News & Views
Mary Frances Berry - To honor John Lewis, we must turn back the rising tide of voter suppression. It has been a long and tumultuous year for voting rights since we lost one of their greatest defenders
It has been a long and tumultuous year since America’s loss of the legendary John Lewis. A year when we saw the birth of hope for a new era under new national leadership.Jared Farmer: Heirlooms of Conquest: Trees + Justice in Los Angeles. First episode of LENS.cast a new podcast from UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies.
In the first episode of LENS.cast, we explore the history and future of Los Angeles’s remarkable trees. California is more than palm trees: it is, according to University of Pennsylvania historian Jared Farmer, an incredible arboretum—a collection of species from all over the woGrant Stanton - Before July 4, American colonists celebrated Pope’s Day — an anti-Catholic rallying cry. Religious vilification united early Americans
As Americans across the nation emerge from the pandemic ready to light up their grills and fireworks, it is timely to consider another holiday that worked to unify Americans in times of trouble: Pope’s Day.Mary Frances Berry - Supreme Court decision rules Arizona’s laws constitutional. While the Voting Rights Act should be interpreted broadly, the latest decision has a patina of fairness.
In a 6-3 decision penned by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the Supreme Court has ruled that Arizona’s election laws do not violate the Voting Rights Act. In her dissent in the Brnovich v.Anders Bright – MADE BY HISTORY - Ohio’s vaccine lottery scheme is working — so why does it bother us? Lotteries were once vehicles for the public good. But then Americans got skeptical about the role of chance.
Last Wednesday, 22-year-old Abbigail Bugenske became a millionaire thanks to Ohio’s new lottery scheme aimed at boosting coronavirus vaccination rates. Gov.The Tokyo Olympics and politics of the pandemic: Frederick Dickinson, a professor of Japanese history and director of the Center for East Asian Studies, explains Japan’s history with the Olympics and why he’s certain this year’s games will happen.
If all goes according to plan, the 2021 Tokyo Olympics will kick off on Friday, July 23, at Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium—one day shy of a full year since the original Summer 2020 games were scheduled to begin.OMNIA PODCAST - Season 2, Episode 7: Repair, Part II Breanna Moore and others speak about how institutions can perpetuate racial inequalities and the work that remains.
A podcast series where we explore the nation’s complex history with race and pose challenging questions: Who controls the narrative about the U.S.? Have we moved beyond our history of enslavement and Jim Crow? Are we at a moment of reckoning?Sarah Gordon (UPenn), and Kevin Waite (Durham Univ-UK) - California is finally confronting its history of slavery. Here’s how. Los Angeles is finding success at reshaping its commemorative landscape
The newest monument to Black history in Los Angeles is small enough to fit in your pocket. Rather than a physical structure, the monument is projected onto the landscape through the viewer’s phone using augmented reality (AR) technology.Nick Foretek - In a riveting story of rebellion, intrigue, love, betrayal, and exile, a Syrian revolutionary finds solace in the philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Azm’s wine.
A month after jihadists had caged and beaten him using a slab of wood studded with nails that punctured and gnashed his flesh, and two years before he would affix two nooses from his ceiling — one for himself and one for his starving dog — he drank all the philJared Farmer and other Penn Professors on THE WORLD AT OUR FEET. It’s our tiny oasis in a vast universe, and it’s feeling fragile. Five faculty give us the latest on Earth and its prospects.
Our habitat is a spheroid mostly made up of iron, oxygen, silicon, and magnesium that masses about 6.6 sextillion tons. Seventy-one percent of its surface is covered with water, and its surface temperatures can vary by more than 260 degrees Fahrenheit.
Welcome
Welcome to the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Over thirty historians in the standing faculty with a broad range of research specialties advance our understanding of the past.
Penn & Slavery Project
The Penn & Slavery Project teaches us that no colony, state, or well-funded university was buffered from slavery’s reach. Penn’s story is a national story, and one of great importance to our ongoing efforts to come to terms with our nations’s history of slavery.
Featured Students
Carson Eckhard
Carson didn’t come to Penn set on being a History Major. Yet her freshman year she enrolled in “The American South” and there wrote a paper about Southern U.S. universities and slavery.
John Mullan
John is a double-major in History and Arabic and Islamic Studies.
Archana Upadhyay
I’m a senior from Chicago majoring in World History. I transferred to Penn as a sophomore from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
