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: Boston Review
Dec 2, 2020
by Simon Torracinta
A new biography of the social theorist examines how his approach to understanding a past gilded age can offer lessons for our present one.
Source: Salon
Dec 2, 2020
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat speaks with Salon's Dean Obeidallah and argues that the danger of a collapse of democracy is not over.
Source: Smithsonian
Dec 1, 2020
Books about racism, military medicine, George Washington, the Civil War in the west, and an academic con are among the top history books of 2020 according to the editors of Smithsonian Magazine.
Source: War on the Rocks
Dec 1, 2020
The staff of War on the Rocks offer suggestions for reading – on defense issues and otherwise.
Source: Cornell Chronicle
Dec 1, 2020
Colleagues remember Richard "Dick" Polenberg as a generous and compassionate colleague and mentor as well as an inspiring teacher and accomplished scholar of modern American history.
Source: NPR
Dec 1, 2020
Public Health historian David Rosner argues that strains of religiosity and individualism in American culture have made it difficult to win acceptance for many public health and safety measures in the past.
Source: Washington Post
Dec 1, 2020
Historians Daryle Williams, Walter Hawthorne, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and David Eltis, along with Henry Louis Gates, are part of an interdisciplinary collaboration to create access to biographical and genealogical information about individual people enslaved in the United States.
Source: Black Perspectives
Dec 1, 2020
by Don S. Polite, Jr.
A review of Marisol LeBrón's "Policing Life and Death" which connects the turn to austerity governance in Puerto Rico with increasingly punitive and racially discriminatory policing practices.
Source: In These Times
Dec 1, 2020
by Peter Cole
The author of a new book on an understudied Black labor radical presents context for an exerpt of an interview Ben Fletcher gave to the New York Amsterdam News, a rare surviving case of the organizer telling his own story.
Source: Capital Radio
Nov 30, 2020
Margo Anderson says that the Trump administration's plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census is unprecedented in the history of the count.
Source: Public Books
Nov 30, 2020
by Julia Gaffield
Historian of Haiti Julia Gaffield reviews two new books examining the Atlantic Slave Trade through the lenses of war against slave rebellion and disease.
Source: Black Perspectives
Nov 30, 2020
The African American Intellectual History Society will present next week a series of responses to Dr. Brandon Byrd's 2019 book examining the relationship between Black American intellectuals and activists and the Republic of Haiti.
Source: New York Times
Nov 30, 2020
German editorialist Jochen Bittner warns that Trump's insistence that the election has been stolen from him echoes the Dolchstosslegende rhetoric which sustained the ascendant National Socialists for years after the end of World War I.
Source: NPR
Nov 30, 2020
Abbas Milani of Stanford University discusses the US-Iran relationship and the shocking assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist last week.
Source: New York Times
Nov 30, 2020
The National Archives of American Art has been moving aggressively to document artists' responses to the concurrent social traumas of 2020, including the pandemic, police violence and protests, and a tumultuous election campaign.
Source: Irish Times
Nov 30, 2020
“The British abandoned people to starvation,” says Prof Kevin Whelan of the University of Notre Dame. “At the highest level of government there was a sense that this ultimately wasn’t their problem”. A new Irish television documentary is narrated by Liam Neeson.
Source: Newsday
Nov 29, 2020
Historians Peniel Joseph and Karl Jacoby, along with media scholar Howard Schnieder, assess the way that strategic misinformation on social media has exploited racial divisions in Trump's efforts to overturn the election results.
Source: Discover
Nov 29, 2020
Modern archaeology has largely succeeded in instituting professionalization and historical rigor to the study of sites of theological significance, but the discipline has a long and continuing historical entanglement with efforts to find proof of religious doctrines.
Source: Contingent
Nov 28, 2020
Contingent Magazine recommends books written by non-tenure track faculty and historians and scholars in non-academic positions.
Source: New York Times
Nov 28, 2020
“You don’t play politics with the Shoah, and this is playing politics with the Shoah,” Professor [Deborah] Lipstadt said. She is one of 750 historians, Jewish studies experts and cultural figures who signed a petition protesting the appointment of Effie Eitam to head Israel's national Holocaust memorial.
