Author: TheConversation

By Katrina Finkelstein, PhD Student, University of Tennessee; and Derek H. Alderman, Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee On Veterans Day, people across America will thank veterans and active-duty military personnel for their service. But many members of the public do not have a clear understanding of what service means to people in the military. How do they honor their own? What kind of spaces and activities help them reflect and remember – beyond one day a year? We are cultural geographers who study how people’s emotions and connections with the past are represented physically in landscapes. Recently, our...

By Daniel Mandell, Professor of History, Truman State University Americans are increasingly worried about the rising tide of economic inequality, as fewer control more wealth. For the origins of these concerns, commentators usually point to the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, when a few men gained immense wealth and power in the U.S. and workers suffered extreme poverty. But fears of great wealth and the need for economic equality go back to the country’s origins. Wealth as a danger to the nation By the 1700s, Anglo-Americans generally believed that the best government was a republic...

By Alan J. Kellner, PhD Candidate in Political Science and Instructor in Chicago Field Studies, Northwestern University I few years ago I was walking with my parents through the newly constructed Titletown District in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a community development project across the street from Lambeau Field, where the Green Bay Packers play their home games. It features a local brewpub, a boutique hotel, free outdoor games like foosball and shuffleboard, and a large practice field, where kids can play football. At one point, I heard my dad say, “I know who this is.” He had picked out the...

By Jonathan Finn, Professor of Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University The 2021-22 NFL season is underway and Colin Kaepernick is still out of a job. It has been more than five years since he took a knee during the national anthem and in so doing further exposed issues of systemic racism in the NFL. I have been researching and writing about sport and media for several years and I frequently use Kaepernick’s case in my classes. To illuminate the gendered and racialized nature of that case and of the NFL, I ask a hypothetical question: what if Tom Brady...