Yael Sternhell is Professor in the Department of History and Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University. This interview is based on her new book, War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War...
memory
Song of the Day
Remembering our fallen heroes:...
The Author’s Corner with Drew Swanson
Drew Swanson is Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Distinguished Professor of Southern History at Georgia Southern University. This interview is based on his new book, A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North...
Joyce Carol Oates on writing, memory, Twitter, and identity politics
At age 85, writer Joyce Carol Oates has “so many ideas.” Check out David Marchese’s interview with Oates at The New York Times. Here is a taste: How does support for the idea that diverse voices should be given primacy...
The Author’s Corner with Hajar Yazdiha
Hajar Yazdiha is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. This interview is based on her new book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton University Press,...
Why do we long for a golden age?
Is the United States in the midst of a moral breakdown? Should we support candidates who want to take us back to a golden age? Why do we want to “Make America Great Again” (Trump) or believe that “America is...
The Author’s Corner with Benjamin Jenkins
Benjamin Jenkins is Associate Professor of History and University Archivist at the University of La Verne. This interview is based on his new book, Octopus’s Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California (University Press of Kansas, 2023). JF: What...
The Author’s Corner with Matthew Dennis
Matthew Dennis is Professor Emeritus of History and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. This interview is based on his new book, American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023). JF: What led you to...
Get ready for more of the Mandela Effect
“The Mandela Effect” is a term to describe a strange cultural phenomenon. Sometimes there is something which a big number of people seem to remember, only it apparently never happened, or it was different than we remember. The classic example...
The Author’s Corner with Travis A. Rountree
Travis A. Rountree is Assistant Professor of English at Western Carolina University. This interview is based on his new book, Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia’s Most Notorious Shoot-Out (University Press of Kentucky, 2023). JF: What led you...
Abraham Lincoln: Working class hero?
Everyone wants to claim Lincoln. Even socialists. Here is University of Arkansas history professor Matthew Stanley at Jacobin: Would Lincoln’s sincere hatred of the Slave Power have translated after the war to a critique of the Money Power and other...
The Author’s Corner with Paul Hardin Kapp
Paul Hardin Kapp is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This interview is based on his new book, Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South (University Press of Mississippi, 2022). JF: What...
The Author’s Corner with Philip Levy
Philip Levy is Professor of History at the University of South Florida. This interview is based on his new book, The Permanent Resident: Excavations and Explorations of George Washington’s Life (University of Virginia Press, 2022). JF: What led you to...
The Author’s Corner with Peter Boag
Peter Boag is Professor and Columbia Chair in the History of the American West at Washington State University. This interview is based on his new book, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon (University of Washington Press, 2022)....
The Author’s Corner with Sarah Purcell
Sarah Purcell is L.F. Parker Professor of History at Grinnell College. This interview is based on her new book, Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). JF: What led...
Episode 97: “In Search of George Washington’s Hair”
Using America’s obsession with Washington’s hair as his window, historian Keith Beutler examines how “physicality,” or the use of the material objects, was the most important way early Americans (1790-1840)–museum founders, African Americans, evangelicals, and school teachers– remembered the nation’s...
Putin’s public memory law
Regular readers of the blog know that I am very interested in the way Putin uses a particular view of the past to justify his invasion of Ukraine. I talked with historian Bruce Berglund about this in Episode 96 of...
Episode 94: “Gettysburg, 1963”
Our guest in this episode is Gettysburg College historian Jill Ogline Titus. Her new book, Gettysburg 1963, tells the story of the centennial celebration of the Civil War in the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. Through an examination of the experiences of political...
How Americans have remembered the July 1776 toppling of the George III statue in Bowling Green (Manhattan)
Wendy Bellion, an art historian at the University of Delaware, has an interesting piece at Smithsonian Magazine on the patriots’ toppling of this statue and a New York Historical Society exhibit on monuments. Here is a taste: A monument to...
The Author’s Corner with Marita Sturken
Marita Sturken is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University Steinhardt. This interview is based on her new book, Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era (NYU Press, 2022). JF: What led...