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Donald Trump’s Records Aren’t All That’s Missing from the Archives: America’s Archives Tell An Incomplete Version of our History.

Oct 25, 2022 Washington Post
The unprecedented crisis between former president Donald Trump and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) highlights the Archives’ critical government and public service role. It also

How Yellow Fever Intensified Racial Inequality in 19th-Century New Orleans

Apr 19, 2022 Smithsonian Magazine
A new book explores how immunity to the disease created opportunities for white, but not Black, people

A Century Ago, American Reporters Foresaw the Rise of Authoritarianism in Europe

Mar 14, 2022 Smithsonian Magazine
A new book tells the stories of four interwar writers who laid the groundwork for modern journalism

Open Twitterversity

Aug 23, 2021 The Panorama
No matter how much I read about it, I can’t really grasp the phenomenon that is social media. I wondered years ago if it would

A 1722 Murder Spurred Native Americans’ Pleas for Justice in Early America

Apr 28, 2021 Smithsonian Magazine
In a new book, historian Nicole Eustace reveals Indigenous calls for meaningful restitution and reconciliation rather than retribution.

How Black Women Brought Liberty to Washington in the 1800s

Mar 5, 2021 Smithsonian Magazine
A new book shows us the capital region’s earliest years through the eyes and the experiences of leaders like Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth Keckley

How to Tell 400 Years of Black History in One Book

Feb 1, 2021 Smithsonian Magazine
From 1619 to 2019, this collection of essays, edited by two of the nation’s preeminent scholars, shows the depth and breadth of African American history

Why the Myths of Plymouth Dominate the American Imagination

Nov 24, 2020 Smithsonian Magazine
A new book shows us a different picture of the English settlers who arrived at the lands of the Wampanoag

What Trump Is Missing About American History

Sep 20, 2020 Politico
Setting up a classroom battle between 1619 and 1776 gets history totally wrong and is damaging for our nation.

For Generations, Black Women Have Envisioned a Better, Fairer American Politics

Sep 8, 2020 Smithsonian Magazine
A new book details the 200-plus years of trenchant activism, from anti-slavery in the earliest days of the U.S. to 21st-century voting rights

How Historic Preservation Shaped the Early United States

May 14, 2020 Smithsonian Magazine
A new book details how the young nation regarded its recent and more ancient pasts

The President’s Cabinet Was an Invention of America’s First President

Apr 7, 2020 Smithsonian Magazine
A new book explores how George Washington shaped the group of advisors as an institution to meet his own needs

A New Book About George Washington Breaks All the Rules on How to Write About George Washington

Feb 4, 2020 Smithsonian Magazine
Alexis Coe’s cheeky biography of the first president pulls no punches

Why we all have the knowledge to decide whether Donald Trump should be impeached

Dec 18, 2019 Washington Post
The crucial importance of keeping historical records public and easily accessible.

Could footnotes be the key to winning the disinformation wars?

Aug 29, 2019 Washington Post
Armed with footnotes, we can save democracy

George Washington, Genealogist: Why Didn’t We Know?

Attached to a page in the first of nearly 300 red-leather-bound, near-atlas-sized folio volumes of the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress (LOC)

This Long-Ignored Document, Written by George Washington, Lays Bare the Legal Power of Genealogy

Jun 18, 2019 Smithsonian Magazine
In Washington’s Virginia, family was a crucial determinant of social and economic status, and freedom

What Naomi Wolf and Cokie Roberts teach us about the need for historians

Jun 11, 2019 Washington Post
Without historical training, it’s easy to make big mistakes about the past.

“Women Also Know History”: Dismantling Gender Bias in the Academy

Jun 9, 2018 History News Network
History is a key source of public information and debate. With public figures making regular historical claims and engaging in debates over the meaning of

The Scholarly Kitchen

What Universities — and Libraries, Researchers, and Publishers? — Owe Democracy

Jun 16, 2022 The Scholarly Kitchen
It has been an intense couple of weeks here in the United States as the US Congress begins its public hearings on the events of

Humanities and Graduate Education:  The Crisis is Real, but Not New

Apr 29, 2022 The Scholarly Kitchen
It’s not all bad news for the humanities in the United States, but there isn’t much good news either. The Humanities Indicators Project released a

Unreachable/ Unwritable Histories: Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe

Apr 7, 2022 The Scholarly Kitchen
There are so many contexts in which history is impossible. Some are systemic. Subtle or explicit forces make histories impossible by disallowing them as we

More on Checking out Library Books

Jan 4, 2022 The Scholarly Kitchen
Did you know that you can cut a US #10 envelope in half, paste it onto the inside back cover of a book, and then

Reading About Libraries and Librarians

Dec 16, 2021 The Scholarly Kitchen
One of the constants in scholarly communication is the importance of understanding the full system of knowledge production. Whether you are a researcher, work in

What Universities Have Wrought: An Interview with Davarian Baldwin

Jun 14, 2021 The Scholarly Kitchen
Headlines remind us that the crisis of higher education in the United States, in which universities that are squeezed for resources are cutting programs and

Revisiting: Dear Reader, Are You Reading?

Jun 9, 2021 The Scholarly Kitchen
We are reading more online all the time. Or, we are expecting more online reading all the time. Or, we are making more reading materials

Historians in Historic Times

Jan 14, 2021 The Scholarly Kitchen
A historian will tell you that every era, every group of people, every subject, and every last fragment of material about the past is historical.

The Humanities [Are Everywhere] in American Life

Dec 17, 2020 The Scholarly Kitchen
Last month the American Academy of Arts and Sciences released a study funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Humanities in American life:  Insights from a Survey of

There is No Truth, There is Only Workflow

Nov 2, 2020 The Scholarly Kitchen
Every day that I sit down to finish this post, I revised the opening example; there is a constant supply available to make my central

Trust as an Ethic and a Practice in Peer Review

Sep 21, 2020 The Scholarly Kitchen
Trust is the theme of this year’s Peer Review Week, and we can’t think of anything more important or timely.  Peer review runs on trust.

Humanities Research Infrastructure is Great ROI — Will We Sell it Short?

Jun 3, 2020 The Scholarly Kitchen
Infrastructure is what enables, whether for education, sanitation or transportation for example, the development and movement of ideas and goods and services. It’s so obviously

Talking About – and Maybe Even Selling – Books in a Pandemic

May 14, 2020 The Scholarly Kitchen
This post is co-authored with Lindsay Chervinsky, PhD, a historian at the White House Historical Association and an expert in Early American history, the presidency, and

The Internet Archive Chooses Readers

Apr 2, 2020 The Scholarly Kitchen
It is a moment for making choices by which we may be measured for decades, or more.

Historians Respond to Plan S: Open Access vs OA Policies Redux

Nov 21, 2019 The Scholarly Kitchen
For years, humanists have been pointing to the multi-dimensional importance of openness and accessibility of scholarship, and the multi-dimensional costs of rigid open access (OA)

Scholarly E-Books and University Presses – Part Two

Aug 6, 2019 The Scholarly Kitchen
This is the second of two posts on the roles of e-books in scholarly publishing, focused on how e-books fit into the mission and the

Will E-Books Feed University Presses — Or Eat Them?  Part One

Jul 30, 2019 The Scholarly Kitchen
What roles are e-books now playing, and what roles will they play, in scholarly disciplines for which books are a primary, often the apex, scholarly

Stanford University Press and the Wrong Lesson of the Humanities

Jun 24, 2019 The Scholarly Kitchen
Are the humanities down for the count? Big declines in majors, unable to compete with the ascendance of STEM, unable to stem the worldwide degradation

Editing is at the Heart of Scholarly Publishing

Apr 24, 2019 The Scholarly Kitchen
In all the discussions about challenges in scholarly publishing, we are struck by the lack of attention to the work of editing. Editing is at

A Brief History of History Responding to Open Access

Feb 13, 2019 The Scholarly Kitchen
This post is co-authored by Karin Wulf and Seth Denbo, Director of Scholarly Communication and Digital Initiatives for the American Historical Association

Yes, Women Also Know: Online Resources Identify and Highlight Women Experts

Jan 8, 2019 The Scholarly Kitchen
Okay, 2019, let’s get moving. There are, alas, still too many examples of journalism, panels, conferences, and book lists with what my dad called “pale

Dear Reader, Are You Reading?

Oct 23, 2018 The Scholarly Kitchen
What are you doing, right now? Are you reading this blog post in your first language, or one of your first languages? Did you print

Clear, Blue Sky: The Environment for Diversity in Peer Review

Sep 10, 2018 The Scholarly Kitchen
Welcome to Peer Review Week 2018! This year’s theme is “Diversity in Peer Review.” There are a lot of perspectives and resources on peer review addressing aspects

Libraries and Archives: A Humanities Take on Discovery

Aug 22, 2018 The Scholarly Kitchen
[This post originated as a presentation for a NISO webinar on “Discovery: Where Researchers Begin.”  Joelen Pastava, from Galter Health Sciences Library and Northwestern University and

The full corpus of my writing for The Scholarly Kitchen since 2015, almost 50 single-authored articles on the humanities scholarly ecosystem, including collections, citations, versioning, reading, and more can be found at:  https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/author/kawulf/

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