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 New Yorker
  7/6/2020
  

  How to Confront a Racist National History

  by Isaac Chotiner

  "But we have to acknowledge that we’re not upholding history, we’re upholding values, and those are not the values that we want in the twenty-first century."

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/5/2020
  

  The Politics of Race are Shifting, and Politicians are Struggling to Keep Pace

  The story of how the Republican Party, once the party of Abraham Lincoln, became almost entirely dependent on white voters, and how the Democratic Party, once the party of Southern segregationists, became the political home to black Americans and other minorities has been years in the making.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/4/2020
  

  Trump’s Push to Amplify Racism Unnerves Republicans who have Long Enabled Him

  Leah Wright Rigeur of the Harvard Kennedy School argues that Trump keeps making appeals to white racism because it's central to his political identity. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  7/1/2020
  

  The Day the White Working Class Turned Republican (Review)

  Clyde Haberman reviews David Paul Kuhn's "The Hardhat Riot" which proves heated social divisions--stoked and exploited by politicians--are nothing new. 

• 
• SOURCE: BBC
  7/3/2020
  

  David Starkey Criticised over Slavery Comments

  A popular British historian faces criticism for saying that the slave trade was not genocidal because "so many damn blacks" survived.

• 
• SOURCE: The New York Times
  7/1/2020
  

  ‘A Conflicted Cultural Force’: What It’s Like to Be Black in Publishing

  When historian Kerri K. Greenidge was trying to publish her book on William Trotter, publishers responded with "who was going to read a book about a Black man that nobody had ever heard about?"

• 
• SOURCE: NJ.com
  7/1/2020
  

  Did Rutgers Find The Perfect President For 2020? Meet Jonathan Holloway, Black Historian.

  On Wednesday, the student of the past makes history himself by becoming the first Black president of Rutgers University, founded in 1766.

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  6/29/2020
  

  In Search of King David’s Lost Empire

  The evidence of David’s life is sparse. Was he an emperor? A local king? Or, as Biblical archaeologist Israel Finkelstein claims, a Bedouin sheikh?

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  7/1/2020
  

  Boston To Remove Statue Depicting Abraham Lincoln With Freed Black Man At His Feet

  The statue should be moved into a museum, historian Ibrahim Sundiata says.

• 
• SOURCE: WBUR
  7/1/2020
  

  Mount Rushmore Historian: Monument 'Is Like A Rorschach, It Says Different Things To Different People'

  In light of Trump's plans to hold a July 4th celebration at Mount Rushmore on Friday, historian John Taliaferro discusses the monument's complex legacy.

• 
• SOURCE: CNN
  7/1/2020
  

  Mississippi Changing Its Flag Isn't the End of Confederate Symbols in State Flags

  "For the first third of our nation's history, from about 1777 to 1861, it was almost unheard of for individual Americans to fly the flag," says historian Marc Leepson.

• 
• SOURCE: Council on Foreign Relations
  7/1/2020
  

  Living in History: Richard Haass, Margaret MacMillan, and Annette Gordon-Reed

  Richard Haass: History is not a cookbook. It doesn't give you exact recipes to understand the present or predictive future. But what it does is give you context, it gives you comparisons, it gives you perspective.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  6/26/2020
  

  Beyond ‘White Fragility’: If you Want to Let Freedom Ring, Hammer on Economic Injustice.

  by Jamelle Bouie

  The histories of Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois and Eric Foner, as well as the later speeches and writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. demonstrate that the cause of racial justice has never been separable from closing the vast economic gulf between owners and workers in America. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Magazine
  7/30/2020
  

  The Best Histories of U.S. Policing, According to Experts

  A panel of experts including historians Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Simon Balto, Max Felker-Kantor, Carl Suddler, Stuart Schrader and Melanie Newport assemble a reading list for understanding policing and its relationship to racism and social class in the US. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  7/1/2020
  

  How Mount Rushmore Became Mount Rushmore

  Historian Gene A. Smith and Oglala Lakota activist Nick Tilsen offer contest for the creation of the monument, its relationship to tribal lands, and the legacies of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt from an indigenous point of view. 

• 
• SOURCE: WBUR
  6/30/2020
  

  Princeton University Removes Woodrow Wilson From School Name (Audio)

  Julian Zelizer discusses Princeton's decision to rename its school of Public Policy. 

• 
• SOURCE: KCET
  6/30/2020
  

  Tongva to Zumba: 'East of East' Celebrates Radical History of El Monte

  “East of East” draws on scholarship in disciplines such as history, cultural studies and urban geography. However, its strength lies in its ability to amplify the voices and expressions of those generally excluded from official archival histories to provide a “new archive” of the region’s historical and contemporary significance. 

• 
• SOURCE: TIME
  6/26/2020
  

  The Asian American Response to Black Lives Matter Is Part of a Long, Complicated History

  “Asian Americans owe so much of their presence in this country to the Black struggle for freedom — from birthright citizenship to the ability to tell our stories in education and the culture to the civil rights we enjoy,” says author Jeff Chang.

• 
• SOURCE: TIME
  6/30/2020
  

  The Surprisingly Deep—and Often Troubling—History of ‘Social Distancing’

  Doctoral student Lily Scherlis traced the evolution of the term in a “social history of social distancing,” from the earliest reference she could find in English—in the 1831 translation of Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne’s memoirs of his friendship with Napoleon—to the Social Distance Scale that sociologist Emory Bogardus created in the aftermath of the Red Summer of 1919.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  6/30/2020
  

  Southern Neighborhoods Have Been Named ‘Plantations’ For Decades. That Could Be Changing.

  In recent years, even as activists have decried Confederate monuments and flags, developers have continued using “plantation” in neighborhood names to evoke elegance. But now plantation place names and the word itself are under new scrutiny.