Roundup

The Roundup Top Ten for March 12, 2021

The week's top opinion writing by historians and about history from around the web. 

Including Women’s Wartime Stories Changes How We Understand Warfare

by Jeffrey H. Jackson

Despite extensive research, the popular view of the second world war remains largely one of men. As we celebrate women’s history month, it is worth remembering how many more untold stories remain.

On Shedding an Obsolete Past

by Andrew Bacevich

"Sadly, Joe Biden and his associates appear demonstrably incapable of exchanging the history that they know for a history on which our future may well depend. As a result, they will cling to an increasingly irrelevant past."

A Living Wage Should Be A Constitutional Right

by John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco

"It is time we invert John F. Kennedy’s famous dictum (“Ask not what your country can do for you …”) and ask what can the country do for us?"

What the Policing Response to the KKK in the 1960s Can Teach about Dismantling White Supremacist Groups Today

by David Cunningham

If history is a guide, providing police with new tools to address current white nationalist threats could result in further repression of activists of color.

Revisiting Reparations: Is it Time for the US to Pay its Debt for the Legacy of Slavery?

by Anne C. Bailey

Among many arguments for reparations, the chance to cement American leadership among nations addressing past injustices is little-discussed, but important. 

Why White Supremacists and Qanon Enthusiasts are Obsessed – But Very Wrong – About the Byzantine Empire

by Roland Betancourt

White supremacists overlook Byzantium's considerable diversity when they invoke it as a model of a new, exclusionary European Christian society. 

Women Used to Dominate the Beer Industry – Until the Witch Accusations Started Pouring In

by Laken Brooks

Male brewers seized on the conservative ideas of the Reformation to push women out of the brewing trade through accusations of witchery. Today's craft beer culture, unlike the home brewing of old, is male-dominated.

How Black Americans Used Portraits and Family Photographs to Defy Stereotypes

by Janette Greenwood

The author and her students researched and curated an exhibition of historical Black family portraits and discovered the way that photography served as a tool for rejecting stereotypes in an era of ascendant racism. 

Joe Biden is Making Clear that Saudi Human Rights Violations Won’t be Ignored

by Nicholas DeAntonis

President Biden's recent affirmation of an American commitment to human rights in discussions with King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud fell short of many demands for action against the Saudi regime. But it is a step in reforming a relationship in which human rights have not been an afterthought, but a non-thought. 

Thucydides, Historical Solidarity, and Birth in the Pandemic

by Sarah Christine Teets

A classicist reflects on Thucydides' account of the Athenian plague, and concludes that the point of historical knowledge is to empathize, not to strategize. 

Tweeting To Find Community

by Varsha Venkatasubramanian

Don't fear Twitter, new historians. Use it for learning, networking, and fun.

Lessons From All Democracies

by David Stasavage

The idea of the "torch" of democracy passing from one historical society to the present blinds us to understanding how popular sovereignty arises and why it's resilient. If we are concerned with protecting democracy, we must first understand it.

The Coronavirus Killed the Gospel of Small Government

by Zachary D. Carter

Revisiting the work of Keynes highlights the fact that struggles to deal with the pandemic are not only public health failures but economic failures — an inability to marshal resources to solve a problem. 

We, the Nation, Born Under This Tree

by Sean Cleary

A speech of Edward Everett and a painting by N.C. Wyeth create a mythical founding moment of an American nation conceived as a white homeland. 

The Exploration of Space as a Project of Humanity

by Joseph Preston Baratta

The exploration of space as an international objective hopefully points the way toward planetary unity beyond nationalism. 

When It Comes To a Bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, ‘The Cruelty Was the Point.’

by Kevin M. Levin

The Nathan Bedford Forrest bust placed in the Tennessee State Capitol in 1978 was not the work of people who could reasonably be said to have the values of another era. Its placement forces us to consider head-on the values of the Confederacy and people who celebrate it. 

A Monumental Error in the Making

by Harold Holzer

Daniel Chester French's statue "The Republic" is on a list of public monuments to be reviewed by the city of Chicago. Removing it would be destroying an important link to the city's past. 

Historian Unjustly Forced to Walk the Plank

by Michael E. Carter

When a historian published an editoral about the history of piracy near Tampa Bay during Super Bowl Week, right-wing media took an effort to present historical knowledge as evidence of a liberal culture war, subjecting them to harassment and threats in their own cancel culture campaign. Is the goal to intimidate historians from weighing in? 

The Four Horsemen: Rush, Roger, Rupert, and The Donald May Ride Forever

by Robert Lipsyte

There’s no reason to think that the ride of the modern Four Horsemen is over. Limbaugh and Aisles have left their vast poisonous pools behind and they won’t dry up soon.