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: Bangor Daily News
  7/6/2020
  

  This Maine Governor Never Publicly Embraced the Klan, But He Never Disavowed its Support

  Ralph Owen Brewster’s silence on the Klan spoke volumes.

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• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  7/4/2020
  

  How a Lincoln-Douglass Debate Led to Historic Discovery

  Just like that, a document apparently unknown to Douglass’s biographers and not found in the orator’s papers at the Library of Congress had landed squarely in the middle of the debate that has swept the nation and the neighborhood around Lincoln Park where the statue stands.

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• SOURCE: NBC News
  7/5/2020
  

  Racist, Brutal Past or Hispanic History? Latinos Clash over Spanish Colonial Statues

  Activist and associate history professor Yolanda Leyva breaks down the complex legacy of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate.

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• SOURCE: Al Jazeera
  7/4/2020
  

  UK Historian David Starkey Quits Cambridge After Slavery Remarks

  The British historian caused outrage by saying 'slavery was not genocide' in a recent interview.

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• SOURCE: NY Daily News
  7/4/2020
  

  Why 2020 Feels Like the Longest Year Of Our Lives — And Yet It’s Only Half Over.

  “One day it feels like 1861, the next 1918, then suddenly 1970,” said professor Ted Widmer.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/4/2020
  

  Historians Question Trump’s Choice of ‘Heroes’ for National Garden Monument

  “It’s like they threw a bunch of stuff on the wall and just went with whatever stuck,” says history professor Karen Cox.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/5/2020
  

  At Arlington Cemetery, A Confederate Monument to the South and Slavery Still Stands

  Historian Micki McElya is among the many who believe the monument should be removed.

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• SOURCE: The New York Times
  7/4/2020
  

  Trump Says He Will Create a Statuary Park Honoring ‘American Heroes’

  Historians Kevin K. Gaines and Julian E. Zelizer discuss the president's power to shape historical narratives.

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• SOURCE: The New York Times
  7/4/2020
  

  The Anthem Debate Is Back. But Now It’s Standing That’s Polarizing.

  “You cannot sit around now in this post-George Floyd period we’re in and say, ‘We’re going to continue to take this safe position,’” says historian Charles Ross.

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  7/3/2020
  

  To the World, We’re Now America the Racist and Pitiful

  The United States, long the bedrock of the Western alliance, is less inspirational today—and perhaps will be even less so tomorrow.

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• SOURCE: The New York Times
  7/6/2020
  

  ‘Hamilton’ and the Historical Record: Frequently Asked Questions

  The Disney+ filmed version has fans wondering what’s accurate. Historians are fans, too, and they have answers, along with caveats.

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Globe
  7/5/2020
  

  MIT Professor Tunney Lee, an Architect, Urban Planner, and Historian of Chinatown, Dies at 88

  An architecture professor who taught at MIT and the Chinese University of Hong Kong is remembered as a historian of Chinese American community and an advocate for including the public in the process of planning.

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• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  7/3/2020
  

  ‘The Most Ignorant and Unfit’: What Made America’s Worst Ever Leader?

  by David Rothkopf

  The best—maybe only—saving grace for Trump in the history books is that no one could accuse him of causing the Civil War.

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  7/1/2020
  

  White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots In U.S. Christianity

  At an earlier point in American history, some Christian theologians went so far as to argue that the enslavement of human beings was justifiable from a biblical point of view.

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  7/6/2020
  

  How to Confront a Racist National History

  by Isaac Chotiner

  "But we have to acknowledge that we’re not upholding history, we’re upholding values, and those are not the values that we want in the twenty-first century."

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/5/2020
  

  The Politics of Race are Shifting, and Politicians are Struggling to Keep Pace

  The story of how the Republican Party, once the party of Abraham Lincoln, became almost entirely dependent on white voters, and how the Democratic Party, once the party of Southern segregationists, became the political home to black Americans and other minorities has been years in the making.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/4/2020
  

  Trump’s Push to Amplify Racism Unnerves Republicans who have Long Enabled Him

  Leah Wright Rigeur of the Harvard Kennedy School argues that Trump keeps making appeals to white racism because it's central to his political identity. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  7/1/2020
  

  The Day the White Working Class Turned Republican (Review)

  Clyde Haberman reviews David Paul Kuhn's "The Hardhat Riot" which proves heated social divisions--stoked and exploited by politicians--are nothing new. 

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• SOURCE: BBC
  7/3/2020
  

  David Starkey Criticised over Slavery Comments

  A popular British historian faces criticism for saying that the slave trade was not genocidal because "so many damn blacks" survived.

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• SOURCE: The New York Times
  7/1/2020
  

  ‘A Conflicted Cultural Force’: What It’s Like to Be Black in Publishing

  When historian Kerri K. Greenidge was trying to publish her book on William Trotter, publishers responded with "who was going to read a book about a Black man that nobody had ever heard about?"