Roundup 
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
1/15/2021
White Christian Nationalists Want More Than Just Political Power
by Lauren R. Kerby
"White Christian nationalism also unites nostalgia for a lost age of Christian power with a profound sense of victimization. No one should underestimate how dangerous this combination is, particularly among those who decide that their faith requires them to retake their nation."
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
1/19/2021
France Knows How This Ends
by James McAuley
"What is especially useful to remember about the Dreyfus affair now is the point of no return it represented, the repugnant embrace of lies by one half of society, educated people who were not ignorant but who had simply ceased to care."
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SOURCE: USA Today
1/19/2021
Biden Inauguration amid Trump COVID Failure could End Republican Era of Bashing Government
by Seth Cotlar
Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory helped cement the popular notion of the futility of government action. Will four years of Trump capped by one year of the COVID-19 pandemic restore public demand for competent and active government?
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SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
1/18/2021
The Next New Deal Must Be for Black Americans, Too
by Willow Lung-Amam
Those advocating for New Deal-type programs from the Biden-Harris administration must be profoundly aware of the way the first New Deal accommodated racial prejudice and deepened material inequality; any acceptable understanding of "build back better" must actively tackle racial inequality as well as protecting the existing middle class.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/15/2021
A Major Business Ally Called for Trump’s Removal. It’s also a Problem for the GOP
by Jennifer Delton
The National Association of Manufacturers called for Trump's removal from office after January 6. The business lobbying group has faced controversies in the past ove the presence of John Birch Society members in its ranks.
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SOURCE: Dissent
1/15/2021
Legacies of Cold War Liberalism
by Michael Brenes and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
Two historians interrogate the origins of liberal intervention after World War II.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/10/2021
The Attempted Insurrection was Only Part of the Right’s Anti-Democratic Playbook
by Melissa DeVelvis and DJ Polite
The overthrow of Reconstruction in South Carolina involved a symbiotic relationship between white political leaders and a loose coalition of armed white vigilante groups.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/9/2021
Pre-Nazi Germany Tells us the Fight to Save American Democracy is Just Beginning
by Michael Brenner
German history highlights how the real risk to American democracy came hours after order had been restored in the U.S. Capitol when seven U.S. senators and 138 members of the House of Representatives voted to sustain an objection to Pennsylvania’s electoral votes.
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SOURCE: Politico
1/17/2021
What Will Trump's Presidency Mean to History?
by David Greenberg
Above all else, a pattern of rule-breaking and a determination not to be bound by rules are the characteristics of Trumpism, and inseparable from the policies the 45th president pursued.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
1/16/2021
QAnon Is Destroying the GOP From Within
by Ben Sasse
The Republican Senator from Nebraska, who holds a doctorate in American history, warns that his party cannot continue to "preach the Constitution while winking at QAnon," and suggests ways to repair the frayed social fabric in which conspiracy theories thrive.
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1/15/2021
The Roundup Top Twenty for January 15, 2021
This week was extraordinary. Historians have been working overtime to put current events in perspective. It was impossible to pick the ten best, so we're featuring a double dose of the top opinion writing by historians and about history from around the web.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
1/14/2021
The Capitol Riot Revealed the Darkest Nightmares of White Evangelical America
by Matthew Avery Sutton
Many observers have speculated that American evangelicals have had a transactional relationship with Donald Trump. But his messages of "American carnage" and warnings of dire consequences if he is defeated mesh perfectly with their end-times outlook and have helped tie evangelicals to the far right coalition.
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SOURCE: Perspectives on History
1/12/2021
Vikings, Crusaders, Confederates
by Matthew Gabriele
The far-right has combined a selective and outdated version of medieval history from popular culture to express values of racial superiority, aggressive masculinity and violence in defense of threatened values.
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SOURCE: Hechinger Report
1/13/2020
A U.S. History Teacher Scrambles to Explain Unprecedented Attacks and Desecration of Democracy
by Jim Cullen
"Our job as educators is to make and model good, conscious choices about what we believe, and to make that necessarily fallible belief system as transparent as we can for students without insisting that they share it."
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SOURCE: Washington Post
1/14/2021
Five Myths about the Lost Cause
by Karen L. Cox
At this time, it's worth examining the particular tenets of the Confederate Lost Cause mythology because of how pervasive they remain and because they may be a template for narratives of resentment and betrayal that are developing now.
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SOURCE: New Statesman
1/13/2021
Why Trump Isn't a Fascist
by Richard J. Evans
Richard J. Evans argues that "fascism" arose in the specific context of states defeated in World War I and thus embraced military expansionism and a concurrent militarization of domestic life in addition to racial domination. While Trump is dangerous, labeling him a fascist doesn't explain his political movement.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
1/12/2021
How Can America Heal from the Trump Era? Lessons from Germany’s Transformation into a Prosperous Democracy after Nazi Rule
by Sylvia Taschka
The Federal Republic of Germany disappointed many who sought a complete reckoning with Nazi crimes. But it successfully balanced the exclusion of top Nazi leaders with winning the allegiance of party supporters to democratic government through a commitment to supporting lives of dignity and sufficiency for all Germans.
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SOURCE: Phi Delta Kappan
1/7/2021
The Silence of the Ellipses: Why History Can’t be about Telling Our Children Lies
by Sam Wineburg
The fairly recent elevation of Crispus Attucks as a hero of the American Revolution obscures the complexity of his role in the Boston Massacre and illustrates the pressure for textbooks to conform to a triumphal American narrative rather than engaging with the complexity of the past.
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/13/2021
Trump Is the Republican Party’s Past and Its Future
by Lisa McGirr
It's not a question of whether Trump voters are driven by racism, nativism or conspiracy theories, or by "economic anxiety." Republican economic policies have created inequality and instability that the party can only paper over by encouraging resentment, suspicion and hostility. It won't end with Trump's departure.
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/14/2021
Why Trump Can Be Convicted Even as an Ex-President
by Steven I. Vladeck
The historical record of impeachment trials suggests that they treat removal from office and disqualification from future office as separate questions, meaning that the Senate may still vote to disqualify Trump from office even after his term has ended.
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