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UPDATE: Technical Difficulties
We apologize if any of you have had difficulty contacting HNN by email between Wednesday evening and the present time. Our email host is experiencing technical difficulties that have prevented HNN from receiving email on several of our accounts.
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What's in a Name?: Decolonizing Sports Mascots
Paul C. Rosier
Decolonizing sports history requires a deeper analysis of how false historical narratives that ‘blamed the victim’ became embedded in public venues in everyday life that shaped generations of Americans’ perceptions of Native people
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Lincoln, Cass, and Daniel Chester French: Homely Politicians Divided by Politics, United through Art
Harold Holzer
In the age before the glare of television and instantaneous photography were relentlessly aimed at our leaders, politicians could succeed even if they looked like Lewis Cass. Or Abraham Lincoln.
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One of the Chicago 7 Reflects on Dissident Politics Then and Now
Lee Weiner
A veteran of dissident politics in the 1960s warns that while today's broad coalition of activists for a more just and democratic America are on the right track, they must learn from the mistakes of an older generation and find ways to keep united despite difference.
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Mankato’s Hanging Monument Excluded Indigenous Perspectives when it was Erected and when it was Removed
John Legg
Both while it stood and when its presence became inconvenient, the Hanging Monument shows how memorials control historical narratives and elevate particular interpretations of the past.
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What the Faithless Electors Decision Says about SCOTUS and Originalism
Ray Raphael
The outcome of the "faithless electors" case shows that judicial "originalists" use that principle pragmatically and selectively.
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Two Contagions, One Opportunity to Reboot our Approach
Steve Pyne
Outbursts of megafires resemble emerging diseases because they are typically the outcome of broken biotas – a ruinous interaction between people and nature that unhinges the old checks and balances.
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"You Sold Me to Your Mother-in-Law...": An Ongoing Quest to Reconnect a Family
Ken Lawrence
David Jackson had been forcibly separated from members of his family with no word of their subsequent fates for more than two decades, yet he had not given up hope of finding them. Can today’s historians shed light on his quest?
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Will the Crisis Year of 2020 Turn Out Like 1968?
James Thornton Harris
Trump’s attempt to use Nixon’s outdated playbook will fail. Our nation is younger, more diverse and better educated now. We know better.
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Who Opened the Door to Trumpism? David Frum's "Trumpocalypse" Reviewed
David O'Connor
Through his long analysis of Trump’s follies, Frum never develops his contention that twenty-first-century conservatism helped open the door for Trump. Without a full accounting, his political mea culpa is hollow and fails to offer guidance on how to avoid mistakes in the future.
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Weighing the Evidence when a President is Accused of Antisemitism
Rafael Medoff
In weighing the evidence that has so far been produced concerning Trump, one must consider the standards that historians have applied with regard to the other three presidents who have been accused of antisemitism—Richard Nixon, Harry Truman, and Franklin Roosevelt.
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Can Martin Luther King’s Spiritual Vision Kindle a New Progressivism?
Walter G. Moss
Advocates for a broader social democratic political agenda should consider the spiritual roots of Martin Luther King's activism, which have historically engaged a broad range of political views to reform movements.
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Blog
Don’t Tear Down the Wrong Monuments; Don’t Attack Every Holiday
Jim Loewen
When COVID concerns allow, visit the Gettysburg and Vicksburg battlefields, and come to your own conclusion about how the National Park S...
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Roundup Top Ten for July 24, 2020
HNN's weekly roundup of the best op-eds by historians and about history from around the web.
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The Hate-Mongers: Characterizing Racism in Comics
Patrick L. Hamilton and Allan W. Austin
The Hate-Monger, a supervillain introduced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, called attention to the destructive power of bigotry, but today readers should resist the idea that defeating any one person, no matter who or how powerful they might be, can eliminate racism.
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"No Longer Just Lincoln and a Slave": Consider Mary McLeod Bethune's Lincoln Park Statue
Jenny Woodley
Thinking of the Mary McLeod Bethune memorial in Washington's Lincoln Park in tandem with the controversial Emancipation memorial suggests ways in which commemorative spaces can operate as places of dialogue.
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SCOTUS's Thuraissigiam Decision is a Threat to all Undocumented Immigrants
Elliott Young
As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, a recent decision could “permit Congress to constitutionally eliminate all procedural protections for any noncitizen the Government deems unlawfully admitted and summarily deport them no matter how many decades they have lived here, how settled and integrated they are in their communities, or how many members of their family are U. S. citizens or residents.”
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Monumental Folly
Pete Daniel
Change is on the front foot, and this is no time to allow wealth and ignorance to gain ground. Achiever exhibits and sculpture gardens seem pathetic sideshows to the powerful history of the country.
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A Historian's Reflections on American Dissent
Ralph Young
At a time like this one longs for a Gandhi or a King to come along and show us the way. Or a Lincoln or a Roosevelt who took up the challenge of leading the United States through existential crises. But I don't see that happening. Not in 2020. Not on the federal level.
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The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Black Action Movement and the Way Forward
Martin Halpern
Activists in today’s struggles against institutionalized racism and for black lives can benefit from studying a local victory of fifty years ago. In the spring of 1970, the Black Action Movement (BAM) at the University of Michigan led a thirteen-day strike that won a commitment to change by the university administration.
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Trump Made it Manifestly Clear: The Discussion of National Destiny is Ongoing
G.W. Gibson
We can take heart that our country and our discipline have come a long way from the nadir and Frederick Jackson Turner. Somewhere between Teddy Roosevelt and Colin Kaepernick, we have managed to pick up a few yards as Americans and as American Historians.
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Barry Zorthian's War: The Pentagon and the Press in Vietnam
Ron Steinman
A 1970 speech by Barry Zorthian, the Pentagon's chief public information officer in Vietnam, shows a thoughtful approach to balancing the rights of journalists with the need of the military to control information. That approach is missing in the era of "fake news" and open hostility by the administration for the press.
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Who Was Our Worst President? Think About it When a Grim 75th Anniversary Arrives
Paul W. Lovinger
The anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should inspire consideration of the global fallout from Harry Truman's presidential decisions.
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Make Digital History a National Common Ground
Stewart D. McLaurin
No one should be at a disadvantage because they can’t visit D.C., or other historical landmarks like Presidential homes and libraries. We can take advantage of our increased dependence on online learning to inspire students, no matter where they live.
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Thinking About Racism Beyond Statues and Symbols
Dolores Janiewski
In his life and his death Floyd experienced the coercive structures that constrain, punish and eventually kill altogether too many Americans. More than Confederate statues, these need to be torn down.
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Blog
The Three Political Prodigy Governors of the 20th Century
Ronald L. Feinman
Three very young men sought to jump from a governor's mansion to high national office. Philip LaFollette and Harold Stassen failed, but in part due to a series of lucky events Bill Clinton succ...
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What Will Happen on November 4?
Steve Hochstadt
What Trump will do if he loses is the wrong question. What matters is what his supporters will do.
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The Roundup Top Ten for July 17, 2020
The top opinion essays by historians and about history from around the web this week.
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"The Day I Start Being Free": Detained Migrants Struggle for Human Rights
Jana Lipman
The experiences of Vietnamese refugees in the 1990s, who experienced detention and a bureaucratic process exposing them to dangerous repatriation, are a precedent for the treatment of asylum-seekers in contemporary America.
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What Comes After the Fall of Pro-Slavery Monuments?
Ana Lucia Araujo
In nearly two decades studying monuments, memorials, and museums memorializing slavery in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, I learned several lessons. When groups decide to erect a monument to remember an event or a person from the past, they are always driven by present-day motivations.
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The Right to Breathe Free: A Showdown Over Race and Nature (Part II)
Douglas C. Sackman
Over time American nature has been retrofitted with an infrastructure of racism, one that gives some people open access to land, clean water, and good air while constricting the access of others to these vital natural resources, or takes them away altogether.
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Centuries of Protest at City Hall Park
Marika Plater
Closed gates around City Hall Park in New York not only restrict access to the park as a site for protest, but ignore the site's history as a theater for political expression.
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75 Years Ago the First "Nuclear Race" Was in Hollywood
Greg Mitchell
Despite Americans' keen interest and considerable fear in the atomic bomb after the end of World War II, the first commercial film to tackle the Manhattan Project was a bomb of a different sort.
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A Letter to America: Why We Need a New History Education
Linda Morse
Let us get busy: history teachers must change the world!
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For Deep and Lasting Reform, We Need to Amend the Constitution
John Davenport
After the upheavals of June, we may now have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get to the constitutional roots of so many national problems.
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Blog
We’re All Historians Now
Stone Age Brain
Donald Trump may not like the debate we are having about history. I welcome it.
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Re-stabilizing the Middle Class and the Poor: Lessons from the 1930s
David Stebenne
For a long time it seemed as though the 1930s era of high unemployment was a kind of “great exception” in American history, but now it has appeared again, suddenly and unexpectedly, just as it did in the early 1930s.
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Will White Liberals Keep Faith With This Historical Moment?
Elwood Watson
White liberal allies to today's Black protest movements must dig in for the long haul and remember the words of Audre Lorde: "The war against dehumanization is ceaseless."
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Eighty Years On, Chamberlain's Appeasement Policy is Still Debated
Yoav J. Tenembaum
The evidence suggests that Neville Chamberlain was sincere in his desire but profoundly mistaken about his ability to keep Britain out of war with Germany.
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Humanity is an Endangered Species. Can We Do What it Takes to Save Ourselves?
Lawrence Wittner
The dire crises facing humanity--climate change, pandemic disease, widespread pollution, and nuclear weapons, to name a few--demand that we reject a fatalistic sense of impotence and the legacies of nationalism that prevent cooperative solutions.
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Marshall McLuhan: The Man Who Predicted the Internet and Warned Us of its Dangers
Ludovic Rembert
These days, most of Professor McLuhan's "global village" is kept in private and confined spaces: the village plaza is Facebook, a space that is operated for commercial purposes, restricting our discussions and absorbing our private data within our conversations and searches to sell it to advertisers.
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The Roundup Top Ten for July 10, 2020
The top op ed essays by historians and about history from around the web this week.
News
- Why Trump’s Blunt Appeals to Suburban Voters May Not Work
- How the Greensboro Four Sit-In Sparked a Movement
- 5 Vice Presidential Candidates Who Made History
- The Impact of White Evangelicals on U.S. Politics (Audio)
- Massachusetts Senators Form Panel To Suggest New State Seal, Which Would Replace Version Native Americans Call Racist