Roundup 
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 Atlantic
1/25/2021
What Hank Aaron Told Me
The author received a touching reply to a fan letter he wrote Hank Aaron in 1972. Writing a book about Aaron years later, he realized he didn't know the half of the burdens Aaron carried in pursuit of baseball immortality.
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SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
1/25/2021
Delusions of Dominance: Biden Can’t Restore American Primacy—and Shouldn’t Try
by Stephen Wertheim
To lead a successful foreign policy, Joe Biden must deeply reconsider the American commitment to foreign military intervention.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/22/2021
White Americans have Weaponized the Idea of Girlhood
by Crystal Webster
The concept of childhood has elastic boundaries; in a racist society, those boundaries stretch to portray whites as innocents deserving protection and Black youth as dangerous and susceptible to punishment.
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1/22/2021
The Roundup Top Ten for January 22, 2021
The top opinion writing by historians from around the web this week.
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SOURCE: Jacobin
1/19/2021
The Sheer Absurdity of Trump’s “1776 Commission” Report Is Hard to Overstate
by Timothy Messer-Kruse
"If American education was organized according to its blueprint it would look strikingly like the schoolrooms common in 1776, complete with rulers used primarily to rap the knuckles of students who answered their questions the wrong way."
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SOURCE: New York Daily News
1/20/2021
Making Revisionism Great Again: The Trouble with Trump’s Rewriting of American History
by James Loewen
"We already have the education that the commission recommends. Our textbooks are nationalist and ethnocentric, rather than critical. That’s why we’re in trouble."
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
1/21/2021
Why the Mob Thought Attacking the Capitol was their ‘1776 Moment’
by Franita Tolson
"The pro-Trump insurrectionists seeking to replicate 1776 ignore that America has consistently recommitted itself to democracy in the two centuries since the Revolution — choosing voting over violence and ballots over bullets."
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SOURCE: The Bulwark
1/15/2021
The Last Action Hero and the First President
by Craig Bruce Smith
If an Austrian-born bodybuilder, a Hollywood actor, can learn the value of the Founders’ ideals, maybe we can too.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
1/18/2021
The Challenges of Teaching the Constitution in the Age of Trump
by Nikolas Bowie
The Constitution has long been used for antidemocratic purposes; the vigorous enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments' guarantees of multiracial democracy was the historical aberration.
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SOURCE: Jacobin
1/15/2021
Trump Is a Threat to Democracy. But That Doesn’t Mean He’s Winning
by Daniel Bessner and Ben Burgis
Overreaction to the horror of January 6 risks giving license to a host of new internal security measures that will likely threaten democracy more than the misguided and futile efforts of Donald Trump and his followers to overturn the election.
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SOURCE: LA Progressive
1/17/2021
Immigrants, Trump, Pope Francis, and Two Films
by Walter G. Moss
Two recent films evoke Pope Francis's message opposing insular nationalism, a stance which echoes the inclusionary nationalism of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
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SOURCE: Washington Monthly
1/15/2021
Impeach Trump, But Not for What He Said on January 6th
by Jonathan Zimmerman
There's ample justification for Trump's second impeachment in his pattern of disregard for democracy and efforts to subvert the vote count. But reviving the charge of incitment of insurrection opens the door to ideological prosecution and the suppression of free speech.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
1/15/2021
That Time Private US Media Companies Stepped in to Silence the Falsehoods and Incitements of a Major Public Figure … In 1938
by William Kovarik
"There’s not much that separates, on the one hand, the mad fanaticism that held Jews supposedly responsible for their own persecution in 1938 and, on the other, the fevered delusion of 2020."
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SOURCE: Public Books
1/18/2021
When Black Humanity is Denied
by Edna Bonhomme
Enlightenment institutions – the prison, science, and asylums – are organized through binaries that draw boundaries between people who are and are not able to exercise freedom. Black artistic work supports Black freedom by challenging those boundaries.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/17/2021
No, the Constitution Does not Allow President Trump to Pardon Himself
by Dale Carpenter
The history of debate over the pardon power in the Constitiution strongly supports the claim that a president's pardon of themselves would be unconstitutional.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
1/15/2021
In a Civil War, Accountability Must Precede Healing
by Melody Barnes and Caroline E. Janney
"With no consequences for their acts of rebellion, the months after Appomattox saw former Confederates regain local and state control and bend it to their purposes."
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/18/2021
Warnock’s Election Reminds Us that Black Churches are Vital to Democratic Success
by Robert Greene II
Democratic politicians must recognize the historical role of Black churches not just as gathering places where visiting politicians may speak to voters, but as organizing spaces where political agendas are formed. Dems who wish to emulate Rev. Warnock's victory need to embrace Black churches in a deep way.
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SOURCE: Washington Monthly
1/18/2021
What the Founders Would Have Done with Trump
by Frank O. Bowman III
"The impeachment mechanism written into the American Constitution owes its structure to a set of very specific lessons the Framers drew from British and classical history," writes a constitutional law scholar. Those lessons point to the validity of trying Trump in the Senate even after the end of his presidency.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/19/2021
Hamilton and Lincoln Warned of a Mobocracy. Trump Brought Their Fears to Life
by Andrew F. Lang
Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln both feared demagogues who might corrupt the body politic and turn a free citizenry against the democratic institutions that safeguarded their liberty.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
1/19/2021
Why It’s Time to Take Secessionist Talk Seriously
by Richard Kreitner
"The Confederate flags the insurgents carried through the Capitol weren’t about the past, but the future." (note: Subscription required to read source article.)
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