Even Donald Trump's harshest critics would do well to understand his powerful appeal to white evangelical Christians instead of simply complaining about it.
Perhaps the threat we are facing from COVID-19 will provide an opportunity to create a more equal and just economy, one that is also in greater harmony with our natural world.
Although Thomas Jefferson was generally an anti-urbanist, he did offer insight into the role of land use in helping towns and cities control epidemics and promote public health.
We are rightly concerned with saving lives from disease. But we must also consider the potentially deadly consequences of authoritarianism and prejudice unleashed by an economic depression.
We cannot afford to overlook the public use of reason: reason that does not simply solve a given problem, but asks further unsettling questions, such as how did this problem arise in the first place?
As a result of several factors--a tradition of temporary strongman leaders, a history of disguised dictatorship, and a unitary government for a regionally divided people--Italy has been more susceptible than other liberal democracies of falling into autocracy in the current COVID crisis.
It is clear that if many white Americans feel alienated and powerless, they will vote for a candidate whose stories promise a better future or greater status for themselves, even if that candidate tells incredible falsehoods and appeals to racism
More women belong in senior foreign and national security policy positions—at State, Defense, the National Security Council, and beyond—and not just at the United Nations.
My work on Congress during the Compromise of 1850 showed me how much wonderful untapped and dramatic material there was to be found in the battles fought on the floor of Congress.
Professor Frank Snowden discusses the situation in Italy, the progress of COVID-19 and governments' responses to it, and his career researching the history of epidemics.
No president can end an epidemic single handedly, but they can inspire a popular movement that eradicates a disease. Such was the case with Franklin Roosevelt and polio.
Insufficient attention was paid to the first influenza death in the city. The United States was in the throes of the Great War, and the Kaiser, not the flu, was on the minds of Philadelphians.
The coronavirus will not succeed in doing to American society what fascism did to Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, but it has sparked a virulent wave of racism and intolerance, especially aimed at Chinese Americans.
If history shows Hoover followed the wrong path for principled reasons, what will it say about Donald Trump, who has several tools that were not available to Hoover?
Our 46th president, whenever he or she arrives, will confront a changed world, partly because of COVID, but also because of the effects of Trump’s personality and policies.
"This pandemic is global in scale and personal in impact, and as a result, it’s touching and transforming virtually every topic that historians have studied. We have a duty to share our insights with the larger world. They’re interested in what we have to say. (And, let’s remember, most of them are stuck at home looking for something to read!)"
Defoe's accomplishment as a work of history lies not so much in the accuracy of its numbers or facts as in its power as a work of fiction, in the observing eye and skeptical intelligence of H.F., and in the stories he tells, which convey through common language and the details of common life what it was like to live through the plague.
