Recent attacks on Kamala Harris's citizenship and eligibility to serve as Vice President depend on willful misreading of the Fourteenth Amendment and ignorance of the specific racist injustices it was written to prevent.
Thomas Patterson's new book, excerpted here, evaluates the political traps the Republican Party has set for itself and considers the consequences for the nation if the party implodes.
Historians may dislike Trump for many reasons that apply equally to our fellow Americans. But we also dislike him because he violates so many of the values important to us as historians.
Historians have much to add to the social science theory on crowds and can help advance understanding past simplistic and mechanistic understandings of today's public unrest.
When we reflect on the monuments we need to ask: does the statue memorialize a person or event that was a force for creating a more perfect union or a force that sought to demolish the United States?
The 1976 campaign highlights a paradox: while the person a presidential nominee chooses as their running mate might be surprising, that individual is selected using criteria that are predictable.
The United States is at a crossroads. The path chosen will determine whether contemporary America resumes its role as a beacon of hope and progress to the rest of the world or joins the Confederate slaveholders of the past among history’s losers.
Creating the bomb was both a milestone achievement, and a profound expansion of the limits of warfare. This complexity deserves a permanent public memorial.
Alfred Kroeber built the University of California's anthropology department into a world leader literally with the bones of the Native peoples of California. It's time to honor them.
Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer, two Civil War-era heroes who rebelled and refused to join a brutal attack against Native peoples represent the moral courage we would do well to honor.
Now, on the streets of U.S. cities, federal agents join militarized police in waging war on Americans who are exercising their lawful rights of freedom of speech and assembly. There is no doubt that the results endanger us all.
Left critics of the recent "Harper's Magazine" open letter on free speech and open debate make some claims that are narrowly meritorious. But they don't address the value of speech as a way of building the collective citizenship necessary for democracy. In this respect, the signers are correct.
Lynching helped to raise the odious flag in 1894. But in 2020, hundreds of thousands of marchers protesting the lynching of George Floyd brought the flag down.
Outbursts of megafires resemble emerging diseases because they are typically the outcome of broken biotas – a ruinous interaction between people and nature that unhinges the old checks and balances.
In weighing the evidence that has so far been produced concerning Trump, one must consider the standards that historians have applied with regard to the other three presidents who have been accused of antisemitism—Richard Nixon, Harry Truman, and Franklin Roosevelt.
Decolonizing sports history requires a deeper analysis of how false historical narratives that ‘blamed the victim’ became embedded in public venues in everyday life that shaped generations of Americans’ perceptions of Native people.
Both while it stood and when its presence became inconvenient, the Hanging Monument shows how memorials control historical narratives and elevate particular interpretations of the past.
