This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: WORT
Dec 20, 2021
Karma Chávez guest hosts a wide-ranging conversation with historian Heather Ann Thompson about policing, mass incarceration, and why overhauling the criminal justice system is the civil rights issue of our time.
Source: Governing
Dec 19, 2021
"Rebellion and revolution are a rejection of the status quo, and the people who reject the status quo are usually people for whom the status quo isn’t working. In the case of Washington and Franklin, however, they couldn’t have asked for more from the status quo, so what caused them to do this?"
Source: Ebony
Dec 19, 2021
Scott's unpublished disseration on Black internationalism in the Caribbean became legendary; Harvard University’s Vincent Brown described it as “an underground mix-tape” that influenced many other scholars in a field that was not yet established in the academic mainstream.
Source: The Guardian
Dec 18, 2021
"Did Wells, an unflinching woman who had traveled the country to investigate the ruthless barbarity of white mobs in other lynchings and massacres, have that much power to save these Black men on death row in Arkansas?"
Source: Washington Post
Dec 16, 2021
"Miss America is celebrating its 100th anniversary as a shadow of its former self, plagued by infighting, litigation, a damaging email scandal and slow-burning financial challenges."
Source: The New Republic
Dec 16, 2021
A major theme of Jeremy Dauber's new history of comics is the tension between democratic values and the desire to eradicate evil through overwhelming force.
Source: Washington Post
Dec 16, 2021
Julian Zelizer says the direct use of Trump's properties by GOP candidates is an indicator both of Trump's desire to profit from his political influence and the fact that he is the de facto boss of the party.
Source: New York Review of Books
Dec 16, 2021
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
"There was a stepwise connection, we think, between sowing cereals in our primeval past and waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles." Do David Graeber and David Wengrow effectively demolish this assumption in a new book with implications for how we understand freedom and civilization?
Source: National Museum of American History
Dec 15, 2021
The NMAH History Film Forum discusses the 1946 classic "It's a Wonderful Life" and the film's enduring and changing meaning.
Source: CNN
Dec 15, 2021
UVA's Larry Sabato says an unfortunate side effect of the release, which frames the removal of minor redactions as "new" documents, is that it feeds continuing conspiracy theories based on the idea that the government is concealing the truth about the assassination.
Source: New York Times
Dec 14, 2021
"Dr. McAlister was adamant that the journal be called Hypatia, for the fourth-century Alexandrian mathematician, astronomer and Neoplatonist philosopher who was skinned alive and burned by Christian zealots outraged by her pagan beliefs."
Source: New York Magazine
Dec 14, 2021
Helen Andrews's recent "American Conservative" column revives the myths that Reconstruction was a "tragic era" and that Black disenfranchisement was a force for progress, troubling indicators of the current right's views of democracy.
Source: The Metropole
Dec 14, 2021
by Matt Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen
"Rooted in racial slavery, settler colonialism, and U.S. empire, policing and incarceration in the United States were slowly and meticulously built over time for the purpose of subordinating, punishing, and exploiting populations –and historians have the documents to prove it."
Source: WXXI
Dec 13, 2021
Michael Oberg and Joel Helfrich of SUNY-Geneseo's Center for Local and Municipal History discuss connecting history students with local historians to unearth and tell their region's history.
Source: Chapelboro.com
Dec 13, 2021
Associate Professor of History William Sturkey worries that ideology may matter more than experience in hiring key administrators at Chapel Hill, and says many faculty are concerned about the growing role of politics in running the campus.
Source: Labor and Working Class History Association
Dec 13, 2021
by Emily E. LB. Twarog
A group of labor historians consider whether violence – manifested in workplace injury and death – is an inevitable part of capitalist labor relations.
Source: Public Books
Dec 13, 2021
by Hannah Appel
"As your work so powerfully shows, the municipal bond market structures racial privilege, entrenches spatial neglect, and distributes wealth and power. American cities are dependent on financiers, rating agencies, and bond markets for nearly everything."
Source: 10TampaBay
Dec 12, 2021
Communications Professor Aisha Durham visited the Smithsonian as a young girl from Virginia, and felt like her African American peers were outsiders to American culture. She now works to highlight the ways that urban Black culture changed America through music, fashion, and other elements of hip hop culture.
Source: Public Books
Dec 10, 2021
by Shane Graham
"Because the book is, at its core, an institutional history, it probes deep behind the scenes of the Renaissance. Lewis focuses not just on the artists, but on the tireless efforts of a small group of people to promote and support those artists, and on the organizations and publications that made the whole movement possible."
Source: WBUR
Dec 9, 2021
Do we need to tolerate a decline in civility in order to ensure the kind of democratic participation that will keep Americans invested in working within our institiutions?
