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Roundup Top Ten for March 13, 2020

Coronavirus School Closings: Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late

by Howard Markel

In the history of medicine, we have never been more prepared to confront this virus than we are today. But this history also teaches us that when it comes to school closings, we must always be ready to act today — not tomorrow.

Joe Biden Personifies Democratic Party Failures Since the Cold War

by Michael Brenes

The Democratic Party needs to escape the shadow of anti-communism and embrace economic and racial justice.

Liberal Activists Have to Think Broadly and Unite Across Lines

by Matthew D. Lassiter

Fifty years before Greta Thunberg, students at the University of Michigan organized a Teach-In that paved the way for Earth Day demonstrations that mobilized 20 million people in 1970.

Coronavirus and the Great Online-Learning Experiment

by Jonathan Zimmerman

Let’s use this crisis to determine what our students actually learn when we teach them online.

The History of Slavery Remains With Us Today

by Ariela Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente

Two historians trace how law and institutions developed around anti-black ideology in the Americas.

We’ve Been Looking in the Wrong Places to Understand Sanders’s Socialism

by Richard White

Detractors like to equate Senator Bernie Sanders’s socialism with Soviet and Chinese Communism, but they’re swinging at the wrong century, the wrong country and the wrong socialism.

My Abortion Before Roe v. Wade

by Elizabeth Stone

Roe v. Wade is in peril, flinging me back to a terrifying time in my own life, one I never expected women today would have to face.

I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me.

by Leslie M. Harris

The paper’s series on slavery made avoidable mistakes. But the attacks from its critics are much more dangerous, argues historian Leslie M. Harris.

The Latest Battle over the Confederate Flag Isn’t Happening Where You’d Expect

by Megan Kate Nelson

Confederate actions in the Far Western theater of the war reveal the extent to which the Confederate flag became a symbol of white supremacy and conquest.

There’s a Complex History of Skin Lighteners in Africa and Beyond

by Lynn M. Thomas

The politics of skin colour in South Africa have been importantly shaped by the history of white supremacy and institutions of racial slavery, colonialism, and segregation. My book examines that history.