The Latest 
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When the President’s Son-In-Law Truly Was a Great Success
Gail Radford
Treasury Secretary William McAdoo was a presidential son-in-law whose knowledge, experience, and belief in the role of government made him an effective public servant.
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Disruption and Resilience: Lessons from the Ancient History of the 2000s
Garrett Peck
The history of the 2000s is a story of human resilience in the face of crisis. We must find ways to respond to disruption with mutual care and creativity.
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Why Study History? More Than Ever, a Question that Needs Answering
Peter N. Stearns
One of the few bright features of the past two months has been the extent to which the pandemic crisis has clarified the real public need for historical perspectives.
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"Fiction Makes a Better Job of The Truth"? Telling the Erased Story of Lucia Joyce
Annabel Abbs
A historical novel exposes the complex relationship between historians and sources: "Because Lucia’s own voice had been effectively smothered, most ‘facts’ came from those later responsible for incarcerating her in a series of mental asylums and hospitals. Few sources are genuinely independent, memory is notoriously fickle, and all facts are open to interpretation."
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COVID and the Deadly Logic of Efficiency in Meatpacking and Elder Care
Jeff Kolnick
The economic logic of efficiency is responsible for the severity and deadliness of the Coronavirus outbreak in both meatpacking plants and nursing homes.
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Trump and the Puritans
Martyn Whittock
No one would ever call Donald Trump a Puritan. But the 17th century religious movement is a foundation of Trump's America.
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COVID-19 is Devasting Native American Communities. History Illuminates Why.
Pete Sigal, Robbie Ethridge, and Nancy Shoemaker
Centuries of unequal access to resources and decision-making served to weaken indigenous health across the Americas and beyond.
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Blog
Things Have Been Worse
Steve Hochstadt
The broad anti-left political campaigns associated with Joseph McCarthy should remind us that pursuing justice requires courage.
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Stop the Machine: Why We Should Resist Online Learning
Jonathan Rose
A history professor argues that, even given the risks of COVID, the intellectual and social missions of higher education will be crippled if in-person education isn't resumed soon.
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Little Richard: Bold, Pioneering, Complex, and Unapologetic
Elwood Watson
Little Richard left a lasting musical and cultural legacy because of his talent and his willingness to be more boldly black and sexual than other artists dared.
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Fly me to the Moon: Covering the Early Space Program
Ron Steinman
Will people struggling to get through a normal day be inspired by a renewed space program? Will either the government or the media commit for the long haul? At least I knew there was a time when we all had it in us. For the future, only time will tell.
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Blog
Presidential Rivalry and Bad Blood in American History (Part 2)
Ronald L. Feinman
Part 2 of a series on the rivalries, grudges, and feuds among American presidents.
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JFK at 103: What We Miss
Joseph A. Esposito
John F. Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917. Although much of the Camelot ideal was mythical, Kennedy's optimism and purposefulness are nevertheless missed today.
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The Decline and Fall of Socialist Zionism (Review)
Ralph Seliger
A new book examines the diminished influence of left and labor parties in Israeli politics.
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Roundup Top Ten for May 29, 2020
The week's top ten op-eds from around the web written by historians or about history.
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Tolerance and Violence: The Fate of Religious Minorities During The Plague under Christianity and Islam
Selina O'Grady
A historian of monotheistic religion argues that the Islamic world showed greater tolerance of religious minorities during medieval plagues than did Christendom. Yet tolerance is a poor model for intercultural cooperation in our current crisis.
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Honor the Work of Brazil's Villas-Bôas Brothers by Protecting the Amazon's Indigenous
John Hemming
The Villas-Bôas brothers worked with Brazil's indigenous people to balance the preservation of their Amazonian lands with inclusion in modernizing society. The policies of Jair Bolsonaro are a dire threat to their work, the survival of indigenous peoples, and the planet.
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"The News Will Get Out Soon Enough": Homefront Jim Crow and the Integration of the U.S. Navy
Dan C. Goldberg
Politico reporter Dan Goldberg's new book details how thirteen black men overcame prejudice and indifference to integrate the Navy's officer corps in 1944.
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Will History Judge Trump? Only if We Preserve Our Capacity for Judgment
Christine Adams and Nina Kushner
The idea of truth reached by reason and evidence is under grave threat. Historians must find ways to publicly defend their methods for the good of history and society.
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The Social Psychology of Popular Right-Wing Conservatism
Daniel Burnstein
Right-wing conservative movements are driven by a psychological complex of threat and hostility to heterodox opinion that makes them difficult to stop once they've developed.
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No More Business as Usual! It’s Time for Joe Biden to Defend our Democracy
Claudia Koonz
A historian of European dictatorship argues that Joe Biden must recognize that not just the election but the health of democracy is at stake and challenge the administration's efforts to operate above the law.
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The Pandemic Exposed a Major Flaw in America’s Health Care System
Robert Brent Toplin
The crisis may create an opportunity to do what once seemed impossible: deliver universal healthcare and end the employer-based insurance system.
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"This Too, Shall Pass." History, and Life, Say So!
Vaughn Davis Bornet
Nearing age 103 gives Vaughn Davis Bornet a perspective on change that might help readers struggling today.
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Pandemic, Pandering and Prejudice: Trump's Effort to Weaponize Xenophobia
James D. Zirin
Blaming China and threatening reprisals is not going to save any lives. It won’t open up the country any sooner. It won’t create a single job. But it might just get Trump re-elected--at least he thinks so.
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Citizen’s Arrest: Racist at its Roots
Alan J. Singer
Georgia's Citizens's Arrest law has always been used to enable and support white supremacy since its enactment during the Civil War.
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A Memorial Day Lament for Capt. Wilfred Owen, Sgt. Joyce Kilmer, and the Needless Dead of Foolish Wars
Walter G. Moss
The horrific scale of slaughter in the first World War can be understood, ironically, through the tragedy of a single lost life. Walter Moss considers the deaths of two poets in France.
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The Post Office is Mentioned, but Not Protected, by the Constitution
David Head
If the day comes when the USPS, like privateering, has outlived its usefulness, the Constitution will prove no obstacle. The only question that matters is the practical one: does the postal service accomplish its mission better than the alternatives?
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Blog
Shining Stars and Rogues: Presidential Offspring in American History (Part 2)
Ronald L. Feinman
Part 2 of a survey of the good, the bad, and the crooked among presidential offspring.
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The Lynching of David Wyatt
Greg Bailey
Lynching and mob terrorism against African Americans have never been a strictly southern phenomenon as a bloody incident from southern Illinois's histrory reveals.
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The Roundup Top Ten for May 22, 2020
The top ten op-eds from around the web by historians (or about history) this week.
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Morning or Mourning in America? Political Advertising and the Politics of Emotion
Wendy Melillo
The Lincoln Project's recent "Mourning in America" ad seeks to connect Donald Trump to deep misery in America. The history of political advertising suggests it's likely to work.
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100 Years of Political Spectacle: Women, Political Protest, and the White House
Bernadette Crehan and Susan Liebell
Like suffrage protesters a century ago, nurses demonstrating at the White House to demand adequate protection for frontline medical workers can win by taking on the President on the grounds of spectacle and social media to shape public opinion.
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Hong Kong Apocalypses: Teaching the Recent Past and the Speculative Future
James Carter
The chaos of Hong Kong's recent protests and the Coronavirus unsettled a historian's sense of the boundary between past and present. Perhaps we understand either only through the mirror of the other.
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Blog
Interview: Historian and Professor Nancy K. Bristow on the Forgotten Police Shooting of Black Students at Jackson State College
Robin Lindley
"Fifty years is too long for these crimes to continue to happen, and to go unpunished by our justice system."
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A Mathematical Duel in 16th Century Venice (Excerpt)
Fabio Toscano translated Arturo Sangalli
The advancement of mathematics in renaissance Italy was complicated by a context of secrecy, jealousy, and competitive dueling governed by implicit codes of honor.
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Who Can Learn From Taiwan? Apparently not WHO
Keith Clark
The World Health Organization is unable to effectively learn from Taiwan's response to COVID-19 because the agency adheres to a "One China" policy that doesn't recognize both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan.
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What Happened to My Future: The Pivotal Years of 1914, 1929, and 2020
Walter G. Moss
There aren't many comparisons to 2020 as a year when illusions of normalcy and prosperity were shattered.
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Graduate Students: NOT THE WORST
Michelle Nickerson
A history professor celebrates her graduate students' idiosyncrasies and their outstanding work under duress as redemption for a calamitous semester.
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Coronavirus Exposed the Contradictions Behind the Curtain. Will Americans Pay No Attention?
Walter L. Hixson
Liberal centrism has come up short in the COVID-19 crisis. Decades of cold war demonization of social democracy have made it disturbingly likely that an American fascism will fill the void.
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Blog
Tax Protesting on the Cheap
Jim Loewen
Leaving certain federal taxes unpaid was a common but poorly remembered form of protest against the U.S. war in Vietnam.
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The Unfulfilled Potential of Progressive Democracy after World War II
Isser Woloch
After the military defeat of Nazism, the governments of Britain, France and the United States made uneven and incomplete progress to remake their societies along more egalitarian lines, but their efforts should be seen as part of an international trend.
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Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic, America’s Billionaires Thrive and Prosper
Lawrence Wittner
Americans may wonder whether the nation can afford to maintain a small, parasitic stratum of society in splendor during economic collapse and pandemic.
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What the New Evidence on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust Means
Rafael Medoff
In the end, whatever their respective reasons, the Pope and the president both opted to look away from the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time.
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Roundup Top Ten for May 15, 2020
This week's best op-eds by historians or about history from around the web.
News
- Abraham Lincoln and the Shavuot Controversy of 1865
- This Montana Farm Boy Became a Scientific Legend, Developing Vaccines to Protect Kids Worldwide
- Should the U.S. Favor Public Health or the Economy? History Shows they’re Inseparable
- Future Historians Will Rely on Wikipedia’s COVID-19 Coverage
- Reparations – Has the Time Finally Come?
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