Exploring historical issues with contemporary relevance, historical perspectives on current events, and ideas about teaching, academia, and alt-ac.
US jails are now the nation’s biggest mental healthcare providers, a fact that surprises many Americans. But, it turns outs, there’s always been a thin division between the nation’s jails and mental healthcare system.
Teaching with digital archives means showing students how to critically examine material. Digital collections can be used as a springboard for engaging students with a plethora of questions that can lead to fundamental discussions about knowledge production.
Practicing history as part of a state agency can be challenging, especially for a historic prison. This article uses Idaho as a case study to outline some of those challenges, and how historians must contend with conservative governments, racist pasts, and difficult prison history.
Conservatives have relied on a small group of historians to validate their criticisms of the 1619 Project. Now one of the most vocal historians against the 1619 Project is trying to distance himself from the far-Right.
What can Mrs. America tell us about the historical context of the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment? Where does it shine and where does it fall short? And what should we take away from the show, and its real history, to better understand our present?
The parallels between the civil rights movement of the early 1960s and the 2020 uprising can situate Gov. DeSantis’s proposal in a broader context. Many of the legislative efforts to curtail Black Lives Matter demonstrations parallel efforts made to criminalize nonviolent actions led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
College students are taking fewer history classes than ever before. The consequences have implications not just for our collective knowledge about the past, but also for our ability to make sense of the present.
In their attempts to make sense of the novel coronavirus, media outlets frequently invoke the past, comparing COVID-19 to the Black Death, the "Great Influenza" of 1918-19, and other historical disease outbreaks. The act of connecting "then" and "now" has produced two countervailing historical narratives: one that emphasizes medical progress over time, and another that highlights America's failure to learn the lessons of past pandemics.
This article looks at what it’s like to work at a dark tourism destination, in this case the Old Idaho Penitentiary. From a public history perspective, it details the challenges of practicing history responsibly, while also catering to visitor demand for paranormal programming such as macabre prison stories. Ultimately, lucrative paranormal investigations allow for more historically based, educational programming that may not be as popular, but fulfills the site’s mission of informing the public of Idaho and prison history.
When navigating an exceptionally demanding moment for history educators, the simplest tools are the best.
