The Language of Race in Early America

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Alexander Boulton considers the evolution of language and its impact on ideas of race during the Revolutionary era.

Diverse Interventions in the Public Sphere by Historians of Native America

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Of the two umbrella terms for public engagement in wide use by English-speaking historians, “public history” tends to refer to efforts pitched toward the people at large, with the less common “applied history” used for conversations between scholars and policymakers.

The Enduring Relevance of Early American Migration Regulations

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Nothing could be more tempting than a high wage. In March 1808, a pseudonymous author in Spooner’s Vermont Journal envisioned the possibility of the American merchant marine being swarmed by foreigners who would “engage in our service for less wages than our own” throwing “native American sailors out of employ.”

A Community Remembrance Project Reckons with the Past: A Nineteenth-Century Lynching in Ohio

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When I first joined Ohio University’s History Department as a graduate student, I knew I wanted to specialize in gender and race relations in the United States to have the ability to teach students and the public about systemic racism and sexism for the purpose of improving society.

Missionary Diplomacy, Applied

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If you want to understand American foreign policy today, you have to understand the history of Protestant foreign missions and its deep entanglement with American diplomacy for more than a century.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Writing for the Public

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Though it’s generally taboo to say, I consider myself a presentist historian. I am interested in history to the extent that it speaks to our current moment and helps us push toward a better future.

Of Hindsight and Foresight: An Introduction to “Rethinking Applied History”

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Over the last few years, I have found myself in an awkward spot. What is my intellectual identity?

Echoes of Spanish-Mexican Women in California’s Constitutional Debates of 1849

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In 1857, Maria Natividad de Haro de Tissol petitioned the Fourth District Court of California to appoint a trustee over her separate property.
A grayscale drawing of a big blocky building with columns on the front, with people standing and walking in the street in front of it, and a church in the background.
A picture of an elderly man taken from behind. He is wearing a cowboy outfit and firing two revolvers at a series of targets shaped like human torsos in a sandpit.
A line art engraving of a man with his back to the viewer holding a long knife and pistols in his belt facing an open cupboard with a small man cowering inside of it.
A political cartoon showing a soldier labeled "White League" shaking hands with a KKK member in full robe and hood over a and image of a black man and woman and a baby cowering with the label "worse than slavery.”
Engraving of two men dueling in a forest, each with a second in a topcoat trying to stop them, with a coach in the background half hidden in the woods.