History Archives - Page 15 of 78

Migration

Historical Analogies and Separated Families

November 2, 2020 • by Daniella Doron

The history of Jewish familial separation is not only a story of Nazi occupied Europe, but also one of the United States. American efforts to facilitate the exit of Jewish children out of Nazi Germany were set in motion soon after the Nazi’s ascension to power in April 1933 and ...

Historical Analogies and Separated Families

History

Why the U.S. Should Convene a 2021 Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation

Lessons from the 1871 congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings

November 2, 2020 • by Andrew Wainer

“The truth of history may be utterly distorted and contradicted and changed to any convenient fairy tale that the master of men wish.” W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935 In 1871, in the midst of escalating racial violence that killed up to 30,000 in the post-Civil War South, Congress launched one ...

Why the U.S. Should Convene a 2021 Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation

Democracy

The Showdown Between Democracy and Autocracy

Why the broad anti-Trump coalition must prepare for a post-election crisis

October 29, 2020 • by Claudia Koonz

Could democracy in the United States die? A number of troubling signs, such as Donald Trump’s refusal to endorse a peaceful transfer of power and his refusal to condemn white supremacists, lead many to worry about what has, until recently, been unthinkable. As a historian of Nazi Germany, I share this ...

The Showdown Between Democracy and Autocracy

Migration

Universalizing Racism in Public Schools in 2020

October 23, 2020 • by A middle school teacher in Baltimore

I wonder if the fact that we are completely virtual (at least for now) helps students to listen to each other respectfully and to open to each other as they broadcast into the classroom from a familiar, private space. Of course, e-learning is not the same as in-person learning and has enormous ...

Universalizing Racism in Public Schools in 2020

Democracy

Why We Need to Defeat White Supremacy at the Ballot Box

North Carolina shows what can happen when anti-Black racism goes mainstream

October 22, 2020 • by Robert Korstad and James Leloudis

Across the nation, white supremacists are growing bolder while our president expresses his approval. Though we have good reason to fear the Proud Boys and other modern-day incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan, we should not focus only on these militant and sometimes heavily armed fringe groups. In the United States, ...

Why We Need to Defeat White Supremacy at the Ballot Box

Migration

Empathy

The only avenue in which humans can understand tragedy

October 21, 2020 • by Sebastian Ward

No human can have the exact same experience as another, but we can experience similar emotions. It is through emotions that we are able to display empathy; an understanding of feeling. Of course, I have always been able to feel empathy for people in Nazi concentration camps, but one particular ...

Migration

The Last Time I Saw Them- New Democracy Seminar Forum

On the uses and disadvantages of historical comparisons for life

October 19, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Marci Shore and Stephen Naron

Can understanding distant parts of the world inspire deeper ways of thinking about our own? Can understanding moments in the past help us to think more creatively about the present? The Nietzschean “on the uses and disadvantages” is intended to suggest that thinking across time and space is not a ...

Migration

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

(Vom Nutzen und Nachteil historischer Vergleiche für das Leben)

October 19, 2020 • by Marci Shore

In the ghetto there was only black and white. Seventy years later, Krystyna remembered looking down from the bridge and seeing brightly-colored flowers at a market on the Aryan Side. She remembered, too, the day that she and her mother escaped from the ghetto, and her stepfather’s aunt on the ...

Migration

‘The Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life’

Tyrone Chambers, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Vera Grant, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Dan Shore, Marci Shore

October 19, 2020 • by Marci Shore, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Vera I. Grant, Dan H. Shore, Tyrone Chambers, II and Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Edited and abridged by Marci Shore KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI: I’m here in Krasnogruda. It means at the border between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, in the northeastern corner of Poland. In my Borderland Centre, which, with my friends, I established 30 years ago, thinking of being more engaged in art, for solidarity with ...

‘The Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life’

Democracy

The Foiled Confederate Coup of 1861

An interview with historian Ted Widmer about his new book, “Lincoln on the Verge”

October 8, 2020 • by Claire Potter and Ted Widmer

_____ As Americans anxiously count down the days to November 3, 2020, President Donald Trump has been evasive about whether, should he lose, he would accept the results of the election. Commentators have rightly deplored this, arguing that the peaceful transfer of power has always been a cornerstone of American democracy. But ...

History

Oh Say Can You Sing?

Why America has the national anthem it deserves

September 29, 2020 • by Ginger Dellenbaugh

For years there have been calls to replace the national anthem with something more appropriate, more modern, more singable. Suggestions have ranged from the stalwart "America the Beautiful" to, most recently, Bill Wither’s "Lean on Me." As physical monuments around the country are being dismantled or questioned for their relevance, shouldn’t ...

Activism

Remembering and Resisting the Age of Reagan

An activist historian advises his students that the choices they make now will shape their future

September 24, 2020 • by James Goodman

______ It was November 1980, two months after my girlfriend and I moved to New York City from Boston, where we had met a year before. I had just started in the M.F.A. program at Columbia and she had just started a job at a small press, managing the production of ...