The Latest 
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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.
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Spiritualism and Suspension Bridges: John Roebling and a Biographer's Sympathy for the Weird 19th Century
Richard Haw
A biographer of Brooklyn Bridge designer John Roebling expected to write about a genius. He also ended up writing about a complete weirdo, and how one man could be both.
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COVID-19 and the White Horse Prophecy: The Theology of Ammon Bundy
Betsy Gaines Quammen
In a country with segments of people who deny science, act on revelation, see regular events as either conspiratorial or supernatural, COVID-19 offers a platform for misinformation and agitation.
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What to do about COVID? Start by Listening to People
Rachel F. Seidman
An oral historian of medical care in the South observes that the current crisis shows weaknesses in the fabric of society that would have long been obvious to policymakers if they were more inclined to listen to ordinary people.
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Turn out the Lights: When the Last American Diplomats Fled China
Joe Renouard
The U.S. diplomats who left China in 1949 left oral histories that are now archived at the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. Their stories warning how how misunderstandings, misplaced hopes, and missed opportunities can poison relations between great powers.
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“The Last Dance” is the ‘Presidential Historian’ of Documentaries
Jason Steinhauer
Viewers have embraced the ESPN Documentary "The Last Dance" as an escape and the best sports "fix" around. But its framing of leadership reflects a serious issue: the limits of how American media presents history.
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The Heroism of an Ordinary American Woman on the World War II Homefront
Jim DeFelice
We should definitely celebrate people like Henry Langrehr, the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne, and the other troops who fought with them. But we should also spend a moment thanking people like his wife, who made their triumph possible.
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Are We Repeating Some Chapter of World History?
Peter N. Stearns
Did I hear some smart aleck student mumble something about Santayana?
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The Real Thucydides Trap
Waller R. Newell
Classical histories are in vogue as explanations for the Coronavirus-fueled tensions between the United States and China. A political science scholar argues that an influential theory gets Thucydides backwards.
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As it was 100 Years Ago, Consuming is Political in a Crisis
Mark W. Robbins and Christine Reiser Robbins
In a crisis, unity and cooperation have been the positive sides of consumer politics. But they have always fought against price gouging, suspicion and stereotyping.
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Trump’s Immigration Restrictions Echo Rhetoric of Africa’s White Settler Regimes
Brooks Marmon
The Trump administration's adoption of immigration restrictions during the COVID crisis echoes the racial and economic agenda of the white settler regime in Rhodesia.
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60 Years Ago, West Virginia Helped Make JFK President
Robert Rupp
JFK's diligent campaigning in West Virginian in 1960 overcame the state's suspicion of his Catholic faith and later put Appalachia on the nation's policy agenda.
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Yes, John Wilkes Booth did Speak Those Notorious Words At Lincoln's Last Speech
Ken Lawrence
There is ample evidence Booth declared his intention--complete with racist invective-- to kill Lincoln after hearing the President state his willingness to make black Union soldiers citizens. The quote helps keep Booth's motives in focus for students of history.
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V-E Day Must Inspire Our Fight against Hunger and Pandemic
William Lambers
The Greatest Generation won a world war and fed the hungry. We need that same spirit today as we face the Coronavirus menace and a world hunger crisis.
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Roundup Top Ten for May 8, 2020
The top op-eds by historians or about history from around the web this week.
News
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