History Commons^™

Monuments Ought To Be Considered Case By Case, Michael J. Birkner

History Faculty Publications

In a press conference last week President Donald Trump made this contribution to the escalating debate about monuments and memorials to American heroes who, by today’s reckoning, failed a moral test.

The statue debate is inherently emotional and when it comes to keeping certain statues up or pulling them down, it riles people up —including Donald Trump. However, it is important to separate President Trump’s intemperate and often factually inaccurate remarks at Tuesday’s press conference from the statue controversy as it is currently playing out. (excerpt)

Ike's Leadership Lessons For New President, Michael J. Birkner

History Faculty Publications

Just days into his presidency in the winter of 1953, Dwight Eisenhower met with his advisers and discussed a challenge from within the majority Republican caucus. If mishandled, it could have endangered his program for a stronger America.

The issue, as he later related, was the demand of conservative Republican legislative leaders that Eisenhower "balance the budget immediately and cut taxes no matter what the result." [excerpt]

Teaching Black History After Obama, Karen Sotiropoulos

History Faculty Publications

This article is a reflection on the teaching of black history after the Obama presidency and at the dawn of the Trump era. It is both an analysis of the state of the academic field and a primer on how to integrate the past few decades of scholarship in black history broadly across standard K-12 curriculum. It demonstrates the importance of theorizing black history as American history rather than just including African American content in US History courses and offers specific methods that can shift the narrative in this direction even within the confines of a more traditional telling of …

The Man Question: How Bolshevik Masculinity Shaped International Communism, Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

History Faculty Publications

It was a communist romance. In 1923, Croatian American communist Steve Nelson (born Stjepan Mesarsoš) met Margaret Yeager, the daughter of ‘radical’ German immigrants, at the Communist Party office in Pittsburgh. As Nelson recalled in his 1981 memoir, ‘everything happened’ very quickly, and the two married the same year. Both understood that Yeager, the ‘better educated’ and ‘more sophisticated’ of the two, would not accept a ‘passive role’ in the relationship. Indeed her mother gave the nineteen-year-old bridegroom a copy of August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism as a wedding gift. Nonetheless, they soon took on stereotypical roles. He became an …