history

Building a Digital Archive of Centuries of Records about Enslaved Peoples

Paper documents are still priceless records of the past, even in a digital world. Primary sources stored in local archives throughout Latin America, for example, describe a centuries-old multiethnic society grappling with questions of race, class and religion.

However, paper archives are vulnerable to…

3 years ago
2134

A Century Ago, Congress Dismissed a U.S. Census

Census 2020 is far from the first census to set off bitter political fights. One hundred years ago, results from Census 1920 initiated a decadelong struggle about how to allocate a state’s seats in Congress. The political arguments were so bitter that Congress eventually decided they would not use Census 1920 results.

3 years ago
2636
Sherman Center mural digital heads

How Archival Research Morphs in the Digital Age

Today, and into the future, consulting archival documents increasingly means reading them on a screen. This brings with it opportunity — imagine being able to search for keywords across millions of documents, leading to radically faster search times — but also challenge, as the number of electronic documents increases exponentially.

4 years ago
2467

The Dean of ‘Ism’ Studies: Walter Laqueur, 1921-2018

Walter Laquer, who fled the Holocaust, experienced the birth of Israel, founded the ‘Journal of Contemporary History,’ and was an unflinching sentinel against terrorism and an authoritarian Russia, died on September 30. He was 97.

5 years ago
1702
Thucydides

Do We Really Want Historians as Policy Advisers?

The claim that Thucydides’ account of the past is useful is often extended to historiography in general, rather than just to his specific – and idiosyncratic – approach. And that, suggests Neville Morley, may be the real trap of Thucydides.

7 years ago
1389

Black History and the Myth of Mary Seacole

In what he describes as the obverse of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, Robert Dingwall argues that the secular sainthood conferred on Mary Seacole steps on historical scholarship and ignores more genuine exemplars.

7 years ago
4900

The Humanities as Human Relations

Do the Humanities not have an intellectual basis as legitimate and rigorous as that of the natural and social sciences? And are not the Humanities in fact an essential part of higher education? Try considering the Humanities as a form of Human Relations.

10 years ago
3182

Liberal Arts: Still Valuable

Emory’s recent decision to shut down or suspend various academic departments and programs has rightly generated campus-wide and national attention.

10 years ago
1182