You might be hearing the phrase “Lost Cause” in the wake of Wednesday’s attempted insurrection. The Lost Cause is most familiar to Americans in relation to the Civil War. While the Union won the war, by the end of the 19th century, the South had won the memory of it through its Lost Cause. This … More A Brief Introduction to Understanding the Lost Cause
2020 has clearly been a history making year from a pandemic to massive protests against white supremacy to the recent election. I certainly do not envy future historians trying to make sense of this year! Recently, I was asked by a reporter from the San José Spotlight to provide some historical context to the political … More Providing Historical Context to Historical Times
This is just a brief introduction into some ideas that have been percolating in my mind lately about the study of History in higher education. Right now the study of History is perhaps more important than ever. Journalists, politicians, and other media creators constantly invoke history as they discuss the pandemic, Black Lives Matters, Confederate … More Thoughts about the History Discipline in 2020
Over the past seven days, I have posted the words of black women in America on my Instagram account: Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ruth Turner Perot, Ericka Huggins, and Angela Davis. Their words stretch from 1861 to 2017. They represent the smallest fraction of black women in the US. … More Black Women Matter
This is a preliminary list of resources from my research and teaching (and some recommended to me, some still in process of reading). I share it only as one way to access the enormous amount of information available to us to better understand the past that continues to shape our present and to be … More Books & Readings on African American History/Actionable Items
Podcasts are changing the game on how we engage with history. Lately, there seems to be a whole range of different podcasts with different objectives to uncover historical “truths.” They are presented in a way that aims to expose what we didn’t know about our past and finding new ways to understand who we are, … More So many ways to engage with history
I’m currently teaching Women in US History again. It’s one of my favorite classes to teach because students are always excited to learn new things about what women were doing in our past and to see the histories that they are familiar with told through new lens. However, I always find myself asking new questions … More Women in History – Gender Roles & Civilization
I am currently teaching a course on the turbulent decades of the 1960s and 1970s at Santa Clara University. Unsurprisingly, we have spent a significant amount of our time discussing the Civil Rights Movement in its many iterations during that period. This has included some analysis and discovery about the Black Panthers, who of course … More Visiting OMC’s Exhibit on the Black Panthers
While working on my dissertation, I spent time at the Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. Like children in all Shaker communities, children at Pleasant Hill lived in family houses separated by gender (note the separate entrances to both homes in the below photographs). Caretakers, rather than biological parents, raised the children. Ideally Shaker children learned … More Researching Children at Shaker Village, Pleasant Hill
Meg Eppel Gudgeirsson 