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 […]
memory
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 […]
Episode 85: Reckoning with Confederate Monuments
Historian Karen L. Cox argues that “when it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground.” In this episode, we talk with Cox about the history of Confederate monuments and how the recent racial unrest in the United States […]
Does your church have a racist past?
Check out Mark Wingfield’s piece at Baptist World Global titled “What to do if you unearth a history of slavery in your church, college, or institution?” Here’s a taste: With increasing attention to the roots of American slavery in religious […]
The ever-usable John Brown
Here is Yale graduate student Bennett Parten at History Today: …John Brown became an American sensation, a source of both fear and enchantment. Slaveholders reviled him; abolitionists wept for him, tolled bells in his honour and came to see him […]