The Roundup Top Ten for August 21,2020

Fannie Lou Hamer’s Dauntless Fight for Black Americans’ Right to Vote

by Keisha N. Blain

As Hamer and her Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party colleagues pointed out to the 1964 Democratic National Convention, a “whites-only” Democratic Party representing a state in which one out of five residents were black undermined the very notion of representative democracy.

Tackling a Century-Old Mystery: Did My Grandmother Vote?

by Martha S. Jones

The historian of Black women's fight to secure the vote had a question of family history to solve that drove her research.

Cutting Back the U.S. Postal Service would Hurt the Lifeblood of Democracy

by Richard R. John and Joseph Turow

Despite its impressive track record, the Postal Service has become a target for free market think tanks convinced that corporate America could run the USPS better than the government.

The Improbable Journey of the Suffragist Sash

by Hilary Levey Friedman

The sash embodies the suffragists’ vision of womanhood — one that was simultaneously progressive and regressive. That vision helped move women into the public and political spheres, but it did so by emphasizing their appearance.

What We Don't Understand About Fascism

by Victoria de Grazia

It is less useful to draw comparisons between today's right-wing politics and past fascist parties than it is to understand how broad crisis in society resembles the conditions from which fascism arose.

The Virtual Democratic Convention Ignores Milwaukee At Its Peril

by Mike Amezcua

The 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago offers a cautionary example for Democrats today: the party's success depends on recognizing and meeting the needs of its constituents.

Co-opt & Corrupt: How Trump Bent and Broke the GOP

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

The Republican Party, and the robust media universe that supports it, had been ready for a far-right, rule-breaking, and polarizing personality like Trump.

Conspiracy Theories Make Sense of a Topsy-Turvy World — But Undermine Democracy

by Zachary R. Goldsmith

While the “paranoid style” in the various conspiracy theories of QAnon are nothing new, they certainly bode ill for democracy.

How Not to Read Bernard Bailyn

by Asheesh Kapur Siddique

Conservatives lionizing Bernard Bailyn for supporting libertarian interpretations of the nation's founding and valorizing the founders "aligns perfectly with the reactionary effort to cancel critically engaged understandings of the American past, but poorly with Bailyn’s own far more nuanced vision of historical practice."

For 100 Years, El Monte Has Celebrated A Blatant Historical Falsehood. Why?

by Romeo Guzmán

The city of El Monte in southern California has embraced a false origin story--that the town was the end of the Santa Fe trail--to focus public history on white/anglo settlers and not the Native, Mexican, and Asian immigrant people who have also built the city.