History Archives - Page 9 of 13

Activism

Remembering and Resisting the Age of Reagan

An activist historian advises his students that the choices they make now will shape their future

September 24, 2020 • by James Goodman

______ It was November 1980, two months after my girlfriend and I moved to New York City from Boston, where we had met a year before. I had just started in the M.F.A. program at Columbia and she had just started a job at a small press, managing the production of ...

Remembering and Resisting the Age of Reagan

Democracy

The United States Post Office is in Trouble

The strange fate of the United States Postal Service

September 16, 2020 • by Ryan Yursha

As I turn onto the northbound entrance for the New Jersey Parkway and speed through the EZ-Pass lane, I take a look at my clock--I have less than two hours to make the 60-mile journey from Brick, New Jersey to Newark Penn Station, find parking, hop on the train, and ...

The United States Post Office is in Trouble

History

When Empires Implode

Does the collapse of the Inca empire teach a lesson about the contemporary United States?

September 10, 2020 • by Stefania de Kenessey

The Inca empire has long fascinated me: young, brash and stunningly successful, this mighty South American kingdom vanished virtually overnight. Recent developments make me wonder whether the United States empire faces a similar implosion. Some of the parallels — admittedly far from perfect — are nonetheless remarkable. The Inca empire rose up ...

History

Who Owns the Evidence of Slavery’s Violence?

A lawsuit against Harvard University demands the return of an ancestor’s stolen image

September 10, 2020 • by Thomas A. Foster

Imagine that a man takes photos of your loved one, without their consent, and those images are then circulated to others. Now imagine that your loved one is naked in the photos. The man is a famous scholar and the images are given to a library. The library then allows ...

Who Owns the Evidence of Slavery’s Violence?

Corporations

Enjoy Your Pandemic Waterpark

A corporation deigns to let taxpayers into a previously private park they paid for

September 2, 2020 • by Pat Garofalo

Back in 2017, Nashville, Tennessee, provided real estate investment trust Ryman Hospitality with about $13.8 million in tax breaks to build a waterpark at its Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. However, taxpayers weren’t able to access the park unless they stayed overnight at the four-star facility. The hotel limited waterpark access ...

Education

Good History Makes the Familiar Strange to Us

Why The 1619 curriculum belongs in our schools

August 26, 2020 • by Daniel Osborn

It is almost a foregone conclusion that when new circumstances, and new evidence, force us to evaluate a consensus view of the American past, new and public conflicts erupt. As a history educator, I have seen this all before. As the culture wars ramped up after 1992, the attempt to craft ...

History

Why We Shouldn’t Try to Erase America’s Racist Past

Twitter’s misguided attempts at censorship

August 25, 2020 • by Karyn Lacy

Some Denny’s restaurants once bore the name “Sambo’s.” Sambo is a character featured in the children’s story Little Black Sambo, set in India, written by Helen Bannerman, a Scottish author, and first published in England in 1898. After it appeared in America a year later, the book inspired an outpouring of ...

Why We Shouldn’t Try to Erase America’s Racist Past

History

Let’s Build a Monument to Anastácia

An enslaved woman’s image that has traveled around the hemisphere can help us rethink slavery and memorialization

July 30, 2020 • by Marc Hertzman and Giovana Xavier

In May 2020, as the social movement to remove racist monuments grew and the COVID-19 pandemic spiraled out of control, two white women protesting against social distancing and masks were photographed with a sign. It read: “Muzzles are for dogs and slaves. I am a free human being.” It featured ...

History

The Case of the Hijacked Statue of the Great Abolitionist

What the fate of the monument to Edward Coles in Edwardsville, Illinois, can tell us about the ironies of hoping that statues might tell a new American story

July 29, 2020 • by Jeffrey Manuel

Recently, renewed efforts have been made to diversify the kinds of Americans commemorated by public monuments. A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an op-ed by David Blight, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer of Frederick Douglass; as the title of the piece put it, “There’s a Chance to Tell a ...

The Case of the Hijacked Statue of the Great Abolitionist

Activism

Trojan Horse

Misusing Greek mythology on a college campus sneaks white supremacy in the back door

July 23, 2020 • by Amelia Jones and Tania Modleski

These cultural forms act as “Trojan horses,” sneaking offensive, even racist and sexist ideas into the fabric of the university where they lie in wait to do harm. In our case, one has to begin, of course, with the hyper-masculine bronze statue of Tommy Trojan (erected in 1930) at the center ...

History

Time Is Out of Joint

Simultaneity in the epoch of the near and far

July 16, 2020 • by Sergio Infante

For those who are either unemployed or overworked, those whose habits and routines have fallen apart, those experiencing psychological or bodily distress, the days may seem to drag on endlessly. For others -- perhaps those who find themselves on the pandemic’s frontlines or those who have discovered a sense of ...

History

A Monument to Dis-Union

The West Virginia Coal Miner statue ignores race, class, and history

July 16, 2020 • by Steven Stoll

During our present twilight of the statues, when citizens across the country force the removal of effigies that represent racism and colonialism, Jackson is an obvious target for removal. Yet I’ve been thinking of another statue just a few yards away from Jackson: The West Virginia Coal Miner, a monument ...