Roundup ![](/web/20231003193859im_/https://hnn.us/images/icon/rss.png)
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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7/14/2023
The Roundup Top Ten for July 14, 2023
The top opinion writing by historians and about history from around the web this week.
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SOURCE: Nursing Clio
7/12/2023
Why Has Medicine Looked at PCOS Through the Lens of Fertility Instead of Pain?
by Alaina DiSalvo
Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome has had a complicated history in medicine. But its path toward recognition has been unfortunately colored by a concern for preserving fertility instead of improving women's quality of life—even in groundbreaking feminist health guides like Our Bodies, Ourselves.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
7/6/2023
In Post-Soviet Russia, Children Have Been Propaganda Instruments
by Clementine Fujimura
Russian regimes since the fall of Communism have inherited and created crises of mass orphanage; their policy responses to parentless children have been informed by politics and nationalism at the expense of child welfare. Removal of orphans from Ukraine to Russia is just the latest instance.
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SOURCE: AMA Journal of Ethics
7/10/2023
The Body Mass Index Grew out of White Supremacy, Eugenics and Anti-Blackness
by Sabrina Strings
Beneath the statistical and scientific imprimatur of the measurement lie a host of assumptions that the bodies of affluent white people are normal and those of others are deviant and deficient.
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SOURCE: Jacobin
7/7/2023
Child Labor Was Essential to Early Capitalism—Don't be Shocked it's Coming Back
by Steve Fraser
As employers seek new possibilities to exploit labor, state legislatures are going back to the future with rollbacks of child labor bans.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
7/11/2023
What "Crackhead" Really Meant in 1980s America
by Donovan X. Ramsey
The memories of politicians and police have been allowed to dominate our understanding of the emergence of crack cocaine in the 1980s. A new book seeks to elevate the voices of urban Black Americans and others who experienced it directly and still live with its effects.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
7/11/2023
Ozempic is the Latest Vain Pursuit of a Scientific Solution to Addiction
by Simon Torracinta
Now that the diabetes drug has been used off-label to suppress appetite, scientists are speculating about its use to suppress neurological aspects of addictive behavior. History suggests this is misguided.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
7/10/2023
In Memphis, Tyre Nichols's Killing Echoes 1866 Massacre
by Isaiah Stafford and Kathy Roberts Forde
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Memphis was a city in political upheaval in which policing became a method of reasserting white supremacy.
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SOURCE: Washington Monthly
7/12/2023
Our Amicus Brief Against Florida's Stop WOKE Act
by Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
"The Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action in college admissions will provoke widespread debate. But not in the classrooms of Florida’s public colleges and universities, because the Stop WOKE Act prohibits it."
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
7/10/2023
Colleges Must Follow the Law, but they Don't Need to Aid SCOTUS's Resegregation Agenda
by Richard Thompson Ford
From the architects of Jim Crow to William Rehnquist to John Roberts, conservatives have been able to use "color blind" principles to actively defend segregation. Colleges must consider this history in deciding how they adjust their admissions practices in response to SCOTUS's affirmative action ruling.
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SOURCE: PEN America
7/13/2023
The Next Culture War Battle? College Accreditation
by Jeffrey Sachs and Jeremy C. Young
Officials in Florida and elsewhere are seeking to overthrow established relationships with accrediting bodies because those organizations help to shield universities against political censorship and interference with teaching and learning.
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SOURCE: The Nation
7/11/2023
The Entanglement of Art and Slavery in the Work of Juan de Pareja
by Rachel Hunter Himes
Diego Velázquez painted the portrait of Juan de Pareja in 1650. An art historian considers what more we can learn about the painting and the world in which it was made by examining the paradox of a dignified and beatific portrayal of a man painted by another man who enslaved him.
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7/7/2023
The Roundup Top Ten for July 7, 2023
The top opinion writing by historians and about history from around the web this week.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
6/30/2023
History Shows Debt Relief is All-American
by Chloe Thurston and Emily Zackin
Throughout American history state legislatures have passed debt relief over the objections of creditors and the courts, responding to the economic needs of the citizenry and defying the idea that indebtedness was a personal failing.
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SOURCE: TIME
7/3/2023
The Declaration of Independence Sealed a Shotgun Wedding
by Eli Merritt
If the founding is to inspire us today, it should be for the way that the journey from the Declaration to the Constitution reflected the ability to overcome bitter and pervasive division.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
7/2/2023
Why We are Still Debating Birthright Citizenship
by Martha S. Jones
Opposition to birthright citizenship has, historically and today, reflected opposition to the idea of equal membership in the political community of the nation and has been inextricable from the idea that white Americans should be privileged citizens, argues the leading historian of the subject.
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SOURCE: New York Times
7/1/2023
Amendments are the Key to Avoiding Constitutional Extinction
by Jill Lepore
Our constitution has essentially been frozen in time since 1971, making it a poor instrument for governing to meet modern challenges. Rescuing the history of the Constitution from the originalists through a comprehensive historical archive of efforts to amend it could help restore its vitality.
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SOURCE: New York Times
7/3/2023
John Roberts's Tragedy is of His Own Making
by Jeff Shesol
John Roberts has the power to arrest the Court's slide into disrepute, extremism, and trollishness. He's chosen not to use it.
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SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
7/3/2023
America Broke its Own Military Industrial Complex
by Michael Brenes
Privatization has worked out great for defense contractors who rake in money for big-ticket experimental programs without any expectation of producing basic military hardware.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
6/29/2023
SCOTUS's Affirmative Action Ruling no Coincidence; Court Seeks to Preserve Power of Small Elite
by Eddie R. Cole
Long before affirmative action was established, white elites fought to ensure that higher education benefitted themselves and their children. It is this political legacy that the Court has affirmed.
News
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- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
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- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel