelining of Black Educators
by Leslie T. Fenwick
Brown v. Board was meant to ensure that children of different racial groups would share classrooms. But resistance to allowing Black teachers and principals to oversee white students' education led an estimated 100,000 Black educators to leave their profession.
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SOURCE: Baptist News
5/13/2022
The Religion of the "Lost Cause" Is Back, and It May be Winning
by Bill Leonard
The weaponization of Southern Christianity around perceived threats to cultural integrity today adapts the playbook of the Lost Cause to the present.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/18/2022
Women Know You Can't Just Replace Formula with Breastfeeding
by Laura Earls
Breastfeeding advocacy is historically tied as much to a prescriptive and sentimental image of motherhood and maternal attachment as to concern for babies' health, and has long ignored physical and social obstacles to nursing.
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SOURCE: Religion & Politics
5/17/2022
Why American Christians "Back the Blue" so Fervently
by Aaron Griffith
Evangelicals within police forces and in the public at large have been encouraged to understand a scriptural mandate for police authority that often short-circuits consideration of other Christian obligations for justice, argues a historian of evangelical attitudes to law and order.
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SOURCE: The Nation
5/19/2021
When a Right-Wing Attack on Textbooks Was Stopped
by Jonathan Zimmerman
A McCarthy-era attack on a leading civics textbook fell short because of both organized resistance and the unpopularity of the ideas behind the ban. Supporters of academic freedom today can potentially draw on both of those elements, too.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
5/19/2022
Alito's Opinion Shows Roe is Only the Beginning
by Thomas Zimmer
The entire idea of substantive due process under the 14th Amendment is called into question by the draft opinion, potentially threatening reproductive rights, civil rights, and sexual freedom in service of a reactionary ideal of patriarchal society.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/19/2022
Ukraine's Eurovision Victory Not the First Time Politics Has Been on Stage
by Tess Megginson
Since its beginnings in 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest has been a stage for statements about the politics of the continent, from the Cold War to the growth of the EU to the invasion of Ukraine.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
5/16/2022
White Power, White Violence, and the Open-Source Manual for Terrorism
by Kathleen Belew
The Buffalo shooter's manifesto doesn't need to be coherent or reality-based; its function will be to give instruction to future white supremacist terrorists within growing networks.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/17/2022
The Abortion Rights Movement Needs Something More than Voting
by Spencer Beswick
Anarchists and other more radical reproductive justice activists have pioneered direct action and mutual aid methods that will be needed to make sure women can access abortion after Roe.
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SOURCE: UT Daily Beacon
4/27/2022
University of Tennessee Must Take Stand to Call Out State CRT Bill as Exercise in White Supremacy
by David Barber
"Our students, and our society, desperately need to hear and learn the real history of this country – a history of this country that has no better telling than that history as seen through the eyes and experience of Black people."
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SOURCE: The Conversation
5/13/2022
At Brown v. Board Anniversary, US Schools Remain Segregated
by Pedro A. Noguera
Ongoing residential segregation by race and income, along with school reforms allowing parents to exercise choice in school attendance, have contributed to ongoing patterns of segregated public education that threaten the nation's ability to create a pluralistic democracy.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/17/2022
Buffalo Shooting Exposes How History Shapes the Present
by Chad Williams
"Buffalo’s unique history of African American freedom, civil rights struggle and perseverance in the face of structural racism and economic neglect remind us of why Gendron targeted this particular community and why this shooting is especially heinous."
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SOURCE: Salon
5/14/2022
We're Facing the Results of the Dems' Retreat from Secularism
by Jacques Berlinerblau
By trying to match the Republicans on bringing Christian faith into policy, Democrats abandoned the difficult but necessary struggles to define how a diverse society protects religious freedom for majority and minority faiths – and those of no faith.
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SOURCE: Phenomenal World
5/12/2022
America's School Funding is Kleptocracy in Action
by Esther Cyna
The American system of funding schools largely through local property taxes contributes to inequalities both obvious and subtle that amount to legal dispossession of poor and minority students by denying them access to quality education.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
5/10/2022
SCOTUS is Enabling a Backlash Against Free Sexual Expression
by Rebecca L. Davis
The history of legislation aimed at suppressing "vice" shows that abortion is tied to other forms of free sexual expression. The last sweeping attack on sexual freedom took decades to reverse.
News
- "We're Still Here": Past and Present Collide at a Native American Residential School
- Historians on Teaching with Integrity in the Face of "Gag Laws"
- The Complicated History of Abortion and Abortion Law in the United States
- Discovery of Earliest Known Record of Mayan Calendar
- Buffalo Shooting Centuries in Making, Say Historians of Slavery and Reconstruction