Roundup

The Strange Case of Booker T. Washington’s Birthday

by Bill Black

A history teacher's saga of the verification of a seemingly simple fact shows that sources may not always be reliable, and that our knowledge of many facts is the product of historians' labor. 

Left Behind: The Trouble with Euphemism

by Nancy Isenberg

A historian of white rural poverty says that the cultural phenomenon of JD Vance's book "Hillbilly Elegy" is just the latest deployment of the "left behind" euphemism to obscure the nature of poverty in the United States. The rural poor are and have been part and parcel of the American economic order.

The Media will be Key to Overcoming a Senate Filibuster on Voting Rights

by Donald A. Ritchie

"From the Boston Massacre to Watergate, the power of the media became manifest whenever editors and reporters, convinced of the seriousness of their cause, kept a story alive until they forced people to pay attention." TV journalist Roger Mudd kept the story of the Senate's filibuster of the Civil Rights Act in the public eye. 

Roundup Top Ten for April 9, 2021

The best opinion writing by historians and about history from around the web this week. 

As the Country Reckons with Race, Will Tribal Nations Lead the Way?

by Alaina E. Roberts

The decision of the Cherokee Nation to accept obligations conferred by treaty to honor the citizenship claims of descendants of Black people enslaved by the Cherokee accepts reckoning with past injustices as a tribal strength instead of a liability. 

Restoring the People’s Universities

by Alejandra Marchevsky and Jeanne Theoharis

"We see this trend across the nation: when students of color finally began to gain access to higher education, disinvestment and the shrinking of educational opportunity followed."

Biden’s Plan for Central America Is a Smokescreen

by Aviva Chomsky

The Biden plan for Central America revives the Cold War formula of business-friendly economic development and militarized security in the name of stopping migration toward the US. This, the author argues, amounts to doubling down on failed policies that have driven migration for decades.

Our Greatest Libraries are Melting Away

by David Farrier

Ice core samples from the Greenland shelf are a physical archive of the long sweep of human history, and demonstrate the connections of humanity's past and future. 

Back to the Future at the Pentagon

by William Astore

The Pentagon's shift away from planning for asymmetrical warfare toward "near-peer" conventional conflict is reviving the defense contracting gravy train for big-ticket weapons systems, with a revival of Cold War nuclear danger as a side effect. 

The Muslims Who Inspired Spinoza, Locke and Defoe

by Mustafa Akyol

"In this age of anxiety, anger and contestations between the West and the Islamic world, many epoch-shaping stories of intellectual exchanges between our cultures are often forgotten."

The End of Development

by Tim Barker

"Capitalism’s publicists are experiencing something of what Marxists went through after 1989, with one important difference: capitalism may be increasingly discredited, but it has not disappeared the way state socialism did."

The Meaning of the Democrats’ Spending Spree

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Joe Biden supported a balanced budget amendment in 1995, ran as the "establishment" candidate in the Democratic primaries, and has been a regular advocate of bipartisanship. So why is his administration proposing the massive American Rescue Plan Act, and showing a willingness to act without securing Republican cooperation? A tour of recent history can explain. 

Without Asian American Studies, We Can’t Understand American Racism

by Min Hyoung Song

The establishment of Asian American Studies and ethnic studies programs has been essential to putting Asian American scholars (and scholars of Asian Americans) in position to engage the mass media around events like the Atlanta shootings. As those programs are under fire, it's time to recognize their value. 

April 6, 2021: On the Republican Party

by Heather Cox Richardson

Since the time of Lincoln, the Republican Party has been part of a bipartisan understanding that expanding the nation's infrastructure – meaning investing in all sorts of supports to economic and social activity – has been a boon to prosperity. That commitment is fraying today. 

Why Republican Efforts to Ban the 1619 Project from Classrooms are so Misguided

by Seth Rockman

"Ultimately the deep concern about the 1619 Project’s truth-telling concerning the American past is not that it puts patriotism at risk, but rather that it jeopardizes particular versions of the American future," including a recent Heritage Foundation report that is mostly concerned that the 1619 project will lessen the appeal of libertarian capitalism. 

Why Weimar is an Imperfect Mirror

by Helmut Smith

Peter Gay's "Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider" became a key text for understanding the Weimar era as an allegory for understanding political conflict when it was published in 1968. But his psychoanalytical approach can be an impediment to understanding the historical specificity of the era. 

What Manhattan Beach’s Racist Land Grab Really Meant

by Alison Rose Jefferson

Debates over  the redress of past racial injustice must acknowledge that some past actions have harmed communities in ways that can't be repaired, including the loss of space for communal leisure or equal access to everyday pleasures. 

When Will Liberals Reclaim Free Speech?

by Jonathan Zimmerman

"When speech can be suppressed, the people with the least power are likely to lose the most. That’s why every great tribune of social justice in American history—including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. —was also a zealous advocate for free speech."

A Poem That Shows How to Remember the Holocaust

by James Loeffler and Leora Bilsky

"Lemkin’s anguished text also explains why the world had already begun to forget the Holocaust. Genocide represents more than a large-scale physical assault on human bodies, he suggests; it is also an attack on the very existence of minority cultures. In a genocide, books are burned and memories are extinguished."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Progressive Catholicism

by Walter G. Moss

Although her religious upbringing is not the most prominent part of her public persona, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez follows a tradition of Catholic advocates for justice.