Roundup

Roundup Top Ten for June 26, 2020

The top ten op-eds by historians or about history from around the web this week. 

New York Opens Traffic-Clogged Streets to People During Pandemic, the City’s Latest Redesign in Times of Dramatic Change

by Amy D. Finstein

The COVID-19 pandemic presents large cities with an opportunity to remake public space around different priorities, putting people before automobiles. 

Building The Chicago Police State: A Review Of Occupied Territory

by Davarian L. Baldwin

"With scrupulous archival detail and sharp analytic focus, Occupied Territory shows how Chicago’s “powerful carceral machinery,” which present-day Black communities condemns for its under-protection and over-policing, was built in the early twentieth century." 

Abolition or Bust: Liberal Police Reform as an Engine of Carceral Violence

by Charlotte Rosen

Recent work by scholars including Naomi Murakawa, Jodi Melamed, Elizabeth Hinton, Marisol LeBrón, Simon Balto, Max Felker-Kantor and Alex Vitale show that liberal reforms to policing fail to solve serious problems and reinforce the power and reach of police departments to the detriment of the disadvantaged.

Yes, D.C.’s Emancipation Memorial Advances White Supremacy

by Rebekah Bryer

The argument that freed slaves commissioned the Emancipation Memorial is only half true; white officials used the funds but ignored designs that expressed a role for the enslaved in bringing about emancipation.

Monuments to a Complicated Past

by Sean Wilentz

Unless we can outgrow the conception of history as a simplistic battle between darkness and light, we will be the captives of arrogant self-delusions and false innocence.

Makers of Living, Breathing History: The Material Culture of Homemade Facemasks

by Erika L. Briesacher

Material culture centers objects as historical documents that can be read like a text; whether highlighting the physical piece or searching for the biography behind it, this approach reveals complex sociocultural behavior.

A Brief History of Anti-Fascism

by James Stout

Today's anti-fascism isn’t about waving flags at football matches; it's about fighting, through direct action, racists and genocidaires wherever they can be found. The author discusses the history of the movement.

Britain's Persistent Racism Cannot Simply Be Explained by its Imperial History

by David Edgerton

It played its part, but empire does not explain all of Britain’s record of elitism, exploitation and discrimination.

Don’t Be Fooled by Seattle’s Police-Free Zone

by Margaret O'Mara

Protest is forcing our city to reckon with truths that can and should make white citizens like me uncomfortable, and that remind us just how much Seattle is like the rest of America: impossibly divided, and impossibly full of hope.

Funny how Trump’s Dislike for 'Losers' Doesn't Extend to Confederate Generals

by Max Boot

"When we celebrate Confederates, we do so because of their racism. By contrast, when we celebrate other great Americans, from Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt, we do so despite their racism. That’s a crucial distinction that should not be lost in the heat of the moment."

“This Is Chaos:” Order Maintenance and the Fear of Black Anarchy in Atlanta

by Danielle Wiggins

Although the city has been called the "Black Mecca" of America, Black political leaders have long tried to suppress protest as part of a strategy to win over the city's business community. Today's protests reflect the limits of that strategy. 

Cancel the Fall College Football Season

by Victoria L. Jackson

For too long, instead of facilitating the intellectual advancement and economic empowerment of young Black men, college sports have helped make American universities another institution perpetuating the undervaluing of Black lives.

This Monument to White Supremacy Hides in Plain Sight

by Richard White

The invisibility of Drake’s Cross in a San Francisco park may make it the most fitting monument to white supremacy in the country.

How 1970s U.S. Immigration Policy Put Mexican Migrants at the Center of a System of Mass Expulsion

by Adam Goodman

"90% of the people pushed out of the country during the 20th century were Mexicans deported via a coercive, fast-track administrative process euphemistically referred to as 'voluntary departure,'" writes Adam Goodman.

The Military Provides a Model for how Institutions can Address Racism

by Margaret B. Montgomery

Making good on the military's policies of desegregation required organized pressure to change military justice and the communities around military installations. 

Martin Luther King’s Giant Triplets of Injustice

by Andrew Bacevich

Without addressing the fundamental evils of economic inequality and militarism American society will continue to fail to realize the promise of racial equality, as Martin Luther King warned in his 1967 speech at Riverside Church. 

American Fascism: It Has Happened Here

by Sarah Churchwell

A cultural historian of the American right argues that efforts to trace American allegiance to European fascist movements miss the point. There are American traditions of racial dictatorship, strident nationalism and populist demagoguery that have come close to converging in a homegrown form of fascism. 

The Confederacy Is Not Worth Commemorating

by Jonathan Adler

A traitorous and failed attempt to secede over slavery is nothing to celebrate.

Britain Celebrates 'Windrush Day' Amid Broader Reckoning on Race

by Billy Perrigo

Here's what to know about the history and significance of this British celebration.