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culture wars



  • Why Meat and Masculinity are a New Culture War Front

    by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg

    The recent embrace of conspiracy theories around food consumption—liberals want to make us eat insects!—show how a sense of imperiled masculinity is being used to stop necessary conversations about making the food system safe, sustainable, and humane. 



  • Racism in the Curriculum Isn't Limited to History – It Affects Math, Too

    by Theodore Kim

    Math is not a neutral space, beyond the reach of history and entrenched racism. At a time of anti-Asian prejudice, American mathematicians obscured the importance of Chinese scholars in developing core concepts that are still significant today, preserving the fiction of math as a western intellectual tradition.


  • HNN Honors James W. Loewen, 1942-2021

    by HNN Staff

    HNN honors the life and work of James W. Loewen, author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me" and numerous other books, and an HNN contributor. He passed at the age of 79 on August 19. 



  • Today It’s Critical Race Theory. 200 Years Ago It Was Abolitionist Literature

    In 1829, South Carolina and Georgia responded to a series of fires they assumed were set by enslaved people by banning both the abolitionist literature they blamed for inciting rebellion and the teaching of literacy to slaves. Today's battles over curriculum are likewise about ideas deemed threatening to social hierarchies.



  • Partisans Often Try to Claim July 4 as their Own. It Usually Backfires

    by Kevin M. Kruse

    Intense partisans seeking to use July 4 celebrations as a way to denounce their opponents as unpatriotic have seldom succeeded, though despite some notorious episodes of Independence Day chaos they will probably keep trying. 



  • The Battle for 1776

    How will the re-emergence of history as a culture war battle front impact the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? Annette Gordon-Reed, Jane Kamensky, Michael Hattem, Kevin Gover, Philip Mead, Robert Parkinson and Alan Taylor are among the historians commenting.



  • Why We Should Cancel The Phrase ‘Cancel Culture’

    by Max Boot

    There are legitimate and important arguments about how much society should tolerate offensive or controversial speech, and how much the markets or public opinion should sanction individuals for what they say. The current "cancel culture" outrage on the right has nothing to do with these arguments. 



  • Why Can't Britain Handle the Truth about Winston Churchill?

    by Priyamvada Gopal

    "Churchill was an admired wartime leader who recognised the threat of Hitler in time and played a pivotal role in the allied victory. It should be possible to recognise this without glossing over his less benign side."



  • What Attacks on Science Get Wrong

    by Andrew Jewett

    Reductive diagnoses of a "war on science" ignore the specific political and cultural stakes of controversies around vaccination, climate, or creationism. 


  • The Latest Resurgence of Ethnic Studies

    by Elwood Watson

    The history of ethnic studies as an academic movement is a cycle of rise and retrenchment; protest movements often push for more representative curricula, while forces of tradition and austerity seek to uphold a canon or push majors linked directly to the job market. Today's protest movements are pushing an ethnic studies renaissance despite the dire financial straits of many colleges and students.



  • Women’s Rights and the Decline of the Culture Wars

    by Jonathan Zimmerman

    Last Sunday, at the United Nations, world leaders marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark Beijing accord on women’s rights. They celebrated women’s progress—especially in education, health, and labor—and underscored ongoing gender inequalities.