Historians in the News

This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in each source note. Quotation marks are not used.

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• 
• SOURCE: Marketplace
  6/14/2023
  

  Blair L.M. Kelley Tells Black Working Class History Through Family

  When the historian set out to write the history of working-class African Americans, her own family's stories proved the best place to begin. 

• 
• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  6/15/2023
  

  Review: J.T. Roane Tells Black Philadelphia's History from the Margins

  by Charles W. McKinney

  Roane picks up a challenge offered by W.E.B. DuBois in his pioneering "The Philadelphia Negro" to understand the spaces of alternative and underground social life as important and formative parts of Black urban life in the Great Migration. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  6/10/2023
  

  Cash Reparations to Japanese Internees Helped Rebuild Autonomy and Dignity

  by Morgan Ome

  Many recent proposals for African American reparations prescribe particular uses for compensation, such as securing housing. But the lesson of the $20,000 payments made to Japanese-American internees and their descendants is that restoring dignity and autonomy means letting recipients decide how to spend any payment for themselves. 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  6/5/2023
  

  J.T. Roane Reconstructs the Historical Spaces of Black Philadelphia

  Roane examines the ways that Black Philadelphians between the Great Migration and the Black Power era created and used "underground" and spiritual spaces to stake claims to life in the city, and asks what places can fill that role today. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  6/9/2023
  

  Science Historian: Apollo 11 Quarantine after Moon Landing For Show

  Dagomar DeGroot's research shows that NASA scientists were aware of the tiny, but potentially catastrophic, risk of moon-earth contamination, and that quarantining the spacecraft and crew would do little to mitigate the risk but could convince the public that authorities were taking precautions. 

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  6/13/2023
  

  Rachel Swarns Traces the Ties of Slavery and the American Catholic Church

  Following up on a blockbuster 2016 Times article, Swarns's book examines the histories of families with ancestors who were sold by Maryland Jesuits to shore up the order's finances (including the fledgling Georgetown University). 

• 
• SOURCE: KJZZ
  6/13/2023
  

  Sports Historian Victoria Jackson: Trans Bans in Sports Part of History of Suspicion toward Women's Sports

  Recent state laws regulating the participation of transgender athletes in girls' sports are part of a long history of policing gender in athletics. 

• 
• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  6/12/2023
  

  Martha Hodes Turns Historian's Training to Reach Memory Hidden by Trauma

  A memoirist of her own experience of terrorist hostage-taking reviews Martha Hodes's effort to apply the tools of historians to recover memory of being held in the Jordanian desert on a hijacked plane in 1970. 

• 
• SOURCE: Dame
  5/30/2023
  

  Thomas Zimmer on Danger and Hope for Democracy

  The historian and podcaster says hope for a multicultural democracy lies with the young: "Preserving the status quo will not be good enough, and the younger generation understands this better than any other."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/31/2023
  

  First Round of Obama Administration Oral Histories Focus on Political Fault Lines and Policy Tradeoffs

  The first 17 of nearly 500 interviews with Obama Administration officials was released this week, as part of a Columbia University project. 

• 
• SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
  5/30/2023
  

  The Tulsa Race Massacre was an Attack on Black People; Rebuilding Policies were an Attack on Black Wealth

  by Brentin Mock

  Victor Luckerson looks to the aftermath of the deadly attacks on the Greenwood district to argue that Tulsa's white leadership, in combination with federal highway and urban renewal programs, thwarted the efforts of Black Tulsans who were determined to rebuild. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Guardian
  6/1/2023
  

  British Universities are Researching Ties to Slavery. Conservative Alumni Say "Enough"

  Historian Nicolas Bell-Romero found that influential Cambridge backers were happy to learn of the links between the university and famous abolitionists, but not on the university's historical links to an imperial elite that benefitted from the slave trade, part of a broad battle about the politics of British history. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  6/1/2023
  

  Martha Hodes Reconstructs Her Memory of a 1970 Hijacking

  At age 12, the historian, with her older sister, was a passenger on a jet hijacked by Palestinian militants. After decades of minimizing the story, her efforts to approach her past as a historian highlight the gaps in documentary records, the contradictory ways memory can fill those gaps, and the varying degrees of distance historians keep from their subjects.

• 
• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  5/26/2023
  

  Jeremi Suri: Texas Higher Ed Conflict "Doesn't Have to Be This Way"

  The UT-Austin historian previously worked in Wisconsin when Governor Scott Walker went to war with the university system. He discusses the similarities and differences a decade later in Texas. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/27/2023
  

  Stanley Engerman, Co-Author of Controversial History of American Slavery, Dies at 87

  His "Time on the Cross," published with Robert Fogel in 1974, ignited debate by arguing for the economic efficiency of enslaved labor and, critics said, downplaying the violence inherent in the system. 

• 
• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  5/28/2023
  

  Professor Helps Rescue "Lost" Asian American Silent Film

  Denise Khor's research on film culture seemed to show that the prints of the 1914 film "The Oath of the Sword" had been lost. But one museum had a decaying copy in a vault, and a restored version has premiered as the oldest known Asian American film. 

• 
• SOURCE: KTVZ
  5/27/2023
  

  Canada Day Festivities Spark Controversy over National History

  The dispossession of indigenous peoples and the exclusion of Chinese immigrants are among the historical episodes that have complicated the celebration of Canadian nationhood in recent years. 

• 
• SOURCE: Associated Press
  5/30/2023
  

  German Government Panel of Historians Begins Inquiry into 1972 Munich Olympics Killings

  The government hopes to address ongoing questions raised by the families of murdered Israeli athletes about failures of security before the attack and as the crisis unfolded. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Magazine
  5/30/2023
  

  The Other Mothers Fighting the School Wars

  Although Moms For Liberty was the early entrant into the current battles over curriculum, race and LGBTQ policies in schools, other groups have mobilized their identities as mothers to fight the right's efforts. Historians Adam Laats and Stacie Taranto note that school politics have often hinged on who could leverage motherhood as a political force. 

• 
• SOURCE: Religion Dispatches
  5/25/2023
  

  Jeff Sharlet on the Intersectional Erotics of Fascism

  by Annika Brockschmidt

  In an interview with historian Annika Brockschmidt, journalist Jeff Sharlet discusses his new book on the "slow civil war" in America and the need to understand how the far right is sustained by the pleasure of ceasing to resist the tide of anger and instead being carried by it.