Roundup 
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6/2/2023
The Roundup Top Ten for June 2, 2023
The top opinion writing by historians and about history from around the web this week.
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
6/1/2023
Amid Anti-Woke Panic, Interdisciplinary Programs Inherently Vulnerable
by Timothy Messer-Kruse
Because standards of academic freedom like those of the AAUP tie that freedom to expertise within recognized professional communities of scholars, those doing interdisciplinary work and working in programs like ethnic studies have less institutional protection against charges that they are engaged in politics rather than scholarship.
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SOURCE: New York Times
5/25/2023
The Right to Dress However You Want
by Kate Redburn
New anti-transgender laws should prompt a legal response, but they also require a fundamental recognition: laws prescribing gendered dress codes infringe on everyone's freedom of expression.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/30/2023
WGA Strike Latest Example of Cultural Workers Joining Together as Entertainment Technology Changes
by Vaughn Joy
The development of television and online content have historically forced multiple Hollywood unions to join forces to secure a share of the returns of new techology or risk being frozen out entirely.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
6/1/2023
Does the Man at the Top Get the Blame for Bankruptcy? French Nobles Found Out the Hard Way
by Christine Adams
French nobility expected a bankruptcy crisis abetted by their intransigence to force Louis XVI to accept a constitutional monarchy. They got revolution instead. Does the House Freedom Caucus understand this lesson?
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/31/2023
Can We Solve the Civics Education Crisis?
by Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman
Universal schooling created the potential for a unifying civic curriculum that, paradoxically, has been the subject of perpetual disagreement regarding its contents. A recent bipartisan roadmap for civics education that makes those disagreements central to the subject matter may be the only way to move forward.
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SOURCE: CNN
6/1/2023
James Comey is Deluded About Trump's Influence on Republicans
by Julian Zelizer
The former FBI director blamed Trump for the growing Republican hostility toward the FBI, among other government institutions. But the belief that major institutions are compromised by un-American elements has a long and deep history on the right that won't be eliminated whenever Trump happens to leave the political stage.
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SOURCE: New York Times
5/26/2023
Will the Debt Ceiling Deal Derail Environmental Justice?
by Robert Bullard and Larry Shapiro
The idea of permitting reform—easing the environmental constraints on building new energy infrastructure—has been a bargaining chip in the debt ceiling negotiations. Reforms could help bring a green energy grid online, but it could also put more polluting industry in poor and minority communities.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
5/30/2023
Understanding Latino White Supremacy
by Geraldo Cadava
"In fact, Latino white supremacy isn’t an oxymoron, and carrying out a premeditated mass shooting in the United States is one of the more American things a Latino could do."
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
5/30/2023
Determined to Remember: Harriet Jacobs and Slavery's Descendants
by Koritha Mitchell
Public history sites have the potential to spark intellectual engagement because when they make embodied connections between people and the sites they visit—even when those connections evoke the cruelty of the past.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
5/31/2023
Commemoration of the Tulsa Massacre Has Put Symbolism Over Justice for the Victims
by Victor Luckerson
"The neighborhood’s historical fame has become a kind of albatross slung over Black Tulsans’ necks, as efforts at building concrete pathways toward justice are buried under hollow symbolism."
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SOURCE: New Statesman
5/31/2023
Neoliberalism: Not Dead Yet
by Brett Christophers
The reassertion of state power over economies during the COVID pandemic shouldn't yet be taken as a sign of a turn away from the dominance of finance capital over the global economy and politics – market fundamentalism is only one part of the system.
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SOURCE: Jacobin
5/31/2023
Do Any Critics of "Marxism" on the Right Actually Know What it Is?
by Ben Burgis
The most prominent public intellectuals on the right-wing internet love to attack a version of Marxism that bears little connection to reality. Even Marxists should want better critics.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/31/2023
Can Activists Use Banking Regulations to Force Decarbonization?
by Bart Elmore
After Clinton-era reforms enabled consolidation of the banking industry, environmental groups in the early 2000s began to target the commercial banking sides of the firms that raised capital and provided credit to the fossil fuels industry.
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SOURCE: Contingent
5/28/2023
When Witches Took Flight
by Chris Halsted
The modern association of witches and flight in fact emerged from a relatively obscure corner of medieval church writings that gained prominence in the context of contemporary political anxieties about women's political influence.
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SOURCE: The Racket
5/31/2023
Why is the American Right so Thirsty for Generalissimo Franco?
by David Austin Walsh
Increasingly "respectable" conservative intellectuals are openly advocating for a dictator to enforce cultural traditionalism as part of a battle to control the politics of elite institutions.
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
5/30/2023
The Hypocrisy (and Futility) of English-Only "Decolonization"
by Eric Adler
The peril the liberal arts face today is exemplified by calls to dislodge the centrality of "dead white men" from the curriculum; universities are happy to accept this as a cheap way to pander to diversity as they gut language requirements and departments that would enable students to have a deeper engagement with world cultures.
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SOURCE: Sojourners
5/31/2023
Dodgers' Controversial Invite to "Drag Nuns" Group Highlights Catholics' Selective Sense of Faith
by Kaya Oakes
Catholic groups expressing outrage at the team's recognition of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence overlook the centrality of mercy in the Gospels.
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5/26/2023
The Roundup Top Ten for May 25, 2023
The top opinion writing by historians and about history from around the web this week.
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SOURCE: New York Times
5/24/2023
Does Lincoln Hold the Key to the Debt Ceiling Crisis?
by Roger Lowenstein
Issuing "greenback" paper currency backed by the government's credit instead of gold was seen as a radical move in 1862, but Lincoln and Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase recognized the paramount importance of safeguarding the nation's credit and did it anyway.
News
- The Debt Ceiling Law is now a Tool of Partisan Political Power; Abolish It
- Amitai Etzioni, Theorist of Communitarianism, Dies at 94
- Kagan, Sotomayor Join SCOTUS Cons in Sticking it to Unions
- New Evidence: Rehnquist Pretty Much OK with Plessy v. Ferguson
- Ohio Unions Link Academic Freedom and the Freedom to Strike
- First Round of Obama Administration Oral Histories Focus on Political Fault Lines and Policy Tradeoffs
- The Tulsa Race Massacre was an Attack on Black People; Rebuilding Policies were an Attack on Black Wealth
- British Universities are Researching Ties to Slavery. Conservative Alumni Say "Enough"
- Martha Hodes Reconstructs Her Memory of a 1970 Hijacking
- Jeremi Suri: Texas Higher Ed Conflict "Doesn't Have to Be This Way"
Trending Now
- New transcript of Ayn Rand at West Point in 1974 shows she claimed “savage" Indians had no right to live here just because they were born here
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- The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of