History Archives - Page 7 of 13

History

Good and Evil

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

February 5, 2021 • by Ann Heberlein

_____ 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 ...

History

What Yellen and Hamilton Comparisons Omit

Women’s progress is not guaranteed

February 3, 2021 • by Sara Damiano

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 ...

What Yellen and Hamilton Comparisons Omit

History

Towards a More Balanced History of the United States

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

January 28, 2021 • by R. Grant Kleiser

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 ...

Towards a More Balanced History of the United States

Europe & Central Asia

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

Collective memories of emancipation through cultural production

January 27, 2021 • by Amanda Brickell Bellows

————— 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 ...

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

History

Waiting for the Executioner in 1848 Austria

Regime change and the case for clemency

January 21, 2021 • by Alison Frank Johnson

_____ In 1848, the Austrian Empire was ruled by the absolutist equivalent of a lame-duck emperor. In March, a peaceful demand for civil rights escalated into a full-fledged revolution. The emperor and his advisors were forced to flee the capital city of Vienna. It was a strange situation. An emperor ruled in ...

Waiting for the Executioner in 1848 Austria

Democracy

Embracing Democracy: The Storming of the US Capitol and the Mixed Lessons of Weimar Germany

An assassination that took place almost one hundred years ago echoes today

January 21, 2021 • by Andrew I. Port

——— For the past four years, many have wondered when Donald Trump would finally have his “Have-you-no-sense-of-decency?” moment. That was, of course, the memorable rebuke uttered by attorney Joseph Welch on June 9, 1954, just after Joseph McCarthy’s insinuation that one of Welch’s colleagues had ties to a Communist organization. The ...

Embracing Democracy: The Storming of the US Capitol and the Mixed Lessons of Weimar Germany

History

Why Race Still Matters

We don’t need to know what race is — we need to know what it does

December 9, 2020 • by Alana Lentin

————— The work, most prominently, of anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century went a long way to establishing the predominantly correct view that race has no basis in actual physical differences between groups of human beings. The anthropologist of race Ashley Montagu, ...

Democracy

Donald Trump’s Lies

Why presidential falsehoods are part of United States political history

December 8, 2020 • by Eric Alterman and Claire Potter

Do Americans think presidential lying no longer matters? Perhaps a better question, journalist and historian Eric Alterman asks in his new book, Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump is Worse (Basic Books, 2020), is whether it ever mattered to voters. Following in the tradition of Isadore F. “Izzy” ...

History

QAnon Will Outlast Trumpism

How a conspiracy theory was born in the Great War and made its way into the 21st century

December 7, 2020 • by Emily Sandercock

For the past three years, someone using the alias “Q” has been posting updates to internet forums, supposedly from within the so-called “deep state.” The posts allege a conspiracy: Donald Trump, they say, is fighting a secret war against a cabal of pedophiles and Satanists entrenched in the government. Soon, ...

Activism

The Models We Need

Forty years ago this week, four U.S. women were killed in El Salvador. It’s taken this long to understand the meaning of their deaths — and their lives

December 3, 2020 • by Eileen Markey

This week in the mountains of El Salvador people who survived that nation's civil war and its violent aftermath walked solemnly into the plaza of the town of San Antonio Los Ranchos, carrying aloft portraits of four Catholic missionaries who were killed 40 years ago. The women are remembered in ...

History

The AIDS Capital of the World

As a pandemic escalated in 1984, one South Florida town predicted the calamity AIDS would become

December 1, 2020 • by Dan Royles

In 1985 researchers and reporters alike focused their attention on the city with the highest rate of AIDS diagnoses anywhere, a city that had become colloquially known as the “AIDS Capital of the World.” This city was neither New York City nor San Francisco, nor was it to be found ...

History

Thanksgiving and COVID-19

Past Present Podcast, Episode 256

November 25, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: For many families, Thanksgiving will look very different this year. Niki wrote about the myth that the “Greatest Generation” was naturally self-sacrificing. Neil referred to this Takeout article about Sarah Josepha Hale’s role in establishing Thanksgiving. Natalia referenced Depression-era Thanksgiving ...