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The color line: race and education in the United States [podcast]

By Steven Filippi and Meghan Schaffer

Black History Month celebrates the achievements of a globally marginalized community still fighting for equal representation and opportunity in all areas of life. This includes education. In 1954, the United States’ Supreme Court ruled “separate but equal” unconstitutional for American public schools in ‘Brown v. Board of Education’. While this ruling has been celebrated as a pivotal victory for civil rights, it has not endured without challenge.

Charlie Brown's America

A Charlie Brown Christmas: the unlikely triumph of a holiday classic

By Blake Scott Ball

A Charlie Brown Christmas was never supposed to be a success. It hit on all the wrong beats. The pacing was slow, the voice actors were amateurs, and the music was mostly laid back piano jazz (the opening theme, “Christmas Time is Here,” carried a strange, wintery melody built on unconventional modal chord progressions). It was almost like the program was constructed as a sort of anti-pop statement. In many ways, that’s exactly what it was. And that’s exactly why it so worried the media executives who had commissioned it.

The Chinese Lady: Afong May in Early America by Nancy E. Davis

Afong Moy on the 21st century stage

By Nancy E. Davis

The story of Afong Moy, the first known Chinese woman on American soil, and the first Chinese person to come face to face with American audiences across the country has been told recently by both the historian Nancy Davis as well as the playwright LLoyd Suh. Davis explores Afong Moy’s life and the different lessons that can be learned through research as well as fictionalization.

Smashing the Liquor Machine

20 people you didn’t know were Prohibitionists

By Mark Lawrence Schrad

The full story of prohibition—one you’ve probably never been told—is perhaps one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. Discover 20 key figures from history that you didn’t know were prohibitionists.

Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America's World War II Military

Resisting racism within America’s WWII military: stories from the frontline

By Thomas A. Guglielmo

America’s World War II military was a force of unalloyed good. While saving the world from Nazism, it also managed to unify a famously fractious American people. At least that’s the story many Americans have long told themselves… But the reality is starkly different. The military built not one color line, but a complex tangle […]

How Welfare Worked in the Early United States

What can early US welfare policies teach us about caring for our communities?

By Gabriel Loiacono

Every year, I spend the semester with 50 college sophomores pondering two questions. The first one is: how have people in the past cared for the neediest people in their community? The second is: how should we?

Walk with Me

The activism of Fannie Lou Hamer: a timeline

By Kate Clifford Larson

Fannie Lou Hamer was a galvanizing force of the Civil Rights movement, using her voice to advance voting rights and representation for Black Americans throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Faced with eviction, arrests, and abuse at the hands of white doctors, policemen, and others, Hamer stayed true to her faith and her conviction in non-violent […]

SHAPE and societal recovery from crises

By SHAPE team

The SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy) initiative advocates for the value of the social sciences, humanities, and arts subject areas in helping us to understand the world in which we live and find solutions to global issues. As societies around the world respond to the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, research from SHAPE disciplines has the potential to illuminate how societies process and recover from various social crises.

An African American Dilemma

Which is better: school integration or separate, Black-controlled schools?

By Zoë Burkholder

This summer journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones shocked Americans when she decided to decline tenure at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in favor of an endowed chair at historically Black Howard University. The choice is unexpected because Ms Hannah-Jones, who identifies as Black, has spent her career arguing for school integration as an essential strategy to equalize educational opportunities for students of color.

Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

The three greatest myths of the Fall of Tenochtitlán

By Matthew Restall

13 August 2021 marks the moment, exactly five hundred years ago, when Spanish conquistadors won the battle for Tenochtitlán, completing their astonishing conquest of the Aztec Empire, initiating the three-century colonial era of New Spain. At least, that is the summary of the event that has since predominated. In recent decades, scholars have developed increasingly informed and complex understandings of the so-called Conquest, and opinions in Mexico itself have become ever more varied and sophisticated.

Empire of Ruins

Let’s raise our taxes! Infrastructure and the American character

By Miles Orvell

If the infrastructure—roads, rails, water, and sewer lines—is the foundation of our economy, we are living on ruins and on borrowed time. The fragility of our infrastructure symbolizes the failure of a national ideology that has submerged public welfare under an ocean of private interests.

Whose streets? The picturesque, Central Park, and the spaces of American democracy

By John Evelev

Last summer, during the “Black Lives Matter” protests in US cities galvanized by the murder of George Floyd, it was common to hear marchers chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!” In some instances, police seeking to break up the protests also took up this chant, an ironic retort to the crowd’s claim to political power. These contesting claims to possession of the city streets framed a conflict over social representation in contemporary US life: “whose streets” are they really

Sandbows and Black Lights

The mermaid in the fishbowl: the rise of optical illusions and magical effects

By Stephen R. Wilk

The nineteenth century saw the publication of several books explaining how magical effects and spectral appearances could be performed using the science of optics. It started in 1831, when Sir David Brewster (famed for his discovery of Brewster polarization and inventing the kaleidoscope) published “Letters on Natural Magic.” In this book, Brewster showed how to produce images of ghosts using partially silvered mirrors and by using a magic lantern to project images onto screens or onto clouds of vapor.

The Shock of America

The rise and fall of the European Super League: when the American challenge backfires

By David Ellwood

In the long history of America’s influence on the politics of innovation in Europe, the case of the planned football Super League stands out. This is not because of the project as such, but simply because, of all the variety of responses Europe has produced when faced with the latest American novelty, none has provoked enthusiasm and rejection—above all rejection—with such extraordinary intensity, unity, and speed.

New York City and the path to neoliberalism in the 1970s [timeline]

By Benjamin Holtzman

In the late twentieth century, New York City transformed into a model of neoliberal governance. While at mid-century, city government maintained the most robust social democratic program in the country, by the late twentieth century, much of this program had been curtailed and the private sector and market had gained a far greater role in providing services previously maintained by government.

Reconstructing the Dreamland

100 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre

By Randall Kennedy

On 1 June 1921, mobs comprised of ordinary white Oklahomans destroyed Greenwood, a black neighborhood in Tulsa sometimes referred to as “Little Africa.” The rioters proceeded to subject their African American neighbors to injury, murder, looting, pillaging, and arson. At least a hundred residents of Greenwood were killed while thirty-five city blocks were torched, destroying churches, businesses, and all sorts of other dwellings. The riot rendered more than a thousand families homeless.