Historians in the News

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.

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• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  5/21/19
  

  The Partisan

  The political odyssey of Sean Wilentz.

• 
• SOURCE: Slate
  5/20/19
  

  If “living history” role-plays in the classroom can so easily go wrong, why do teachers keep assigning them?

  Teachers with no sense of perspective tried to make history personal and ended up reinforcing white supremacy in the name of “learning.”

• 
• SOURCE: Fast Company
  5/20/19
  

  MIT just cracked open an historic time capsule–here’s what was inside

  Buried in 1999, the capsule contained the 1992 proposal for the World Wide Web developed by Tim Berners-Lee–and Microsoft’s first product.

• 
• SOURCE: Daily Mail
  5/19/19
  

  Historian Ben Macintyre reveals the gripping story of the KGB agent who saved us from Armageddon in 1983

  How did double agent Oleg Gordievsky stop Russia launching a nuclear strike on the West?

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  5/16/19
  

  Peter Cole's ‘Dockworker Power’ Highlights Transnational Struggles for Justice

  by Ralph Callebert

  There is thus an extensive literature on dockworkers and their activism. Peter Cole’s Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area fits in this tradition.

• 
• SOURCE: USA Today
  5/21/19
  

  How Lonnie Bunch came to lead the Museum of African American History

  "I get to get people excited about the past, I get to tell stories of resiliency of optimism, I get to actually do the thing I love most – talk about American history."

• 
• SOURCE: AP
  5/19/19
  

  Historian works to ‘humanize those enslaved’ at Fort Monroe

  A trove of historical records tells us Fort Monroe in Hampton was built on the backs of thousands of African slaves. But little was known about their identities or who they were — until now.

• 
• SOURCE: Daily Mail
  5/21/19
  

  Art Historian Timothy Clifford has identified the earliest known Michelangelo drawing

  This sketch of the Seated Man is said to be the earliest-known Michelangelo, created when he was aged around 12.

• 
• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  5/14/19
  

  Historians Argue That The History Major Won’t Go the Way of the Dodo

  Featuring Philip Balson, Olivia Daniels, Ethan Ehrenhaft, Max Minshull, and Marie-Capucine Pineau-Valencienne.

• 
• SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
  5/15/19
  

  Tenure, Twitter and Taking Her Board to Task

  Historian at U of Minnesota "celebrates" tenure with a scathing critique of her governing board's recent actions against a building-renaming proposal. She says she couldn't have risked these statements without job security.

• 
• SOURCE: Slate
  5/14/19
  

  The new Statue of Liberty Museum is a quiet paean to America’s embrace of immigrants—but what is there to celebrate?

  The elegant little Statue of Liberty Museum opens to the public later this week and provides, at last, a consolation prize for the tourists who land on Liberty Island each year.

• 
• SOURCE: AP
  5/15/19
  

  McCullough’s new book on pioneers’ history draws criticism

  With his latest book, “The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West,” McCullough is seeing some of the sharpest criticism of his career.

• 
• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  5/14/19
  

  What to Do With Richmond’s Confederate Statues

  Richmond’s Monument Avenue is lined with Confederate statues, but an exhibition filled with proposals to replace them struggles to find a road forward.

• 
• SOURCE: AP
  5/12/19
  

  Alabama historical group elects first black president

  The Alabama Historical Association has elected Wetumpka native Franzine Taylor as president for the upcoming year.

• 
• SOURCE: NY Times
  5/8/19
  

  Sarah Knott Looks at Pregnancy and Mothering Through the Ages

  Knott, a professor at Indiana University, uses her own path to motherhood, which includes a miscarriage and two successful pregnancies, as the scaffolding for her engaging and pleasingly radical “unconventional history” of this subject. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  Accessed 5/14/19
  

  New Books Showcase Female Spies and Their Secrets

  An old-boy operation was transformed by women during World War II, and at last the unsung upstarts are getting their due.

• 
• SOURCE: Space.com
  5/14/19
  

  'Apollo's Legacy': Space Historian Talks Lunar Science, Politics — and a Return to the Moon

  An interview with Roger Launius. 

• 
• SOURCE: WGBH
  4/13/19
  

  Making History More Relevant, One Case At A Time

  The case study method was popularized at Harvard Business School to help graduate business students understand how captains of industry made critical decisions.

• 
• SOURCE: New Yorker
  4/13/19
  

  How the Presidential Memoir Evolved

  by Jill Lepore

  Jill Lepore on the "Confessions of a Presidential Candidate."

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/3/19
  

  Sarah Lewis' grandfather was expelled from school for asking why his textbooks had no black people. Today she teaches at Harvard.

  Lewis teaches art history and African American studies at Harvard.