An Empire of Sanctions

A syllabus from the Historians for Peace and Democracy

Sanctions are now the preferred economic weapon that the United States uses to pressure, discipline and coerce enemies and even allies.  Sanctions restrict targeted states from importing, exporting and receiving investments; they prohibit US corporations and banks from dealing with those countries, and they limit the economic activities of individuals in ...
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An Empire of Sanctions

Women’s History, An Origin Story

In 1975, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg published “The Female World of Love and Ritual, and changed how my generation of feminists understood the practice of history

I first encountered Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual” in 1978. I was twenty and a junior at Yale. A teaching assistant passed it on to me when I met with her after class: a paper was due and my mind was empty. She said that there ...
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Women’s History, An Origin Story

The United States Is in Recovery

What Texas, white supremacy and coronavirus can teach us about American history

"In the exchange, Americans saw a president who cared, and a government that finally, after its previous leaders had told them to get out of a terrible catastrophe on their own, responded to their needs."...

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The United States Is in Recovery

Larry Flynt

Past Present Podcast, Episode 267

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Larry Flynt, founder of the Hustler empire, died this month. Niki recommended historian Carolyn Bronstein’s book Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement, 1976-1986 and referred to this Politico article about the GOP abandoning the war on pornography. Natalia mentioned ...
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Insurrection and Apocalypse: Staring Down Monsters, from the Middle Ages to America Today

How the medieval understanding of redemptive violence can illuminate the impulses of some Christian conservatives today

Nine hundred years ago, on April 25, 1112 – an Easter Sunday – a mob in the French town of Laon rose up in a carnival of vandalism and homicide. Witnesses describe a world turned upside down. Merchants murdered the local bishop and set fire to the town’s cathedral. Serfs ...
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Insurrection and Apocalypse: Staring Down Monsters, from the Middle Ages to America Today

Good and Evil

An excerpt from On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt

_____ Goodness exists, even in the darkest of moments. It is worth remembering this—that the violence and brutality of the war did not only bring out the worst in people. The darkness also inspired goodness, bravery, and responsibility. There are countless examples of people who, often at great risk to themselves ...
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Good and Evil

What Yellen and Hamilton Comparisons Omit

Women’s progress is not guaranteed

When President Joseph Biden nominated Janet Yellen to become the first female Secretary of the United States Treasury, references to Alexander Hamilton began immediately. Invoking Lin Manuel-Miranda’s hit musical, Biden quipped that Yellen, like the first Treasury secretary, deserved her own production. In response, American Public Media’s Marketplace commissioned hip-hop ...
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What Yellen and Hamilton Comparisons Omit

Towards a More Balanced History of the United States

How a page from history exposes the underlying politics of contemporary historical projects

The Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser was a paper founded in 1742 in Philadelphia by William Bradford, a printer, publisher – and eventually a leading participant in the American Revolution. He was the first to publish the journalism of Tom Paine (in 1775) and an outspoken critic of the wildly ...
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Towards a More Balanced History of the United States

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

Collective memories of emancipation through cultural production

————— Amanda Bellows is a Lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at The New School’s Eugene Lang College where she teaches nineteenth century U.S. History. Her new publication, American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination was published by the University of North Carolina Press, June 2020. This book is ...
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American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination