Tag: Historical writing

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A Magnificent Discovery and What It Means to Me

Statue of Abraham Lincoln and freed slave.

Last year, during the height of agitation over whether or not to tear down statues, the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park came under scrutiny. The statue, dedicated in 1876, shows Abraham Lincoln freeing a slave who is crouched below him.

The statue’s subordination of the slave to a white man has spurred calls for its removal. And those calls led to the discovery of a previously  unknown letter from  famed orator Frederick Douglass.

The debate over the statue continues, but my purpose here is to discuss the discovery of Douglass’s letter and how it reflects, if I may say so, a bias of historians. Continue reading “A Magnificent Discovery and What It Means to Me”

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Rebel with a Cause

Nefertiti

I was a child when I learned about an unusual Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten. He worshipped a single god, Aten, the sun god. And unlike previous pharaohs, he brought to Egypt a more natural style of carving and sculpture, so different from the rigid, flat poses typical of Egypt’s past. (The carving above is of his wife, Nefertiti.) To many Americans in the 1950s, Akhenaten represented a foreshadowing of the monotheism to come, with perhaps a forewarning of Martin Luther as well, as Akhenaten was a rebel against the priestly establishment of 1350 B.C.

I have become reacquainted with Akhenaten while auditing a course in ancient Mediterranean civilizations at North Carolina State. It turns out that while Akhenaten’s impact on Egypt was fleeting, he has fascinated people, especially Europeans, for the past two hundred years.  “The Akhenaten myth . . . is a unique barometer exploring the fascination of the West with ancient Egypt,” writes a historian Dominic Montserrat. [1] Even Sigmund Freud was fascinated by Akhenaten. Continue reading “Rebel with a Cause”

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What Was the Journal of Race Development?

G. Stanley Hall
G. Stanley Hall. Photogravure by Synnberg Photo-gravure Co., 1898. Licensed under Creative Commons BY 4.0.

I was somewhat shocked to come across an American publication called the Journal of Race Development, published from 1910 to 1919.[1] I was especially surprised that a journal with such a name was a predecessor to Foreign Affairs, the respected journal of the Council of Foreign Relations. As I noted before, Foreign Affairs does not acknowledge this on its website.[2]

My post is about this Journal of Race Development. Here’s what I’ve learned.

First, the journal started publication soon after the United States began experimenting with colonialism. Having “freed” Cuba and the Philippines from the Spaniards in 1898, Americans kept the countries for themselves, more or less, along with islands such as Puerto Rico and Guam. The nation’s new role may have generated the journal—Americans suddenly realized the rest of the world might be relevant. Continue reading “What Was the Journal of Race Development?”

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The Furor over the 1619 Project

Anti-Slavery Broadside

My last post addressed the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Published in August 2019—400 years after the arrival of African slaves in Virginia—the project‘s essays took up almost the entire New York Times Magazine plus a ‘broadsheet” of African-American history prepared with the Smithsonian Institution. It was a show-stopper. It argued that modern America, from capitalism to health care, was shaped almost entirely by slavery.[1]

Many praised this tour-de-force and it received the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. But criticism also emerged very quickly, and that is the subject of this post. Continue reading “The Furor over the 1619 Project”

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How to Be a Graduate Student in 2020

NC State University

James Hankins, a Harvard historian, has written an astute essay for the Martin Center about the difficulties facing a graduate student who wants to study traditional history. Such a student is one “who dislikes mixing contemporary politics into every historical dish and is out of sympathy with the perfervid evangelism of the modern progressive academy.”

These potential  students, whom he calls conservative (but may not be conservative in the usual sense, just eager to study traditional history), are increasingly avoiding the academy. They find themselves out of sync with “social justice” agendas, and sympathetic would-be mentors are increasingly entering retirement.

I highly recommend Hankins’ article. In addition, it gives me a timely opportunity (in journalism, a “news peg”) to share my own experience as a history graduate student at North Carolina State University, from which I will soon receive a master’s degree. Continue reading “How to Be a Graduate Student in 2020”