Historians in the News

Prof. Trinidad Gonzalez Seeks Truth and Reconciliation from Texas Rangers

The historian at South Texas College is seeking acknowledgment by the state legislature and elected officials representing the Rio Grande Valley of the atrocities committed under the color of law by the Texas Rangers after Texas independence. 

UF Faculty and Students Host "Can't Ban Us" Black History Teach-In

“The state of Florida has banned aspects of African American studies within grades K-12 and are now trying to further ban higher education students from learning critical ways to understand how race and racism works,” [historian Paul] Ortiz said.

Linda King Newell, 82, Pioneering Feminist Mormon Historian

Newell was briefly blacklisted by the leadership of the LDS Church for her work on Emma Smith, the first wife of founder Joseph Smith, which portrayed women as influential in the early church before being sidelined by an increasingly patriarchal institution.

A Win in the Battle to Commemorate a Notorious Waco, TX Lynching

For decades, activists fought for public acknowledgment of the lynching of teenaged Jesse Washington in 1916. Against the current of efforts to suppress the history of racist violence, a marker was unveiled this week. Historians Patricia Bernstein, William Carrigan and James SoRelle were involved in the effort. 

What Politics Kept In and Took Out of the AP Course

The excision of terms like "systemic" from the AP African American Studies curriculum suggest either an idiosyncratic review process or an attempt to avoid the specific triggering keywords of the right's complaints about liberal education. 

From a Celebration of the First President to a Celebration of the Presidency

Nothing, from the date to the name to the punctuation, has been straightforward in the celebration of Presidents' Day (which is officially observed by the federal government as Washington's Birthday), says biographer Alexis Coe. 

The HistoryMakers: Preserving Untold Stories of African American Achievement

60 Minutes covers a nonprofit group working to preserve and document Black American history. Julieanna Richardson's team has conducted, transcribed and posted more than 3,500 oral history interviews. 

Adam Laats Connects Current Course and Book Controversies to Past School Wars

The education historian joins Soledad O'Brien to discuss past controversies over how the past is taught. 

Jefferson Cowie: A Long History of White Grievance Aimed at the Federal Government

A microhistory of one Alabama county suggests that "freedom" has always been imagined by many white Americans to encompass their ability to dominate or exploit others, a vision that has been antagonistic to federal intervention.

Vincent Lloyd: What's Gone Wrong with Antiracist Politics

The Villanova professor explains the incidents that led him to ask whether a center-right critique of antiracist rhetoric and discursive rules has some justification, and how a broader coalition against domination can be rescued from some censorious excesses.

Stephen Kotkin on How the Ukraine War Could End

The historian of Russia and the USSR argues that Putin's invasion will ultimately be seen as a disaster for Russia. Its unclear, however, if that view is sufficiently widespread in Russia to change Putin's strategic outlook or the regime. 

Creating the First Complete List of Names of Interned Japanese Americans

Duncan Ryuken Williams of the University of Southern California led a research team for three years assembling a documentary record that could restore the individuality of 125,000 victims of internment. 

Clara Mattei on the History of Austerity Politics

A decade before the Great Depression, capital responded to a serious crisis of legitimacy by adopting measures that punished a restive working class through scarcity, argues a new economic history; maintaining hierarchy, not growing the economy, is the objective.

Black New Orleans Chefs Rewrite a Whitewashed, Tourist-Driven Culinary Narrative

A group of chefs is working to highlight the role of African-descended people, including enslaved Black people, creoles, and Haitian migrants, in creating the city's cuisine; food scholar Zella Palmer emphasizes that culinary ability and knowledge was among the skills targeted by traffickers who brought west Africans to New Orleans. 

The Book that Launched Black Studies Was a Challenge to Classroom Racism

by Ibram X. Kendi

Education historian Jarvis Givens discusses a 90th anniversary edition of Carter Woodson's pathbreaking "The Mis-Education of the Negro," noting that the book was banned in Oklahoma for being "antiklan" in its efforts to overturn the pervasive message of Black inferiority in the established school curriculum. 

Robin Kelley: What Florida Got Removed from AP African American Studies

The UCLA historian discusses what the changes mean for the course in the future and how they reflect the politics of the present. 

Review: Can Robert Kagan Reboot Interventionism?

by Samuel Moyn

"All along, not much ever separated neocons such as Kagan from a nationalist such as Trump, except the pretense that what is good for the United States, including all its war-making, is good for the world." But does the public buy it? 

The Origins of Valentine's Day

Was the holiday a Christian cooptation of the Roman Lupercalia, a wine-fueled fertility rite? Was Saint Valentine a mashup of two early Christians whose name was slapped on the day to try to get people to put their pants back on? 

How the Rocky Road of AP African American Studies Passed through Florida

The College Board, seeking to explain significant changes to the course's curriculum, maintained its denial that it did not make the alterations under pressure from Florida officials who, it said, showed “ignorance and derision for the field of African American studies.”

Medical Historians: We've Been Taught to Forget What We Used to Know about Head Injuries in Sports

Stephen Casper, Emily Harrison and Jeremy Greene argue that league-affiliated researchers who claim the jury is out about whether head injuries in competition contribute to long-term cognitive and mental deterioration are ignoring a long archive of medical studies that solidifies the link.