Month / October 2020

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Anderson Quoted in ‘The Hill’ Op-Ed

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in an article in The Hill. Written by Juan Williams, the piece discusses Donald Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on the results of the upcoming presidential election. Read the excerpt citing Anderson below along with the full piece: “Juan Williams: Trump’s plan to thwart democracy.”

Trump has frequently said the only way he can lose is if the election is rigged. These messages feed a strategy intended to “suppress and depress” the vote. Emory University Professor Carol Anderson said the strategy starts with Trump telling Americans that their “vote won’t count, and it doesn’t matter what I do.”

She explained on a recent Slate.com podcast: “So we have these suppressive techniques: voter ID, poll closures, massive voter-roll purges, eliminating early voting days…When you begin to see these five-hour lines, and the research is clear on this: It is designed to make folks think, ‘Oh, this is just too much,’ and…voter turnout goes down.”

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Junior History Major Annie Li Selected as a 2020-2021 Imagining America Joy of Giving Something Fellow

Junior history and sociology double major Annie Li is among eight undergraduates nationwide selected as a 2020-2021 Imagining America Joy of Giving Something Fellow. The fellowship, which includes a tuition scholarship, mentorship and financial support for a community arts project, recognizes Li’s work on Emory’s “Stories from the Pandemic” project. For her community arts project, Li plans to make a film about the experiences of Chinese Americans in Atlanta during the emergence and spread of COVID-19. This idea was inspired by a spring 2020 course on Asian-American history that Li took with Dr. Chris Suh, Assistant Professor of History. Learn more about the fellowship via the Emory News Center’s article, “Emory student receives fellowship grant for humanities work.”

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Goldstein’s 2006 ‘The Price of Whiteness’ Attains New Relevance in 2020

Dr. Eric Goldstein, Associate Professor of History, published The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity with Princeton UP in 2006. Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies recently published a story outlining the special relevance Goldstein’s work has gained in the midst of current, widespread protests for racial justice. Read an excerpt from their feature below along with the full article, “Goldstein’s book takes on new relevance in 2020.”

“In the last few months, Goldstein has been contacted by a host of groups and organizations from across the country—both from inside and outside the Jewish community— to help them sort through the complicated set of issues around American Jews and their place in current discussions about race and privilege. In a recent webinar with the Jewish Federations of North America, Goldstein explained that he first became interested in these issues during his graduate training at the University of Michigan, where he was the only student in his cohort studying U.S. history in combination with modern Jewish history. As it became clear to him how central issues of race and racial discrimination were to the shaping of American history, he was pushed to think about how the American Jewish experience was also decisively shaped by a national culture in which “black” and “white” were the most important categories of difference. He explored these questions in a doctoral thesis that would eventually become The Price of Whiteness.”

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‘AJC’ Cites Investigative Work of Miller and Hartstein in ‘Fake News’ FYS

Dr. Judith Miller and sophomore history major Edina Hartstein tracked a disturbing recent news item about an alleged child smuggling ring. Their work was cited in the Atlanta Journal Constitution article, “Feds cobbled criminal cases together in missing children operation, creating false perception.” Read an excerpt from the article below along with more about Miller’s course on “fake news” via the Emory News Center’s feature from last year, “‘Fake News’ class helps students learn to research and identify false information.”

“Judith Miller, an associate history professor at Emory University who teaches a class on “fake news,” tracked Operation Not Forgotten’s course on social media and in news coverage as it evolved into descriptions of a “criminal enterprise” on cable TV news shows, then became a subject of the false mythology of QAnon.”

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LaChance Named Winship Distinguished Research Professor for 2020-23

Congratulations to Dr. Daniel LaChance, Associate Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Law and the Humanities, on being named a Winship Distinguished Research Professor for 2020-23. LaChance is an expert in twentieth century American legal history and culture. The Winship Distinguished Research Award is given to tenured faculty who demonstrate singular accomplishments in research and is designed to encourage further scholarly research and research-based teaching.

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Tam Institute for Jewish Studies to Feature Conversation between Goldstein and Eric K. Ward

Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies will host the 12th Annual Rothschild Lecture on October 29, 2020, at 7:30pm via Zoom. The lecture will feature a conversation between Associate Professor of History Eric Goldstein and Eric K. Ward, Executive Director of the Western States Center and nationally-recognized expert on the relationship between authoritarian movements, hate violence, and preserving inclusive democracy. The topic for the conversation is “Skin in the Game: American Jews, Whiteness, and the Contemporary Movement for Racial Justice.” Goldstein is the TIJS Judith London Evans Director and author of The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. Register for the virtual event here.

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Eckert’s ‘West Germany and the Iron Curtain’ Wins 2020 GSA/DAAD Book Prize

Congratulations to Dr. Astrid M. Eckert, Associate Professor, who was awarded the 2020 GSA/DAAD Book Prize in History for her work West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands. The monograph was published with Oxford University Press last year. Read the GSA/DAAD committee’s appreciation of Dr. Eckert’s work below.

“Astrid M. Eckert’s book achieves what all innovative history aspires to do: open new sight lines that advance both conceptual and empirical knowledge. The book focuses on the ‘Zonenrandgebiete’ created in Germany by the Iron Curtain: peripheral regions whose socioeconomic development accorded neither with the storyline of the ‘economic miracle’ nor with the political narratives of Bonn and West Berlin. The brilliance of Eckert’s book lies in demonstrating the centrality of these peripheral areas. Despite their backwater status as the ‘east of the west,’ the borderlands exerted substantial force in reconstituting the West-German state. By reimagining the cultural landscape of West Germany’s social and political development, Eckert’s extensively researched study marks a signal contribution to the fields of local and regional, German and European history. Eckert is alive to the lived social experience of borderland actors and the evolving conditions that acted upon them.“

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Suddler Edits Special Edition of ‘The American Historian’: “History for Black Lives”

Dr. Carl Suddler, Assistant Professor, edited the September issue of The American Historian. The volume features seven articles on “History for Black Lives” contextualize the nationwide protests that occurred in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. The special issue is open for a limited time to the general public, regardless of OAH membership, here.

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New WaPo Series ‘The 45th President’ Cites Anderson

An article in the new Washington Post series “The 45th President” recently cited Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department. The WaPo series reflects back on the Trump presidency. Read the excerpt citing Anderson below along with the full piece: “Allegations of racism have marked Trump’s presidency and become key issue as election nears.”

Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.

“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”

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Anderson Quoted in Article about New Investigative Series ‘Barriers to the Ballot Box’

The Center for Public Integrity and Stateline recently launched an investigative series, “Barriers to the Ballot Box,” that provides data on polling place availability for elections from 2012-2018. The information may shed new light on how voting access has been limited since the U.S. Supreme Court weakened voter protections. The article discussing the release of the data cites Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read the excerpt below along with the full piece: “National Data Release Sheds Light on Past Polling Place Changes.”

“When you have that kind of disparity in population, you’re going to have a disparity in wait times, a disparity in access,” said Carol Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University and author of the book One Person, No Vote. “And long lines then lead to their own form of voter suppression. People have to leave. People get discouraged.”

This year, a primary season marred by unprecedented polling place consolidations forced by the coronavirus pandemic, featuring indelible images of voters standing in hours long lines to cast ballots, added new urgency.