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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.

  • SOURCE: JSTOR Daily
    9/24/2020

    The Red Scare and Women in Government

    McCarthyite attacks on the political left also pushed women out of policymaking positions in the federal government, the historian Landon Storrs argues. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    9/24/2020

    The Forgotten Feminists of the Backlash Decade

    Lisa Levenstein's book assesses a shift in the women's movement in the 1990s into digital spaces and professionalized issue organizations. A reviewer considers what that shift enabled women to achieve and what it cost. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    9/24/2020

    The Origins of Policing in America

    Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Media Studies scholar Chenjerai Kumanyika explain how American policing grew out of efforts to control the labor of poor and enslaved people.

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    9/21/2020

    Eric Williams’ Foundational Work on Slavery, Industry, and Wealth

    by Katie Donington

    Debates over Eric Williams’s work have ebbed and flowed ever since he first published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944. His book inspired a body of historiography to which many historians of slavery and abolition have added their voices over the decades.

  • SOURCE: Boston Globe
    9/22/2020

    Is it Fascism Yet?

    Columnist Renée Graham cites Ruth Ben-Ghiat's history of Italian fascism as a warning about authoritarianism's growth. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    9/25/2020

    Telling the Truth About Slavery Is Not ‘Indoctrination’

    “'We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans,' Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction." Today, American students' levels of ignorance about slavery suggests this too often remains true. 

  • SOURCE: BBC
    9/23/2020

    Are We Living at the "Hinge of History"?

    Journalist Richard Fisher examines the argument that the present--this moment--is the most important juncture in human history because human capacity to affect the planet outstrips human wisdom to direct that capacity.

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    9/21/2020

    The Libertarian Ideas That Wrecked the Fed

    by Bruce Bartlett

    Friedman’s ardent libertarian faith was central to his monetarist thinking; like all libertarians, he was always extremely wary of anything that would cause the size of government to grow.

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    9/22/2020

    How the Welfare State Became the Neoliberal Order (Review)

    by Pablo Pryluka

    Although the Tennessee Valley Authority was a pioneering public works project, its alumni worked in Latin America to advance redevelopment projects that elevated the authority of big business, a model now associated with the neoliberal turn in the developed world. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    9/16/2020

    How the Black Vote Became a Monolith

    by Theodore R. Johnson

    Despite the political diversity within Black America, the political system's accommodation of bigotry and the political utility of appeals to white identity have pushed the overwhelming majority of Black voters to cast ballots for the same party.