Roundup

A Short History of Black Women and Police Violence

by Keisha N. Blain

Despite, or perhaps because of, their own vulnerability to state-sanctioned violence, black women have been key voices in the struggle to end it.

Roundup Top Ten for June 12, 2020

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

Using the Military to Quash Protests Can Erode Democracy – As Latin America Well Knows

by Kristina Mani

Even strong democracies have unraveled when the military was brought in to quell protest. Uruguay in the 1960s, Venezuela in the 1980s and Chile just last year provide insights.

The Black Women Who Paved the Way for This Moment

by Keisha N. Blain

The prominence of black women in today's protests is not a sudden development. In taking to the streets in support of their goals, they are building upon a rich tradition of black women’s organizing.

What the U.S. Can Learn from the History of Northern Ireland

by Andrew Sanders

British soldiers deployed to Northern Ireland in 1969 in an operation intended to be a temporary action to quell sectarian violence and inflammatory mob and police attacks on Catholic civil rights advocates. They remained until 2007, a lesson that American politicians should heed. 

A ‘Good’ Protester is Just a ‘Bad’ Protester in the Misty Rearview Mirror

by David S. Meyer

The comparison drawn between "good" and "bad" forms of protest usually draws on oversimplified historical comparisons and is often intended to justify ignoring the substantive problems animating protests. 

How Do We Change America?

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police if the roots of oppression and inequality that constitute what many activists refer to as “racial capitalism” are left in place.

Explaining Today

by Ed Ayers

The leader of a web-based digital history initiative argues that normal ways of teaching history fail students by ignoring the nature of injustice in favor of a triumphal narrative of steadily expanding freedom. 

Stop Comparing Today's Protests to 1968

by Thomas J. Sugrue

The who, the where and the why of 2020 cannot be boiled down to a reprise of 1968, nor can we predict political responses by catching a glimpse of the past through our rearview mirrors.

2020 Is Not 1968. It May Be Worse.

by Niall Ferguson

The Hoover Institution Senior Fellow suggests that the current political climate--a reelection campaign amid multiple national crises--has both similarities and differences from 1968. 

Wanted: An End to Police Terror

by Stuart Schrader

Radical activists have long used the "Wanted" poster as a subversive strategy to advertise the crimes of police. The author asks if today's activists should move past a political rhetoric that accepts punishment and incarceration as necessary aspects of society. 

#Ladygraham Went Viral — And Not Just Because Of Lindsey Graham’s Politics

by Thomas Balcerski

Behind the gossip about Graham and others lay the remnants of a stubbornly pernicious idea: the presumption of heterosexuality for those in positions of power. 

Richmond’s Confederate Monuments Were Used to Sell a Segregated Neighborhood

by Kevin M. Levin

The Confederate monuments dedicated throughout the South from 1880 to 1930 helped do the work of justifying segregation and relegating African Americans to second-class status. Monument Avenue was unique in this regard as part of a speculative real estate development (for whites only, naturally).

How the US Government Sold the Peace Corps to the American Public

by Wendy Melillo

Given the growing counterculture movement in the early 1960s, the government feared that few young Americans would be motivated to join the Peace Corps by a message that they’d be volunteering to help to fight communism. 

The Template for Using White Privilege to Fight Racism

by Nancy C. Unger

Whiteness enables allies in this struggle to push in ways that African Americans sometimes cannot without disproportionate risk. That was Belle La Follette’s secret — she used white privilege to fight against it.

Letters From An American: June 8, 2020

by Heather Cox Richardson

Among other topics, Professor Richardson weighs in on the New York Times editorial fiasco, arguing that Tom Cotton's op ed was too detached from fact to make any contribution to meaningful public debate. 

Don't Worry about "Rewriting History": It's Literally What We Historians Do

by Charlotte Lydia Riley

People have always reinterpreted and re-evaluated the past. Every time a statue comes down, we learn a little more.

The Promise and Risks of Artificial Intelligence: A Brief History

by Rebecca Slayton

Machines have been taking over tasks that otherwise require human intelligence for decades, if not centuries.

Rumors of War in Richmond

by Thomas J. Brown

Kehinde Wiley's statue Rumors of War certainly draws meaning from its location, but it is also the capstone of a series on which the artist has been engaged since an early stage of his meteoric career, long before Confederate monuments stirred wide controversy.

Subverting New York’s Police Brutality Policy

by Lawrence Wittner

Longstanding opposition from the Patrolman's Benevolent Association, the union of New York City police officers, has made meaningful civilian oversight of the police impossible.