Books 
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8/7/2022
Healing a Divided Nation
by Carole Adrienne
From specialized trauma care to emergency transportation to board certification of physicians, when we encounter the medical system today, we are experiencing Civil War medicine.
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7/31/2022
Kathryn Olmsted's "Newspaper Axis" Shows Media Extremism Nothing New
by Kathryn Smith
FDR's success in promoting the New Deal and rallying Americans to the defense of Europe against fascism was a triumph over the nation's right-wing newspaper barons.
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7/24/2022
Learning About Stalin from His Books: An Interview with Geoffrey Roberts
by Aaron J. Leonard
Researchers who access Stalin's books will find the dictator's library a source of insight into his political thinking and engagement with ideas (and his pithy marginalia), but not a Rosetta Stone for understanding his capacity for atrocity.
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7/8/2022
The Story of the School that Defied Nazi Ideological Control
by Deborah Cadbury
Amid the intense politicization of education today, what can we learn from one remarkable story of a teacher's defiance of official ideological control?
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7/3/2022
Excerpt: INAUGURAL BALLERS: The True Story of the First U.S. Olympic Women’s Basketball Team
by Andrew Maraniss
“Win this game,” Billie Moore told her team, “and it will change women’s sports in this country for the next twenty-five years.”
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6/12/2022
Excerpt: The Fires of Stavishche, 1919
by Lisa Brahin
Between 1917 and 1921, an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 Jews were murdered in pogroms across Ukraine. The author has worked to reconstruct this history, including her ancestors' escape from the town of Stavishche.
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5/29/2022
A History of Art for Our Times
by Charlotte Mullins
The classic works of art history tell a story of great artists, overwhelmingly European and male. The author's new history refocuses the narrative on the diverse networks of creators through which art is made – networks crossing lines of geography and including women artists and artists of color.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
5/18/2022
Historians Disagree with Alito: Roe Didn't Create Polarization
by Adam Serwer
The idea that the 1973 Roe decision created polarized politics around the Supreme Court ignores the decades-long backlash to Brown v. Board of Education and other decisions of the Warren Court and the contested politics of abortion before Roe.
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5/8/2022
Confronting the Erasure of Native Americans in Early American Towns and Cities
by Edward Rafferty
Colin Calloway's book explores the presence of Native Americans in early American towns and cities, demolishing the longstanding myth that they vanished with the wilderness and highlighting indigenous critiques of the settler society.
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4/17/2022
Bringing Queer History to the Public (Excerpt)
by Marc Stein
The author of a new book of essays on writing queer public history recalls how he developed a voice for writing to the broader public – including by writing for HNN.
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4/10/2022
Excerpt: A Late-Life Friend Shares Rosa Parks's Memory of Her (Widely Misunderstood) Refusal to Move
by H.H. Leonards
H.H. Leonards was asked in 1994 to host an elderly woman she didn't know, and didn't at first recognize as a civil rights pioneer. This spring she is publishing the lessons she learned from an unlikely friendship with Rosa Parks.
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2/27/2022
Excerpt: George Brown and Firestone's Liberian Empire of Rubber
by Gregg Mitman
The African American intellectual George Brown confronts the brutality of Firestone's rubber plantation empire in Liberia in an excerpt from a new history of the company.
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2/27/2022
Irwin Gellman Asks: Did JFK Steal Victory in the "Campaign of the Century"?
by Justin P. Coffey
Irwin Gellman's latest volume in his political history of Nixon argues the 1960 election returns in Illinois and Texas were rigged for Kennedy. A reviewer finds the case is intriguing but falls short of solid proof, though it does resonate with charges of stolen elections and media favoritism that are all too familiar today.
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2/27/2022
Bridget the Grocer and the First American Kennedys
by Neal Thompson
The history of the Irish immigrant Kennedys has long focused on its prominent men. A new book looks to JFK's grandmother Bridget Murphy Kennedy as the foundation of the family and a neglected figure for understanding immigration, urban life, and the changing of American politics.
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2/20/2022
Martin Indyk Writes the Palestinians Out of the History of Kissinger's Middle East Diplomacy
by James R. Stocker
Martin Indyk’s new work offers a vivid portrait of the former Secretary of State’s Arab-Israeli diplomacy, but he completely misses one of the most important parts of this policy – the Palestinians.
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1/23/2022
Peter Richardson on Hunter S. Thompson and the Long Shadow of the Counterculture
by Aaron J. Leonard
"His historical significance, I think, lies in his willingness to challenge the nation’s political class, including the leaders of both major parties. He didn’t do that in established journals of opinion."
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1/23/2022
The Art of Swimming (Excerpt)
by Bill Hayes
Unline many recognizable modern sports, for most of human history swimming was treated as a utilitarian activity (and occasionally as a pleasure), unsuited for competition or spectatorship.
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1/16/2022
Can a New Labor Movement Grow and Win with Direct Action Instead of Collective Bargaining?
by Lawrence Wittner
"In this time of growing corporate domination of the United States and of the world, William E. Scheuerman's A New American Labor Movement illuminates a useful path forward in the long and difficult struggle for workers’ rights."
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11/21/2021
Perlstein's "Reaganland" Sheds New Light on a Familiar Story
by Ron Steinman
Rick Perlstein's "Reaganland" captures details of the 1980 campaign that weren't obvious even to political journalists covering Reagan's ultimately successful mission to take the conservative movement to the White House.
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11/14/2021
What "Forget the Alamo" Forgets
by James W. Russell
"Forget the Alamo" is ultimately constrained by American unwillingness to fully deal with the reality that the US forcibly stole Texas and the southwest from Mexico.