With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Roundup Top Ten for June 26, 2020

The Confederacy Was an Antidemocratic, Centralized State

by Stephanie McCurry

Whatever way you look at it, it is impossible to turn this history and its leading figures into a part of American heritage. 

What Kind of Society Values Property Over Black Lives?

by Robin D.G. Kelley

"Let me offer a more productive question instead: What is the effect of obsessing over looting?"

How 1970s U.S. Immigration Policy Put Mexican Migrants at the Center of a System of Mass Expulsion

by Adam Goodman

"90% of the people pushed out of the country during the 20th century were Mexicans deported via a coercive, fast-track administrative process euphemistically referred to as 'voluntary departure,'" writes Adam Goodman.

Monuments to a Complicated Past

by Sean Wilentz

Unless we can outgrow the conception of history as a simplistic battle between darkness and light, we will be the captives of arrogant self-delusions and false innocence.

Donald Trump’s Message is Falling Flat Because it is Outdated

by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz

Our cities and suburbs look and feel very different than they did in the depths of the urban crisis in the late 1960s. That’s one reason Trump’s attempt to revive the law-and-order playbook of that era has fallen flat.

How to Stop the Cuts

by Sara Matthiesen

Historians and other faculty who want to protect their disciplines and their colleagues from budget cuts need to develop maps of power and how it operates in a university.

Police Say Deaths of Black People by Hanging are Suicides. Many Black People aren’t so Sure.

by Stacey Patton

Black people's suspicions that a number of recent hanging deaths were murders rather than suicides echoes a long history of concealing violence against black people by ruling it suicide. 

The Black Women Who Launched the Original Anti-Racist Reading List

by Ashley Dennis

Black women librarians have been important leaders in promoting books and publishing standards that encourage readers to recognize human dignity and reject racist stereotypes in children's literature.

Cancel the Fall College Football Season

by Victoria L. Jackson

For too long, instead of facilitating the intellectual advancement and economic empowerment of young Black men, college sports have helped make American universities another institution perpetuating the undervaluing of Black lives.

Martin Luther King’s Giant Triplets of Injustice

by Andrew Bacevich

Without addressing the fundamental evils of economic inequality and militarism American society will continue to fail to realize the promise of racial equality, as Martin Luther King warned in his 1967 speech at Riverside Church.