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The Lost Cause: A David Blight Perspective

Yale historian David Blight has been in the news lately. Even he is surprised about the frequency of his cable news appearances. His increased visibility derives from two related by difference sources: The Lost Cause and Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In general terms, his expertise as an historian in the Reconstruction is what […]

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American Historical Association: Presidential Culture Wars Contretemps

The apology by the American Historian Association President arrived online before the print version from the September newsletter did. It has been a couple of years since a history organization endured a culture wars controversy of its own making: SHEAR CHAOS: A Culture Wars Train Wreck for a History Organization (8/19/20). SHEAR, the Society for […]

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What Should You Call Middle Passage Descendants?

WARNING: THIS BLOG USES HISTORICALLY ACCURATE TERMINOLOGY WHICH MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO READERS. IN A CLASSROOM OR AUDIENCE YOU WOULD BE REQUIRED TO SIGN A RELEASE SIGNIFYING YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF THE USE HISTORICALLY ACCURATE BUT POLITICALLY INCORRECT LANGUAGE BEFORE BEING ALLOWED IN  At first glance, the question of what name to use for Middle Passage […]

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The Power of History Textbooks: A 1619/Critical Race Theory Case Study

History textbooks are in the news. So is the history curriculum. The source of the news is not the federal Department of Education over some new regulation (remember Common Core?). It is not even from the state education departments. Instead it is from the state legislatures plus some Senators, Representatives, and talk-show hosts. The cause […]

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The American Revolution: An Academic Perspective

This blog begins a series of conference reports. The series will include conferences I attended and conferences with abstracts posted on the web that I did not attend but know about and consider worth reporting on. In chronological order, the first conference is the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American […]

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Museum History: From Maine to the Met to the Erie Canal

Museums have a history, too. Museums today the repositories of historical artifacts available to scholars and the general public alike. However that was not always so. There is a history of how museums came to be what they are today. This topic was the subject of two presentations at conferences in June: “Entertainments at Taverns […]

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The American Revolution 250th: A Time to Heal or a Time to Divide?

Now that this year’s July 4th celebration is over, it is time to start looking ahead to the big one, July 4, 2026. That date marks the 250th anniversary of the declaring of the United States of America. It also is the bicentennial of the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and […]

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