Exploring historical issues with contemporary relevance, historical perspectives on current events, and ideas about teaching, academia, and alt-ac.
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.
HUMN 222 takes on The New York Times challenge to reframe American history, to consider the possibility that the origin of this country can be traced to 1619, the year that marks the arrival of the first Africans (from the land that would become Angola) to the land that would become America in all its defining contradictions.
LGBTQIA+ history deserves a place in the modern K-12 curriculum. This piece includes a rationale and resources for educators working to make their courses more inclusive by incorporating LGBTQIA+ voices.
Although social media enables political food puns to go viral, they are rooted in a long tradition of journalists, activists, and average citizens combining food and humor to poke fun at political opponents. This article examines three such moment: (Im)Peach-Mint Crumb Cake and President Trump, The Watergate Cookbook and President Nixon, and Suffrage Pie For the Doubting Husband from the women's suffrage movement.
The Trump administration has been making efforts to redefine human rights. The history of human rights examined through a gendered lens helps explain why those efforts are so controversial - and dangerous.
The current UAW-GM strike has been in the news recently. But the historical roots of the current strike extend back over eighty years to the Flint Sit-Down strike of 1936.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's history of donning brownface and blackface connects to a troubling history of blackface in Canada.
The narrative that centrist Democrats can win but progressives cannot seems to be everywhere in 2019. The underlying rationale is that Democrats lost in 2016 because Donald Trump won with white, blue-collar workers in rust-belt states. For Democrats to win in 2020, the party needs to nominate someone who can win those exact voters back... Continue Reading →
By Tiffany Baugh-Helton and Sarah King Elizabeth Warren is the professor. Everyone wants her to be their adviser. Warren has invited her most senior advisee to lead the day's discussion. She'll sit back with a slight smile on her face for most of the seminar until someone really screws up, at which point she'll use... Continue Reading →
