History Archives - Page 5 of 13

History

The Floating Pool Lady

A quest to bring a public pool to New York City’s waterfront

May 12, 2021 • by Ann L. Buttenwieser

_____ My research in the musty documents detailing the administrative history of New York Harbor ended roughly with the demise of the floating public baths. These documents, which no one had seen or cared about for nearly a century, were about to be thrown out. I left the Battery Maritime Building, ...

History

A New Battleground for American History

How the classroom has been politicized

May 5, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

_____ On Friday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and 36 Republicans sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona accusing him of trying to advance a “politicized and divisive agenda” in the teaching of American history. This is a full embrace of the latest Republican attempt to turn teaching history ...

History

The Secret Life of Colonel Sanders

My grandmother knew him

May 4, 2021 • by Yvonne M. Vissing

_____ “Things and folks ain’t always what they seem,” my Grandma Maudie often said. In small towns like Jeffersonville, Indiana, on the Ohio River, everyone seems to thrive on knowing everyone else’s business. One of the best gossip survival techniques of living in towns like that is pretending you are someone ...

History

The Paris Commune of 1871 – Myth and Reality

It was not a spontaneous, prefigurative gathering of people waggling their fingers at a general assembly in the spirit of Occupy: it was a working government, and it passed a lot of decrees

April 28, 2021 • by Mitchell Abidor

_____ This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune, often regarded as the first instance of the working-class seizing power and establishing a government dedicated to its interests. The uprising occurred in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, after the defeat of France, the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, ...

The Paris Commune of 1871 – Myth and Reality

History

New York, From a Balloon

A map captured the evolution of New York City but missed one thing, the people

April 28, 2021 • by David T. Z. Mindich

_____ In its May 6, 1871 issue—150 years ago next week—Harper’s Weekly published an extraordinary bird’s-eye view of New York, which was quickly becoming one of the world’s greatest cities. “Eighteen Miles Around New York” is a snapshot of a city still under construction, one that had been transformed well within the lifetime of ...

History

Promise and Peril: Mass Vaccination in Colonial Africa

How a yellow fever vaccine in French West Africa may have killed thousands

April 21, 2021 • by Aro Velmet

_____ In 1944, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) mandated that all travelers arriving in regions where yellow fever was endemic should be inoculated against the disease. Two immunization options were on offer: a vaccine developed by the American Rockefeller Foundation, known as 17-D, or one with a ”French ...

Promise and Peril: Mass Vaccination in Colonial Africa

History

A Roaring Twenties Redux?

Past Present Podcast, Episode 276

April 20, 2021 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: As “post-pandemic life” becomes imaginable, predictions of a second “Roaring Twenties” are ubiquitous. Niki referred to her article about the promise and limits of such comparisons for CNN. Natalia drew on historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’ Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from ...

History

Steve Bannon and the Aesthetics of Catholic Romanticism

Why the populist Svengali wants to have a power base near the Vatican

April 15, 2021 • by Daniel DiMassa

_____ Steve Bannon would have you believe he’s a “gladiator,” but his exploits in Rome suggest a more apt historical analogy: clearly he is a Romantic. In August 2020, Bannon was arrested and charged with fraud for his involvement in the mismanagement of a crowdsourced fund to build President Trump’s border wall. ...

Steve Bannon and the Aesthetics of Catholic Romanticism

History

Why Weimar is an Imperfect Mirror

Its polarized culture reinforced the destructive energy of an increasingly polarized politics

April 8, 2021 • by Helmut W. Smith

"It would be too much to say that the Weimar Republic fell to Nazism because of its bifurcated culture. But the high culture of Weimar was not a supporting pillar of democracy either. Instead, Weimar’s polarized culture reinforced the destructive energy of its increasingly polarized politics. " - Helmut W. ...

History

When Welfare Was a Route to Community Empowerment in Las Vegas

In 1971, Black women workers seized control of their own destiny—and won

April 1, 2021 • by Annelise Orleck

_____ This month, Congress passed, and President Joe Biden signed, a bill that seeks to address longstanding economic, educational, local government and health care needs that have become desperate during the pandemic. Even though it was missing key elements – a $15 federal minimum wage, and a lower cutoff for eligibility ...

When Welfare Was a Route to Community Empowerment in Las Vegas

Democracy

Winston Churchill’s North American Tour

In the summer of 1929, the future prime minister almost quit politics

March 30, 2021 • by Josh Ireland

_____ One night in the summer of 1929, Winston Churchill, who was staying in a bungalow owned by William Randolph Hearst, was horrified to see a bulky figure clambering through his window. The intruder, Winston realized, was his son Randolph, who seemed equally startled. Randolph had expected to find Hearst’s daughter-in-law, who ...

Higher Ed

The Education Trap

Schools and the remaking of inequality in Boston

March 22, 2021 • by Cristina Groeger

————— Despite its centrality in public life and scholarly debate, education, surprisingly, has not been a chief focus of political or economic histories of the modern United States. The role of schools, however, has been fundamental to American historical development in several key ways. Politically, education was a key driver of ...