I was sitting at a dinner table with about eight other guests. The others represented a center-right political outlook peppered with a couple of die-hard Trump supporters here and there. My goal at these events is always to stay out of a fight, but last time I had failed miserably and ruined the evening. And…
Where Have the Historians Gone?
One of the long-term consequences of Dylann Roof’s brutal attack in Charleston, SC back 2015 has been a reevaluation of the place of Confederate monuments and memorials in the Southern states. In the weeks following Roof’s attack, attention focused on Confederate flags still flying at Southern state capitols. The Southern Poverty Law Center began taking…
The OTHER Baylor University Scandal
Despite some startling revelations about it this past fall, the recent Baylor University sexual assault scandal seems to have dropped from the media radar. And yet I forgot…until I came across an older rape scandal at Baylor.
Rachel Maddow on Reconstruction
I don’t usually watch The Rachel Maddow Show but I happened to catch part of it last night. Maddow spent about 15 minutes reviewing some basic history of Reconstruction culminating in a discussion of the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which criminalized conspiracies to intimidate voters in federal elections. The Klan Act is currently the…
What Real Rigged Elections Look Like
Over the past week, presidential candidate Donald Trump has begun to claim that the 2016 presidential election is rigged. He says that the fix is in for Hillary Clinton, and that the news media handed it to her on a silver platter by ignoring new evidence of corruption during her tenure at the State Department…
Brennan Gardner Rivas, PhD 