Historians in the News

This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in each source note. Quotation marks are not used.

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• SOURCE: Orange County Register
  4/8/2020
  

  CSUF Professor’s New Book on the History of Robots in America Resonates in Coronavirus Era

  Dylan Abnet's “The American Robot” explores how robots and their like—automatons, androids, artificial intelligence and cyborgs—are tied to questions about modern culture.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/7/2020
  

  How Coffee Ruined a Country

  by Lizabeth Cohen

  Lizabeth Cohen reviews Augustine Sedgewick's book, which argues that coffee monoculture was disastrous to El Salvador.

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  4/6/2020
  

  Online Roundtable—Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (by Simon Balto)

  A roster of historians of racism and law enforcement including Melanie Newport, Max Felker-Kantor, Anne Gray Fischer and Dan Berger discuss Simon Balto's book Occupied Territory on policing in Black Chicago. 

• 
• SOURCE: Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
  4/7/2020
  

  SHGAPE Prizes 2020

  by Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

  Andrew Huebner, Caroline Grego, Alana Toulin and Mark C. Boxell are winners of annual prizes from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/7/2020
  

  Meet Your Meme Lords

  A small team at the Library of Congress, led by Abbie Grotke, is archiving internet culture as fast as it can (now, from home).

• 
• SOURCE: Atlas Obscura
  4/8/2020
  

  In 19th-Century America, Fighting Disease Meant Battling Bad Smells

  Melanie Kiechle, a history professor at Virginia Tech, foul smells or "miasmas" were considered to indicate risk of disease before the germ theory of disease developed.

• 
• SOURCE: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
  4/8/2020
  

  Historians Among Recipients of 2020 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships

  Historians Mark Philip Bradley, Amy Nelson Burnett, James T. Campbell, Dyan Elliott, Susan Juster, Vera Keller, Bernadette Meyler, Chris Otter, H. Glenn Penny, Kim Phillips-Fein, Camille Robcis, Erica Schoenberger, David Sepkoski, and Anna Shternshis were among the 2020 awardees of the Guggenheim Fellowship.  

• 
• SOURCE: The Metropole
  4/6/2020
  

  A Letter From The UHA About Our 2020 Conference

  As a result of the uncertainly resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, the Urban History Association has decided to postpone by one year our biennial conference previously scheduled for October 2020. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Bulwark
  4/6/2020
  

  'America First' and the Coronavirus

  The pandemic makes a mockery of Trump’s core principle.

• 
• SOURCE: CNN
  3/8/2020
  

  New Orleans Cultural Historian Died of Coronavirus, But His Family Only Found Out on the Day of Funeral

  "I want to educate the world about our great culture," Ron Lewis wrote on the museum's website. "How we do this, and why we are so successful at it even though the economics say we ain't supposed to be."

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/5/2020
  

  The Worst President. Ever.

  Trump's handling of the coronavirus crisis has cemented him as the worst president in American history, argues historian Max Boot.

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  4/5/2020
  

  A Historian Looks Ahead At A Transformed Post-Pandemic World

  It's changing the way we work, we live, we communicate, what we expect from our governments. NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Yuval Noah Harari about what happens once COVID-19 is beaten.

• 
• SOURCE: The Times
  4/6/2020
  

  If You Thought Byron Was Bad You Should Have Met His Family

  The scandal-prone poet came from a family mired in cuckoldry, cowardice and killing.

• 
• SOURCE: Observer
  4/5/2020
  

  An Art History Professor’s Tips for Taking Your Kids on a World Tour—From Home

  Many of the world's greatest landmarks and artworks are just a click away.

• 
• SOURCE: BBC
  4/5/2020
  

  Madam CJ Walker: 'An Inspiration to Us All'

  A new Netflix series tells the story of Madam CJ Walker - a trail-blazing black female entrepreneur in the early 20th century.

• 
• SOURCE: The New York Times
  4/6/2020
  

  What Moms Always Knew About Working From Home

  The obsession with office “face time” hurts women. When the coronavirus pandemic is behind us, let’s not return to it.

• 
• 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.”

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/5/2020
  

  Mystery Shipwreck Dates to Before Revolutionary War, Researcher Says

  The hull of a ship that surfaces every few years on a Maine beach may have been the Defiance, a sloop built in 1754.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/2/2020
  

  Everyone Wore Masks During The 1918 Flu Pandemic. They Were Useless.

  In 1918, with a different virus, masks didn’t help.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/6/2020
  

  A Rich (Very Rich) History of the Jewish Dairy Restaurant

  In a new book, the writer and illustrator Ben Katchor celebrates the places that have fed New York’s craving for blintzes, matzo brei and other delicacies.