With support from the University of Richmond

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.

The Roundup Top Ten for April 10, 2020

A Revolution of Values

by Peniel E. Joseph

Racial apartheid’s grip on American democracy, argued King, corrupted the nation in war and peace.

Letters From An American, April 4, 2020

by Heather Cox Richardson

Manipulating the vote has a long and shameful history in America, but modern media and computer modeling has enabled today’s Republican Party to carve out its voters with surgical precision.

Common-Good Constitutionalism Is an Idea as Dangerous as They Come

by Garrett Epps

A recently published theory of law is an argument for authoritarian extremism.

Scapegoating New York Means Ignoring Its Desperate Need

by Kim Phillips-Fein

Blaming the city for coronavirus is a way of letting the federal government off the hook.

Republicans Could Use the Coronavirus to Suppress Votes Across the Country. This Week We Got a Preview

by Carol Anderson

This week Wisconsin provided a glimpse of the dystopian democracy, in which American voters find their rights even more constrained.

When Centrists Sounded Like Bernie

by Ed Burmila

If today’s centrist, establishment Democrats are unwilling to hear warnings coming from the left, perhaps they will heed their own advice from an earlier era.

The Long History of US Racism against Asian Americans, from ‘Yellow Peril’ to ‘Model Minority’ to the ‘Chinese Virus’

by Adrian De Leon

Self-isolation, social distancing and healthy practices should not be in the service of proving one’s patriotism.

Lessons from Haiti on Living and Dying

by Marlene L. Daut

The late historian C.L.R. James sought to disavow the importance of one of Haiti’s most storied revolutionary heroes to reveal the role played by the Revolution’s masses and less visible leaders, reflecting that each life and death is profoundly poltical.

How the Republican Party Took Over the Supreme Court

by John Fabian Witt

We are now at least one decade into a nearly unprecedented experiment in partisan judging at the highest court in the land. Our legal and political systems have barely begun to process what that means.  

How New Efforts Are Recovering the Stories of People Who Were Deleted From History

by Rachel Lance

For so many American families, lack of representation in paperwork might have otherwise led to a lack of representation in memory, but technology and crowdsourcing are finally bringing them out of the shadows.