Alumna Vaneesa Cook (Ph.D. 2015) has written a blog post about her work with the Missing in Action Recovery & Identification Project at UW–Madison. The piece is titled “The Legacy of the 5307th Merrill’s Marauders: Wisconsin MIAs in Burma.” The MIA Project is a joint initiative between UW–Madison and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) …
Graduate student Leslie Bellais has published a chapter in the edited collection Home Front in the American Heartland: Local Experiences and Legacies of WWI (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020). The chapter is titled “‘Lest We Forget’: Remembering World War I in Wisconsin, 1919-1945” and is the second chapter in a volume aimed at offering a multifaceted exploration …
Alumna Tyina Steptoe (Ph.D. 2008) has written a piece on hip-hop and the Black Lives Matter movement for The Conversation, an independent, nonprofit online publisher of commentary and analysis. The piece is titled “Hip-hop is the soundtrack to Black Lives Matter protests, continuing a tradition that dates back to the blues.” Steptoe explains the long …
Today is Juneteenth, a day that commemorates an important moment in U.S. history – the liberation of nearly 200,000 enslaved Texans in 1865. Although President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 pronounced freedom to all enslaved people in areas still under Confederate rule, by 1865 Texas still remained very much a slave state in practice. …
Professor Brenda Gayle Plummer, a historian who specializes in the intersection of race and U.S. foreign relations, has an article published today on foreignaffairs.com, titled “Civil Rights Has Always Been a Global Movement: How Allies Abroad Help the Fight Against Racism at Home.” The timely article addresses the current protests that have erupted on both …
We are excited to unveil a new page on our website, the History of the History Department! Our illustrious history stretches back to the mid-19th century when the State of Wisconsin and its flagship university were founded. This section highlights benchmarks in the department’s institutional history and key changes in its curriculum, faculty, and students, …
Last week Professor Brenda Gayle Plummer was featured on a new episode of Deep Dish, a podcast from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The episode, titled “How Racial Injustice Shapes U.S. Foreign Policy,” delves into how the murder of George Floyd and the U.S. government’s reaction to national protests on racial injustice have raised …
On Saturday, June 13th, Professor Judd Kinzley published an op-ed in The Cap Times on the subject of new federal proposals that would limit the number of Chinese graduate students and researchers coming to Wisconsin and UW–Madison. A new executive order signed by President Trump and recently proposed legislation in the Senate aims to deny …
Professor Louise Young, recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, presents her research on World War II memory politics in Japan. Seventy years after Japan’s surrender, why does the conduct and interpretation of World War II remain so contested? Professor Young traces the ways in which these issues have “appeared and disappeared …
The undersigned members of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of History express their collective grief, anger, and resolve in response to the murder of George Floyd, and the killings of so many African Americans that have in recent weeks shocked the nation’s conscience, including Breonna Taylor, killed by police as she slept in her own …