“Judith Miller, a professor of history at Emory University, says getting ahead of the misinformation, or ‘pre-bunking’ information, is the key because once lies begin to spread online, it’s often too late to change the minds of those who’ve been convinced.
“‘Even if someone is clinging to fake news and has a friend or family member who is trying to persuade them that something they believe is false,’ Miller said, ‘often that just makes that boundary harder and the person who lives the fake news retreats even farther.'”
Dr. Polly J. Price, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Professor of Global Health, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in a PolitiFact article. The piece, “Could Joe Biden challenge Florida, Texas on mask policies? Probably not,” discusses whether the federal government has the authority to combat state laws passed in some Republican-led states to prohibit mask usage in schools. Price is, most recently, the author of Plagues in the Nation: How Epidemics Shaped America(Beacon Press, forthcoming). Read an excerpt from the PolitiFact piece quoting Price below along with the full article.
“‘Traditionally, these restrictions on federal power have led states and localities to take the lead on ‘public health measures like quarantine and isolation, school closings, banning smoking in restaurants, and more,’ said Polly J. Price, a professor of law and global health at Emory University.”
Dr. Mary L. Dudziak, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in an article in The New York Times. The piece, “Afghanistan, Vietnam and the Limits of American Power,” collects analysis from historians about the parallels and differences between the U.S. wars in, and departures from, Vietnam and Afghanistan. Dudziak is the author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2012). Her latest work, “Going to War: An American History,” is under contract with Oxford UP. Read an excerpt from The New York Times piece quoting Dudziak below, along with the full article.
“Mary L. Dudziak, a law professor at Emory University and the author of “War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences,” agreed that any attempt at reckoning would be short-lived, and that in the long term America could become even less constrained in its assertion of power.
“‘I expect that one similarity,’ she said, ‘will be a failure to grapple with the way U.S. political culture undermines a more robust politics of military restraint, and this hampers powerful political opposition within Congress, which might put a brake on the entry into and persistence of war.’
“What might have been a sustained, nuanced conversation about limiting the president’s war powers, she added, has been short-circuited by the frenzy to decide ‘who lost Afghanistan.’
“‘In our toxic political environment,’ Professor Dudziak said, ‘Republicans are likely to use this moment to undermine President Biden, and partisanship may foreclose the deeper re-examination of American war politics that is sorely needed now, and was also after the war in Vietnam.'”
Dr. Patrick N. Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, recently authored an annotated list of five essential works on U.S. environmental history for the website Shepherd. Allitt’s most recent book is A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism (Penguin, 2014), an intellectual history of American environmentalism since World War II. Find the list of recommendations here: “The best books to understand American environmental history.”
The Journal of American History recently published a review of Dr. Michael Camp’s first book, Unnatural Resources: Energy and Environmental Politics in Appalachia After the 1973 Oil Embargo. Camp is a 2017 alumnus of the Emory History doctoral program. Dr. R. Mcgreggor Cawley, Professor at the University of Wyoming, reviewed Unnatural Resources. Read an excerpt from the review below along with the full piece here.
“Camp’s study provides an accessible and detail-rich narrative about the interactions between national policy goals and the localized political landscape in east Tennessee and nearby areas of West Virginia and Kentucky. On the face of it, this region appeared well suited to contribute to solving the energy crises of the 1970s. It was a major coal-producing area, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was engaged in state-of-the-art nuclear technology, and the Tennessee Valley Authority had established the potential for hydroelectric power. Yet, as Camp deftly demonstrates, union strikes and railroad regulation disputes created obstacles for coal production. Similarly, he uses the struggle over the Clinch River Breeder Reactor to highlight problems with increasing the use of nuclear power. Finally, he explains how the Tellico Dam controversy presented a classic confrontation between energy and environment.”
President Joe Biden has nominated Emory historian Deborah E. Lipstadt as special envoy to combat and monitor antisemitism in the U.S. and abroad. Lipstadt will hold the rank of ambassador if confirmed to the position by the U.S. Senate. She has previously served on the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Religious Persecution Abroad. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and associated faculty in the History Department.
Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. and United Nations Gilad Erdan welcomed Lipstadt’s nomination on Friday.
“As an accomplished author and historian, Dr. Lipstadt has dedicated her life to fighting antisemitism and preserving the memory of the Holocaust,” Erdan said in a statement. “Antisemitism is the oldest and most widespread form of hatred and the recent wave of antisemitic attacks against Jews around the world and in the U.S. serves as a reminder that no place is safe from antisemitic hatred.”
Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies Dr. Carol Anderson was recently interviewed by Slate journalist Mark Joseph Stern. Their conversation centers on an upcoming Supreme Court case challenging the state of New York’s restrictive concealed carry laws, which have drawn criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Drawing on her most recent book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021), Anderson discusses the intersection of racism and gun control, past and present. Read an excerpt below along with the full piece: “Does the Progressive Case Against New York’s Concealed Carry Ban Hold Water?”
The amicus brief really speaks to the conundrum of anti-Blackness in American society. When Black people are defined as the default threat in American society—when you have this architecture of laws and of policing that comes into being to control that Black population—it means that Black people are vulnerable when they are armed, and vulnerable when they’re unarmed.
What was the genesis of your project, and how has it changed since you first entered graduate school?
The project I am working on now is quite different from the project I started with when I first entered graduate school. Geographically, I stayed in the wonderfully complex eighteenth-century Mississippi Valley, but thematically, my project has changed directions many times. My interest in the process of land-claiming expanded from an inquiry into colonial migration and European competition to a much broader analysis of property formation, settler colonialism, and dispossession.
My dissertation project now examines how small and mobile Indigenous groups from the Houma, Shawnee, Delaware, and Avoyelles-Tunica-Biloxi nations used Spanish colonial laws to protect their land, property, and sovereignty from white settlers. I argue that the process of property formation was a contested and malleable set of practices, negotiated through occupation, land grants, and court proceedings. My dissertation challenges traditional periodizations and geographies of North American history by viewing colonial expansion, Indigenous dispossession, and the rise of the slave-plantation economy as interconnected processes that spanned across national and imperial boundaries.
What has the research process during dissertation fieldwork been like?
I am fortunate that my fieldwork takes me to many interesting and beautiful cities. Following archival trails and trying to piece together stories that happened in the eighteenth-century Mississippi Valley brought me to libraries and archives on both sides of the Atlantic – from New Orleans to Aix-en-Provence, and from Mexico City to Madrid.
I analyze every-day interactions and conflicts between Indigenous peoples, Europeans, and Africans through the lens of property formation using French and Spanish correspondence, Euro-American travel accounts, Indigenous oral histories, Spanish judicial records, and maps, land surveys, and archeological reports.
Despite its challenges, working with such a wide variety of sources ensures that I never have a boring day in the archives. It also helps that archives like the Historic New Orleans Collection are located in the French Quarter, so I can always be sure to find a nice Feierabend drink at the end of a long day in the reading room.
How do digital humanities approaches figure into your work?
Digital Humanities has been a key element of my dissertation process since the very beginning. I use historical geography and digital mapping not only as a tool for visualization, but also as an integral research methodology. Trying to map Indigenous, colonial, and African settlement patterns has led me to both ask new questions and offer different approaches than previous scholarship.
Support from the Fox Center, the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation enabled me to develop technical skills and conduct research for a digital mapping project that has since become an integral part of my dissertation.
Are you partial to a particular chapter, section, or story from the project so far?
I decided to start with the chapter I presumed to be the most challenging. Chapter 3, “Possessing the Border,” is a case study of property formation and dispossession that analyses Houma and French-Acadian settlements in the Lower Mississippi Valley from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Using eighteenth century French and Spanish notarial acts, correspondence, and Houma oral history, this chapter is a legal history of migrating, settling, claim-making, titling, and defending property. One challenge was that all actors in this chapter are constantly re-locating – there is no static “homeland” over time. In part, I argue that the notion of “homeland” is fluid and malleable as people adapt to new circumstances and locations.
What I like about this chapter is the variety of sources that helped me draw this story over almost two hundred years. By looking at original and rarely used Spanish and French handwritten archival records, I could draw out perspectives that differ from the nineteenth-century English translations that previous historians used.
“‘I think the denomination is at a crossroads, but Southern Baptists are often at crossroads,’ Alison Collis Greene, an associate professor of religious history at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, tells NPR. ‘None of these things happens overnight, and this one has been brewing for a while.’
“The spotlight was already on SBC leaders as they entered this week’s convention. Last week, recordings were leaked of internal meetings that critics have said shows the denomination’s top leaders were slow-walking reforms that would address sexual abuse.
“‘At this point, the SBC’s core values are deeply connected with Republican Party politics,’ Greene says. ‘I’d use the term “reactionary” rather than “conservative” to describe those, particularly with regard to race, gender, and authority.'”
