social history 
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SOURCE: The New Republic
11/15/2021
Thinking in Generational Terms is Holding Us Back
by James Chappel
"A politics that relies on young people to revitalize democracy and address inequality is likely to prove a disappointment."
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SOURCE: Nursing Clio
10/14/2021
Manhood, Madness, and Moonshine
by Dillon Carroll
Today's concern for "deaths of despair" among white Americans isn't unprecedented; a wave of alcoholism and temperance advocacy after the Civil War highlighted the relationship between social unsettlement, substance abuse and social reformism.
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10/17/2021
Passing Time and the Challenge of Catching "Eyewitnesses to History"
by Thomas Doherty
Historians have only recently wised up to the need to capture eyewitness remembrances of events. As the "Greatest Generation" passes and the Baby Boomers age, a cultural historian urges: talk to people while you still can.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
10/11/2021
Time to Stop Talking about "Generations"
by Louis Menand
By this light, generations are just a novel way of slicing up the space-time continuum, no more arbitrary. The question, therefore, is not “Are generations real?” The question is “Are they a helpful way to understand anything?”
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SOURCE: CNN
4/12/2021
Are you ready for the Roaring '20s?
by Nicole Hemmer
The end of the pandemic may portend a repeat of the "roaring 20s" a century later. But anyone anticipating a wild party should recall the nativism, racism, and rampant inequality of the era. Can the individual desire to live life to the fullest support a politics of inclusion and equality?
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/29/2020
The Life in "The Simpsons" Is No Longer Attainable
In the 1990s, "The Simpsons" drew humor by putting bizarre dysfunction in the context of middle class suburban banality. Today it's the idea of homeownership paid for by a stable single income that seems outlandish.
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SOURCE: American Enterprise Institute
12/9/2020
From Fish House Punch to Bud Light: America’s Long, Complicated Relationship with Alcohol (Web Event, 12/17)
To mark the centennial of Prohibition, please join AEI’s Kevin R. Kosar for a conversation exploring how alcohol has influenced America’s economy, politics, and culture.
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SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
12/1/2020
The Struggle to Document COVID-19 for Future Generations
by Pamela Ballinger
Images of suffering have been powerful spurs to humanitarian action in history, but the process has the potential to reinforce messages of fault, blame, and separation. Assembling a visual archive of the age of COVID must avoid those traps to be useful in the future.
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SOURCE: The New York Times
8/4/2020
Don’t Believe the Lie That Voting Is All You Can Do
by Daniel Hunter
Stop minimizing the work of movements.
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SOURCE: Governing
7/23/2020
How Can Local Government Address Systemic Racism?
Peniel Joseph, one of the nation’s leading civil rights scholars, has studied and written about the history of race and democracy. He has some ideas on how cities and urban areas can begin to dismantle racism.
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7/12/2020
Re-stabilizing the Middle Class and the Poor: Lessons from the 1930s
by David Stebenne
For a long time it seemed as though the 1930s era of high unemployment was a kind of “great exception” in American history, but now it has appeared again, suddenly and unexpectedly, just as it did in the early 1930s.
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SOURCE: TIME
6/30/2020
Why We Owe Gay Marriage to an Early Trans Activist
by Eric Cervini
Why isn't Sylvia Rivera a household name?
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SOURCE: San Francisco State University
6/22/2020
Professor of History Marc Stein looks back at 50 years of celebration, resistance at LGBT pride parades
The historian and author of “The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History” answers questions about the past, present and future of LGBT pride parades.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
6/15/2020
The History of the “Riot” Report
by Jill Lepore
How government commissions became alibis for inaction.
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SOURCE: CommonWealth
6/7/2020
Protesting the George Floyd Killing: A Moment or a Movement?
Certain moments “hit a collective nerve,” said historian Heather Ann Thompson.
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SOURCE: Black Perspectives
6/8/2020
Using MLK to Quell Outrage Distorts His Legacy
by Jeanne Theoharis
King has much to say about our contemporary moment, about the persistence of police abuse and the power of disruption, which may account, at least partly, for why this aspect of his politics is considerably less recognized.
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SOURCE: The Dispatch
6/4/2020
Ben’s Chili Bowl Founder on Civil Unrest—In 1968 and Today
The iconic DC restaurant "became a safe and neutral space for people to meet when things were really hot elsewhere in the city,” says co-founder Virginia Ali.
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SOURCE: TIME
6/2/2020
Trump Declared Himself the 'President of Law and Order.' Here's What People Get Wrong About the Origins of That Idea
Historian Elizabeth Hinton's research suggests that this platform truly took hold under the Johnson administration.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
5/31/2020
History, Right Now: Echoes of 1968, and Other American Years
Historian Thurston Clarke describes the year 2020 as "a convergence of the greatest catastrophes of the past 100 years or so, all hitting us at once."
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
5/23/2020
The Many Faces of the ‘Wine Mom’
Historian Lisa Jacobson explains that the "Wine Mom" meme is rooted in gender and middle class norms regulating women's obligations to their children (and women's desire for freedom from them).