Author: TheConversation

By Christian Appy, Professor of History, UMass Amherst The history-making whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, who by leaking the Pentagon Papers revealed longtime government doubts and deceit about the Vietnam War and inspired acts of retaliation by President Richard Nixon that helped lead to his resignation, died of pancreatic cancer on June 16 at the age of 92. In 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg arrived at a federal court in Boston, a journalist asked if he was concerned about the prospect of going to prison for leaking a 7,000-page top-secret history of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg responded with a question of his...

By Andrew Maynard, Professor of Advanced Technology Transitions, Arizona State University The term “Luddite” emerged in early 1800s England. At the time there was a thriving textile industry that depended on manual knitting frames and a skilled workforce to create cloth and garments out of cotton and wool. But as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum, steam-powered mills threatened the livelihood of thousands of artisanal textile workers. Faced with an industrialized future that threatened their jobs and their professional identity, a growing number of textile workers turned to direct action. Galvanized by their leader, Ned Ludd, they began to smash...

By J. W. Traphagan, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, The University of Texas at Austin; and John J. Kaag, Professor of Philosophy, UMass Lowell A common complaint in America today is that politics and even society as a whole are broken. Critics point out endless lists of what should be fixed: the complexity of the tax code, or immigration reform, or the inefficiency of government. But each dilemma usually comes down to polarized deadlock between two competing visions and everyone’s conviction that theirs is the right one. Perhaps this white-knuckled insistence on being right is the root cause of...

By Thomas Doherty, Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University On April 4, 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the indictment of former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump on 34 felony charges related to alleged crimes involving bookkeeping on a 7-year-old hush money payment to an adult film actress. Trump is unlikely to wind up in an orange jumpsuit, at least not on this indictment, and probably not before November 2024, in any case. Yet if he does, he would not be the first candidate to run for the White House from the Big House. In the...

By Mark Satta, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Wayne State University The drag shows will go on. At least for now. On June 2, 2023, Judge Thomas Parker, a Trump-appointed federal district court judge in western Tennessee, ruled that Tennessee’s “Adult Entertainment Act” violated the First Amendment’s free speech protection. The act had been passed by the Tennessee Legislature and signed into law by Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee in March 2023. The law gained national attention because it appeared designed to limit drag performances through regulation of “male and female impersonators.” Parker provided several grounds for concluding that the law...

By Daniel Feller, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Tennessee Justin Jones, one of two Black members expelled from the state’s House of Representatives in April 2023, had run afoul of House leadership before. In 2019, as a private citizen, he was arrested following his actions in protesting a bust in the state capitol honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and later Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. While the expulsion of Jones and his colleague, Justin J. Pearson, riveted the nation’s attention, a curious and related event in the Legislature’s other branch, the Tennessee Senate, passed...