Preview the Forthcoming Issue – March 2026
Special Issue: “What Is To Be Done? Historians of Crisis in a Moment of Crisis”
Ryan W. Booth — Burrowed in the Bloodline: The Stories That Sustain Me
This essay explores the role of family stories as a means of resilience, identity, and historical understanding through an Indigenous lens. Employing autoethnography, Booth situates personal narratives within broader contexts of US and Native histories, emphasizing the power of storytelling to sustain individuals and communities across generations. Family accounts—from poverty in Kentucky to Native Hawaiian migration, Canadian residential schools, and US Indian boarding schools—reveal complex experiences of trauma, faith, adaptation, and perseverance. These “story arrows,” borrowing Keith Basso’s metaphor, continue to guide lives by embedding lessons of fortitude and hope. The essay argues that history is made by people living ordinary yet meaningful lives and that remembering, sharing, and gathering around stories remains essential for survival and connection today.
Justene Hill Edwards — The Specter of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 Today
There are conspicuous similarities between the aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 for people of African descent in the United States and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids occurring in 2025 for people suspected of being of Latinx descent. This essay explores these similarities. It advocates for more comparisons between the antebellum era and modern America by offering a brief analysis of the historical parallels between the federal government’s empowering of slave kidnappers in the 1850s and the public spectacle of immigration agents capturing people they suspect of not having legal immigration status in the United States under the second Trump presidency.
Elaine S. Frantz — Parodic Exaggeration, Transparent Lying, and Conspiracy Thinking in US History
Historians of the United States have not been sufficiently attuned to the prevalence of political dishonesty as a strategy within national politics. Particularly but not only at times of serious contention—including the Reconstruction era—political leaders, movements, and the press have often prevaricated, sometimes in ways intended to be understood as dishonest and instrumental speech by supporters and opponents alike. Donald Trump’s and the MAGA movement’s strategies of making transparently false claims, parodically exaggerating opponents’ positions, and building conspiracy theories have long histories as methods to challenge hegemonic discourses. Exploring this context may shed light on today’s political discourse.
John W. Hall — A-Mouldering in Our Graves?
This essay reflects on the challenges of using the past to make the present more legible to students who may be alienated by the implications. Always susceptible to abuse, historical analogies are even more fraught in an era of intense polarization. Nevertheless, Andrew Jackson’s rise to the presidency with the support of “the common man,” the implementation of the spoils system, racialized conceptions of citizenship, distrust of professional expertise, partisan suspicion of the loyalties of the US military’s officer corps, and isolationist foreign policy impulses all resonate in the present crisis. The essay further notes similarities between the sectional reaction to John Brown’s execution in 1859 and partisan reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, observing that the earlier case produced secession whereas the latter has resulted in an assault on progressive orthodoxy regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and, indeed, the truths of American history.
Scott Hancock — Survival with Sanity: Sarah Cook, Black Optimistic Realist
This essay proposes that employing rigorous historical research in order to tell the stories of individuals or communities who often had little reason to expect just outcomes and yet persisted in seeking such outcomes, is an important function of and purpose for historians and historiography, regardless of whether those individuals and communities succeeded or failed in their eff orts. The example provided here is the story of Sarah Cook, who escaped slavery during the Civil War and subsequently embarked upon a twenty-year battle with the Bureau of Pensions as she sought to provide evidence of her marriage to a USCT soldier. Sarah’s story suggests a posture that holds potential for, though not promise of, sustaining sanity while struggling with obstacles that may or may not be insurmountable: that of the Black Optimistic Realist.
Martha S. Jones — Lessons From My Grandfather’s FBI File
In spring 2024, I received, via a Freedom of Information Act request, my grandfather’s FBI file. From the 1920s through the 1950s, he served as president of a historically Black college, Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. He had worked in the face of twin threats: Jim Crow and the Red Scare. Surveillance and scrutiny threatened his career and the well-being of his campus, and I returned to his times searching for lessons for our own. I learned that we have been here before; today’s threats to our work and to democracy echo those leveled nearly a century ago. As we push back against forces that aim to shut us down, as citizens, workers, and leaders we must hold fast to what we know and what we believe in. Finally, we will face threats to our intimate lives, even our families. Throughout it all, we may be humbled, but we must also learn to resist.
W. Caleb McDaniel — Slouching Towards Arlington House
This essay discusses the author’s visit to Arlington House in the spring of 2025, a season of deepening crisis for federally funded research and public history on slavery and Black life in the United States. Arlington House (a National Park Service site also known as the Robert E. Lee Memorial) was closed for renovation in 2018 and reopened in 2021 with a new interpretive focus on slavery and freedom. Two years later, descendant groups signed an agreement with the Park Service to ensure that exhibits at the house were honest and accountable to the families whose enslaved ancestors had once lived and labored there, like Charles and Maria Syphax. These changes could still be seen at the site in March 2025. By the summer, however, the site’s new features were threatened by political directives from Washington, DC, that targeted Black history. These developments make it more imperative than ever for historians to research the many complex lives that intersected at Arlington House, including twentieth-century Park Service employees like Essie Hart Lawrence, a Black park technician who worked at the site in 1975 when President Gerald Ford arrived to sign a resolution restoring Lee’s citizenship.
Scott Reynolds Nelson — The Current Situation of 2025: Thoughts on Media, the Public Sphere, and Education
This article examines the evolution of the public sphere in the United States from the Civil War era to 2025. It argues that a revolution in mass media, marked by increasing consolidation and targeted manipulation, has enabled recent political shifts, including those taking place in the Trump administration’s second term. The article explains how the “bourgeois public sphere,” a concept introduced by Jürgen Habermas, could be transformed from a place of open debate into a “consuming public,” eventually leading to a blurring of news and advertising; Habermas saw this occur in Germany in the period before World War II. This article argues that this transformation has been taking place since the 1980s, with some similarities to a partial transformation in the 1870s. Finally, the document connects this media transformation to the current attacks on university education, portraying universities as targets in a partisan “diploma divide.”
Tamika Y. Nunley — Storytelling, Digital Archives, and Black Women’s Reproductive History in Real Time
This essay examines how Black women have responded to the intervention of the law and the state in their reproductive lives over time. Through the practice of digital archiving, insights about survival, knowledge production, and the nexus between slavery and the twenty-first-century Black maternal health crisis emerge from the possibilities of storytelling.
Erika Pani — A Guide to Surviving Interesting Times: Lessons from an Unpredictable Past
This essay suggests that since the mid-twentieth century innovations in the ways historians make sense of the past both reflect and respond to significant changes in politics, economics, and society. It also argues that although historians cannot resolve the present crisis, they can contribute to make it legible. This is not because of what they know but thanks to the skillset they rely on to reconstruct and interpret the past: attention to context and evidence, shifting perspectives, openness to debate.
Lindsey R. Peterson — “We the People State of Mississippi”: Letter Writing, Archiving, and Democracy from Reconstruction to Today
This essay analyzes freed people’s political correspondence to Mississippi’s governors during the Civil War and Reconstruction to off er one model for contemporary political engagement—and the importance of its archival preservation—during the Trump administration. Throughout Reconstruction, Black Mississippians wrote directly to their state executives, sharing their fears and frustrations, their hopes and dreams, for the first time. Through this correspondence, they embraced, expanded, and defended their fragile citizenship and, in the process, created an archive that underscores important connections among political correspondence, citizenship, censorship, and government accountability during Reconstruction and today.
Alaina E. Roberts — In 2025, an Echo of the 1800s: The Fight for Black Citizenship in the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations
Pondering the connection between the present crisis—in higher education, in the United States, and in the broader world—and my research, this essay discusses the connection between the late 1800s fight for citizenship waged by the Black and mixed-race women and men enslaved by Chickasaw and Choctaw Indians (Chickasaw and Choctaw Freedmen) and the advocacy efforts of Chickasaw and Choctaw Freedmen and Chickasaw and Choctaw tribal citizens today. At a time when political leaders of the United States and tribal nations have shown they are not always willing to make the moral or ethical choices that best serve their communities, this essay asks what is possible if we redefine kinship outside of the framework of the settler and tribal states.
Aaron Sheehan-Dean — Habits of Mind: How History Teaches Humility
This essay interprets the history of the Civil War era in terms of its value for understanding President Trump’s attacks on the rule of law and constitutional order. It emphasizes ways of thinking modesty, humility, respect for the unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions, the necessity of change and adaptation—that were of value to Lincoln and his contemporaries and might benefit us today.
Margaret M. Storey — Empathy, Humility, and Good Faith: Studying History in Times of Crisis
This essay argues that studying history is an act of empathy, humility, and good faith in times of crisis. Studying past people who have faced their own moments of existential struggle allows individuals to better appreciate how all humans act with limited and uncertain understanding of what is happening to them. Having no good choices, or to being forced to choose between unappealing options, is a far more common part of human history than mythologies (and politics) tend to allow. Recognizing this in forebears who, in their turn, felt despair and bitter disappointment, and used it to hammer out a new social contract that could encompass them, can allow people to find meaning and purpose in their own times of trial.
Robert K. Sutton — The Freedman’s Memorial
The National Park Service manages thousands of monuments. Many stand as silent sentinels to commemorate people, places, or events, and seldom elicit any response. Others can stir positive or negative reactions, or, in some cases, both. Such is the case with the Freedmen’s Memorial (often referred to as the Emancipation Monument) on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Some know that the monument depicts President Abraham Lincoln ending slavery by lifting an African American man—Archer Alexander–out of bondage. They may also be aware that African American people, as former slaves, donated the funding. Some might know that Frederick Douglass gave the dedicatory speech for the monument in front of President Ulysses S. Grant and members of Congress and the Supreme Court. At the same time, many understand these stories but believe that ultimately the memorial is demeaning to African American people, since. Alexander is on his knees, and thus should be removed. This essay tells this story.
Michael Vorenberg — Exceptional Times
This essay begins as a reflection on the question of whether the US Civil War is truly over, a question appearing with more frequency than usual in the early months of the second administration of President Donald Trump. Rejecting the proposition that that Trump administration represents a continuation of the Civil War waged by the Abraham Lincoln administration in the 1860s, the essay posits that the connection between the 1860s and the current moment might be better made through the concept of a “state of exception,” also known as a “state of emergency.” National leaders in both periods invoked states of emergency. The more accurate description of governance in these moments, the article contends, is “constitutional dictatorship.”
Fay A. Yarbrough — The Civil War’s Unfinished Business
The United States is not on the brink of a civil war, but the nation is dealing with the failure to reckon with the Civil War and its aftermath, namely the emancipation of 4 million enslaved people and what that meant for the United States socially and politically. The unaddressed racial and economic inequalities and the radical disagreement about whether they exist and/or how to ameliorate them are at the heart of current political divisions. This essay considers some of the history surrounding the Reconstruction amendments, the first attempt to redress these inequalities, and how that history shaped and continues to shape contemporary ideas about who can access citizenship and voting rights.
Review Essay: Carole Emberton — Trauma, Trauma Everywhere: Race, Violence, and Pathology in the Study of American Slavery
This essay discusses how the concept of trauma has evolved within scholarly circles and its impact on historians of slavery and emancipation. It considers whether trauma is a useful category of analysis and surveys its use among recent historical works relating to the legacy of slavery among Black communities. Despite a tendency to flatten historical analysis, the concept of trauma can be useful in charting both individual and collective responses to violence and its aftermath.
