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Can the Democrats Take Schools Out of Politics?

by Michelle Goldberg

Times Columnist Michelle Goldberg says that the CRT controversy is obscuring the ways that Virginia's public schools are part of a long political movement to undermine public schools that got a boost from the COVID pandemic. 

Some Antiracist Organizational Trainings are Reductive and Dumb; Liberals Should Draw Lines to Protect their Priorities

If liberals don't aggressively separate the goals of revising history curricula and improving teacher training from the pop-social science of the growing industry of social equity consultation, conservatives will aggressively lump them together, says New York Magazine writer Eric Levitz.

Sometimes it Comes in Handy to Understand Historical Examples of Systemic Racism

by Philip Bump

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg's references to racism in design and planning drew mockery from Republicans but reflect the history of political choices that shaped America's transportation networks. 

Who's Afraid of Higher Education?

The splashy launch of the University of Austin concept echoes the establishment a half-century ago of evangelical conservative colleges; despite the claim to value free speech, the institutions seek to avoid intellectual turbulence and conflict.

TNR Editor: Actually, Biden Was Elected to Be an FDR

If Democratic moderates want their president and their party to succeed, they need to grapple with the political decisions that have destroyed public investment and transferred the nation's wealth upward to the rich, and think of the present as a crisis comparable to the Great Depression. 

Claiming Colleges are Too Censorious, They Claim to Be Starting One Dedicated to Free Inquiry

A group of scholars and activists are planning to establish a new university dedicated to free speech, alarmed, they said, “by the illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s most prestigious universities.”

Inside the 1980s Phenomenon of "Truly Tasteless Jokes" and What it Says about a Cultural Shift around Offensiveness

The wildly successful series of paperbacks heralded a moment when the embrace of offensiveness as a political weapon was shifting from the left to the right (audio contains the contents of some Truly Tasteless Jokes). 

Stanley George on Putting Viewers in the Middle of the Nation's Bloodiest Prison Rebellion

"It’s like the window has been cracked a little bit, so that people who might never have thought to doubt law enforcement are doubting law enforcement now, and they’re thinking about their cruelty and racism in a way they might not have thought about it five years ago."

Navy Names Ship for Slain Gay Rights Pioneer Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk was forced to resign from the Navy, and his surviving relatives have declined to have his discharge reclassified to preserve memory of the history of discrimination in the armed forces. 

3 Black Soldiers Executed by the Confederacy to be Honored by Virginia

A Confederate private's diary casually described the execution of three members of the U.S. Colored Troops near Culpeper, Virginia. Today the work of Howard Lambert and his Freedom Foundation will honor the anonymous soldiers. 

Astroworld Joins Tragic History of Concert Crowd Disasters

The tragedy in Houston is only the latest example of the dangers posed by crowds and the need for adequate safety measures. 

UF Reverses Course; Profs can Testify in Voting Rights Suit

Attorneys representing the professors said they were still planning to move forward with a lawsuit against the university.

An Illustrated History of Vaccine Requirements for Schoolchildren

Vaccine mandates for school attendance are two centuries old. An illustrated history.

The History of Women in the New York City Marathon

Amateur Athletic Union rules in the 1970s didn't sanction any competitive race for women longer than 1.5 miles. Kathrine Switzer and other pioneering women marathoners discuss a half-century of change. 

Restrictions on Faculty Testimony at UF Included Non-Paid Testimony, COVID Protocol

The University's prior explanation, that faculty are free to serve as witnesses to litigation against the state on a pro-bono basis on their own time, appears to be contradicted by efforts to stop a pediatrics professor from testifying pro bono in favor of school mask mandates.

In China, Illegal to Mock National Heroes

Since March, a new law has been used at least 15 times to prosecute Chinese who "slander" heroes of the Communist Party's official historical narrative. Experts attribute the crackdown to the fact that slowed economic growth no longer guarantees the party's widespread legitimacy.

U. of Florida’s Accreditor Will Investigate Denial of Professors’ Voting-Rights Testimony

The University of Florida had told three faculty members that their work as consultants for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state's restrictive new voting laws are "adverse to the university's interests"; will this affect the school's accreditation as a violation of the institution's independence?

The Most Ambitious Diary in History

by Benjamin Anastas

The playwright and classicist Claude Fredericks kept 65,000 pages of a journal, likely the longest record of one American life ever kept. Is it valuable as a documentary record, or as a demonstration of the self-mythologizing work of the diarist? 

Serwer: Florida Silencing Academic Critics of Disenfranchisement Echoes End of Reconstruction

Free speech debates miss a key point: some participants don't want to protect the right to speak as much as the right of the state to use its power to end political arguments. The role of Black Floridians as citizens was once such an argument, and disenfranchisement ended it. 

Black Women in Noxubee County, Miss. Fight Historical Inequities Exposed by COVID

COVID-19 has highlighted the historical processes of agricultural labor, land ownership, and economic underdevelopment that have made Black residents of Noxubee County in eastern Mississippi vulnerable to both illness and economic from the pandemic.