psychology 
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SOURCE: The New Republic
2/16/2021
Can Historians Be Traumatized by History? (Content Warning)
by James Robins
"If the historian—the very person supposed to process the past on behalf of everyone else—struggles with trauma, then it is little surprise that societies as a whole struggle to face the violence of how they were formed and how they prevailed."
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12/20/2020
The Psychology of Election Denial
by Robert Brent Toplin
The Republican response to the election results is a lesson in the mental mechanics of cognitive dissonance.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/14/2020
How Civilization Broke Our Brains
The anthropologist James Suzman's book evaluates the ravages of modern capitalist civilization – in particular, the institution of work – on individual and collective psychology.
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SOURCE: TIME
11/12/2020
What We Can Learn About Nazi Psychology From the Wives of Hitler’s Top Officials
A new book, excerpted here, assess everyday life under Nazism by attention to the lives of the wives of leading Nazis.
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6/28/2020
Those We Abuse, We Loathe
by J. Chester Johnson
Until white Americans reckon with the significance of white supremacy in America, they will deflect a sense of responsibility by laying blame for black suffering on black Americans themselves.
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SOURCE: Ted.com
4/25/2020
The Dark History of IQ Tests (Video)
by Stefan Dombrowski
Since 1905, IQ testing has been put to constructive and highly destructive uses, as this Ted video explains.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
3/30/2020
The History of Loneliness
by Jill Lepore
Until a century or so ago, almost no one lived alone; now many endure shutdowns and lockdowns on their own. How did modern life get so lonely?
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3/31/19
The Psychotherapy of Marcus Aurelius
by Donald Robertson
Did one of Rome’s wisest and most revered emperors benefit from an ancient precursor of cognitive psychotherapy?
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11-10-17
The Troubled Genius of Robert Lowell
by Robin Lindley
An interview with clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison on her groundbreaking study of art and illness.
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SOURCE: S-USIH (United States Intellectual History)
3-9-17
Naomi Weisstein’s Contribution to Psychology, Science, and Women’s Liberation
by Jesse Lemisch
A historian’s take (who happens to be her husband.)
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2-1-15
The Complex History of Pain: An Interview with Joanna Bourke
by Robin Lindley
In her groundbreaking new book "The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers," renowned British historian Joanna Bourke explores how the understanding of the human sensation of pain has evolved over the past three centuries in the English-speaking world.
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SOURCE: Aeon
10-7-14
The psychology of torture (The Holocaust is the event that shaped the Milgram experiment)
by Malcolm Harris
The Milgram experiments showed that anybody could be capable of torture when obeying an authority. Are they still valid?
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11-11-13
History Gets Into Bed with Psychology, and It’s a Happy Match
by Carol Tavris
History gives us the data of our march of folly. Cognitive science shows why.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
7-18-13
Louis René Beres: What Does It Mean to Kill for a Cause?
Louis René Beres is a professor of political science at Purdue University and the author of multiple books.Before any country can fashion an effective counter-terrorism policy, it needs a clear and purposeful understanding of "the enemy." For the United States, especially after discovering so-many behavioral contradictions in the Boston Marathon bombers, an underlying task must be to look more closely and explicitly at issues of normalcy. On the cover of yesterday's Rolling Stone, for instance (which was the source of widespread outcry) Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is both "glamorously" posed and called a "monster."Is it correct to assume that all or most of this country's terrorist foes are "abnormal"? Or does such a position ultimately hinder our urgent national security efforts? Would such an assumption represent little more than a ritualized political obligation -- a purely self-serving and ideologically obligatory policy stance -- or might it still be the considered outcome of rock solid and objective psychological science?
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SOURCE: LiveScience
1-15-13
Knowledge of history may change views of racism
Ignorance about the extent of racism in history might explain why some people perceive less racism today than others, researchers say.
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SOURCE: NYT
1-14-13
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Psychologist Who Studied Depression in Women, Dies at 53
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist and writer whose work helped explain why women are twice as prone to depression as men and why such low moods can be so hard to shake, died on Jan. 2 in New Haven. She was 53.Her death followed heart surgery to correct a congenitally weak valve, said her husband, Richard Nolen-Hoeksema.Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema, a professor at Yale University, began studying depression in the 1980s, a time of great excitement in psychiatry and psychology. New drugs like Prozac were entering the market; novel talking therapies were proving effective, too, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, in which people learn to defuse upsetting thoughts by questioning their basis.
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Science Relevant to History
This page is designed to help historians keep up with the sciences.
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