Home Ownership and the History of Mortgages
Episode 402
In this episode of Past Present, Niki, Natalia, and Neil discuss Americans’ attachment to the thirty-year mortgage...
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Can You Smile and Say “Land of the Free”?
An excerpt from American Confidential
Can you smile and say ‘Land of the free’? Of course you can. There . . . that looks perfect. Did you know that this is where the West begins?” And then
she would drive off and her mood instantly soured and she would wonder why her son Lee hardly ever ...
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“Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb?”
An excerpt from American Relics and the Politics of Memory
Relics’ ability to bridge space could match their facility in transcending time—they are conventionally transportable, sometimes through their fragmentation and multiplication, and their mobility enhances their usefulness to their possessors, who are thus able to deploy their power where they might have the greatest effect....
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Writing in Third Person
An excerpt from Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography
Historical narration had to be anonymous and the historian undetectable lest they make their presence known in any way. ...
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History Rhymes
As history’s pendulum swings back, the problems and promises of globalization’s fragmented frameworks become almost too evident
The neoliberal thinking that has defined globalization in the West since the eighties decrees that state involvement in the economy is verboten-but that’s actually antithetical to America’s origins....
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Austerity, Then and Now
An excerpt from The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism
Part of what makes austerity so effective as a set of policies is that it packages itself in the language of honest, hardscrabble economics. Vague sentiments such as “hard work” and “thrift” are hardly novel; they have been extolled by economists since the days of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and ...
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Watergate Summer
In 1973, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer’s determination to broadcast a Congressional investigation mattered to our democracy, and revolutionized television news
In other words, alternative television showed government as it was, mainlining the excitement of democracy to a dedicated and growing group of political junkies. At the same time, seeing the investigation play out live provided reassurance that Watergate was a constitutional crisis but not, as Nixon characterized it, a plot ...
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How to Become a Queer Historian
An interview with San Francisco State University scholar-activist Marc Stein
Marc Stein is Professor of History at San Francisco State University, where he teaches U.S. law, politics, sexuality, gender, race, and social movements. He’s also an old friend: we met when Marc was in graduate school and I was starting my career as a visiting professor at The University of ...
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The Blast
An excerpt from a new novel about the radical Left in 1916 San Francisco
Adding to the cannery women’s travails was their invisibility to—the willful blindness of—the city’s traditional labor unions. The women had no specific skills, the labor leaders would say when pressed, and did not fit any particular craft or trade union, so their requests to the central labor council for some ...
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When Disasters Are Good For Museums
A conversation with historian Sam Redman about his new book, The Museum: A History of Crisis and Resilience
Samuel J. Redman is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The author of two previous books about American museums and the sciences that flourished there in the 19th and early 20th century, this spring, he published his third book: ...
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How My Grandmother Ceased to Be African
How East African Asians have been written out of African history
And in the pre-independence era, a new racial politics emerged, one that has, for far too long, encapsulated much of East Africa’s postcolonial thought, in which families like ours were increasingly depicted as foreigners to a place that had long been our home....
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The Color of Abolition
Linda Hirshman introduces her new book on Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Maria Weston Chapman
I was looking for the mechanics of activism—the meetings, the speeches, the broadsides, the litigation—for my analysis. And Garrison and Douglass were both central to the mechanics of activism. Their alliance fueled critical years of the movement, and their breakup affected the direction of the movement profoundly. This was the ...
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