language 
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/5/2022
The Antiabortion Movement's Victory in the War of Language
by Jennifer L. Holland
The antiabortion movement was able to overcome American skepticism of enshrining religious views into law and demands by women for full citizenship by turning the language of rights to apply to fetuses. It remains to be seen if this language will lead to a national ban on abortion in the name of fetal personhood.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
1/10/2022
How the Chinese Language Modernized
Jing Tsu's book examines the ways that the Chinese written language has survived waves of iconoclasm and shifts in the politics of cultural authority.
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SOURCE: Mother Jones
10/15/2021
What Does it Mean to Call Someone a "Male Chauvinist Pig"?
by Julie Willett
Merging the term "chauvinism" from the old left and the radical 1960s desire to render authority grotesque, the term emerged with the second wave of feminism. But today some of the sexists labeled with it appear to have turned it into a badge of honor.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
8/12/2021
How Native Students Fought Back against Abuse and Assimilation at US Boarding Schools
by Sarah Klotz
Young Native students like Ernest Knocks Off were not passive victims of forced assimiliation in Indian residential schools; they fought – in his case, to his death – to retain the language and culture the schools sought to expunge.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
6/4/2021
Where Gender-Neutral Pronouns Come From
The invention of pronouns to better address gender has been part of the English language for a long time, as has moral panic about the degradation of culture and speech.
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5/23/2021
The Ethics of the "N-Word" in the Classroom
by Alan Singer
Neither censorious expungement nor free speech absolutism offer good practical guidelines for teaching historical sources that include racial slurs. A professor of history education explains his approach.
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3/14/2021
The Birth, and Life, of a Word
by Ralph Keyes
One of the most widely-used terms in discussions of American racism has its roots in a campaign by two pro-slavery writers to troll abolitionists through a fake tract promoting "miscegenation."
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SOURCE: Variety
12/9/2020
Nicolas Cage Hosts ‘History of Swear Words’ Series on Netflix
While generally disapproved in polite company, swear words are a powerful and entrenched aspect of language around the world. Nic Cage will host a series examining their historical origins and use.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
7/16/2020
Zounds! What the Fork are Minced Oaths? And Why are We Still Fecking Using them Today?
by Kirk Hazen
Minced oaths have historically performed a very specific role: providing a weakened but socially acceptable form of an actual religious oath, swear or curse.
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SOURCE: New York Times
6/26/2020
A Debate Over Identity and Race Asks, Are African-Americans ‘Black’ or ‘black’?
For proponents of capitalizing black, there are grammatical reasons — it is a proper noun, referring to a specific group of people with a shared political identity, shaped by colonialism and slavery.
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SOURCE: Perspectives on History
4/1/2020
Singular They: Nonbinary Language in the Historical Community
As the dictionary’s staff wrote in explaining their pick, “English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun... and as a consequence ‘they’ has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.”
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
3/31/2020
The Case Against Waging ‘War’ on the Coronavirus
There is a long history of world leaders framing fights against disease within the context of war.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
2/6/20
The English history of African American English
by Shana Poplack
Many of the features stereotypically associated with contemporary African American Vernacular English have a robust precedent in the history of the English language.
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SOURCE: AHA Perspectives on History
12/2/19
James Grossman Writes Article on Career Diversity: "Revising Revisited: Words Matter When It Comes to Career Diversity"
by James Grossman
Historians need to write and speak carefully. A single word or phrase, a particularly evocative metaphor, can undermine a nuanced argument pointing in a very different direction.
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SOURCE: BBC
9/22/19
Merriam Webster added 'they' as a non-binary pronoun. Here's a brief history of gender neutral pronouns
These identifiers are nothing new and have actually been used throughout the history of literature.
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
2/1/9
History professor is suspended for using the N-word in class
He was discussing language in a James Baldwin essay. Given the slur's potential to throw learning off course, is it ever worth using in the classroom -- if it ever was?
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11/25/18
So Dictionaries Are Political?
by Rosemarie Ostler
It’s an American tradition starting with Noah Webster’s.
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SOURCE: The Local
10-13-16
How Nazi terminology is creeping back into politics
Long-banished German words and phrases linked to the country's Nazi past have been revived by far-right politicians railing against the migrant influx, sparking comparisons to the 1930s.
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SOURCE: Slate
6-8-16
How Hawaiian Came Back From the Dead
A legacy of colonialism nearly wiped out the language and its culture. These immersion schools weren’t having it.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
6-3-16
Losing the Cornish language would kill off part of British culture
The Cornish language “Kernewek” is one of the oldest tongues still spoken in Britain today.
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