Category: American History

Guest post by Ronald S. Coddington From a collector’s perspective, there are two types of individuals in the world—those who do, and those who do not. I am in the former group. My first serious collection focused on baseball cards. Spurred by childhood exuberance for the national pastime, I amassed thousands and thousands of them,…

Source material is the lifeblood of academic research (learn why here), and, courtesy of Michael Scott Bieze and Marybeth Gasman's Booker T. Washington Rediscovered, the JHU Press is now in the business of hosting such valuable content on our website. Students, researchers, and scholars can now read the works of this turn-of-the-century intellectual pioneer as…

By Brendan Coyne, exhibits and awards manager If you've been paying any attention at all to our political discourse in recent weeks you know that reproduction is a hot and controversial topic. From Susan G. Komen for the Cure to insuring contraception for women, uncomfortable questions about sex and power and religion have forced their…

Guest post by Christopher N. Phillips What place does storytelling have in literary history today?  I didn’t expect this to be a central question in my book, Epic in American Culture, but the more I explored the topic, the more I realized that storytelling caused many of the problems I faced in this project—and story…

Guest post by Lawrence A. Peskin What is the connection between writing and teaching? That's a question that I get asked all the time as an academic historian. Up until recently I would have had to answer with generalizations: classroom discussions sometimes prompt new research questions; research findings sometimes prompt new ways of approaching material…

Guest post by David A. Mindell This weekend I head down to the USS Monitor Center, at the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia, for “Hampton Roads Weekend.” Scholars, archaeologists, Civil War buffs, and the interested public will gather to commemorate the events of March 9, 1862. One hundred and fifty years ago this Friday,…