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Category: Made By History

  • In 2026, like in 1770, standing armies in our cities erode freedom

    In January, Bruce Springsteen released a passionate anti-ICE ballad, “The Streets of Minneapolis,” in which he named U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “King Trump’s private army.” Dedicated to the memory of two protesters who died at the hands of armed government agents in a frigid Minnesota winter, the song invites comparisons to Paul Revere’s famous and equally passionate engraving of the 1770 Boston Massacre. Revere’s image depicts a bloodthirsty line of soldiers shooting directly into a crowd of unarmed Bostonians, killing five and injuring six more. In calling ICE a king’s private army, Springsteen drew on a long history of protest against standing armies, one built on the belief that accountability to the people and their representatives is the foundation for political liberty.

    Since the Magna Carta, Britons had been hostile to the idea of a standing or permanent army, one that existed even in peacetime, and that was paid for through taxes rather than staffed by volunteers. The 1689 Bill of Rights explicitly prohibited a standing army except with Parliament’s blessing. Within a few years, however, Parliament had softened its stance against armies in peacetime, since Britain was engaged in nearly continuous and often undeclared wars against France and Spain. In response, Britons firmed up other ground rules for a standing army: military power must always be subordinate to civilian authority, and some form of legislative consent was necessary. Without these guardrails, people feared, a monarch could simply turn his military might on his own subjects to quell dissent.

    The army could be used as a British police force, but not without complications. Magistrates and mayors regularly requested troops to come to their aid as they tried to catch smugglers and control rioting. Although a justice of the peace might occasionally be able to disperse a crowd by reading the Riot Act, those civilian authorities usually required military support. Eighteenth-century soldiers were trained for battle in the field, not to police civilians, and magistrates soon begged the war office to remove rowdy soldiers from their towns, and especially from the public houses where they were quartered.

    In 1768, the Massachusetts governor, like so many magistrates before him, asked the British War Office to send him troops in response to colonial protests against new tariffs set by Parliament. Bostonians felt deeply betrayed by the news of arriving troops. As one minister wrote: “To have a standing army! Good God! What can be worse to a people who have tasted the sweets of Liberty?” They were less concerned with the violence soldiers might bring than with the threat that a peacetime army posed to society and especially to the political rights of civilians.

    When the first two regiments of Redcoats landed in Boston Harbor in October 1768, they marched with flags flying and drums beating along the central Long Wharf into the heart of the city, where they appropriated Boston Common and Faneuil Hall as temporary campsites. Determined to demonstrate to the world that their peaceful town had no need of troops to keep order, Bostonians mostly refused to rise to the bait. For at least a while, there was nothing for the troops to do.

    Instead, the Sons of Liberty turned to the press to protest the troops’ arrival. In the year and a half that British soldiers lived in Boston, the newspapers were crammed with examples of how the very presence of a standing army could destroy every part of a civilized society, from church services (when the army band deliberately played music during the sermon) to parental authority (as young women defied their fathers to date Redcoats).

    Most of all, colonists feared the impact of a standing army on political freedom. How could a free people debate, much less protest, at the point of a bayonet? When the British army pointed its cannons at the door of the Massachusetts legislature, it was hard to escape the conclusion that a standing army was the king’s way of taking back political power. In sum, as the Massachusetts assembly complained to the governor in 1769, “establishing a Standing Army in this Colony, in a Time of Peace, without the Consent of the General Assembly of the same, is an Invasion of the natural Rights of the People.”

    The death of British protesters at the hands of soldiers was not uncommon in England, and colonists and officers alike knew that a violent clash was only a matter of time. On March 5, 1770, troops fired into a crowd of civilians in downtown Boston, killing Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, and James Caldwell immediately; Patrick Carr and teenager Samuel Maverick later died of their wounds. Even 256 years later, the exact sequence of events that led to the shooting is impossible to discover. Its importance for shaping the American Revolution, however, is clear.

    On the night of the shooting, the acting governor of Massachusetts rushed to the scene and was horrified to see people bleeding to death on the snow before the seat of governmental power, today the Old State House. He swore he would launch a full civilian investigation with local law enforcement, and he promised, “I will live and die by the law.”

    The governor was as good as his word. That night, the captain in charge turned himself in to the local jail, as did the men under his command. John Adams, urged by the Sons of Liberty to demonstrate Bostonians’ equally strong commitment to the rule of law, took on the defense of the British soldiers, successfully winning acquittals for most of them. Three years later, Adams reflected that defending the soldiers was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.” And he was quite convinced that the jury verdict “was exactly right.”

    At the same time, Adams agreed that Boston should certainly “call the Action of that Night a Massacre.” In fact, he wrote, “[I]t is the strongest of Proofs of the Danger of standing Armies.” The experience of living with — and dying at the hands of — a standing army forever damaged Bostonians’ trust in the British empire.

    In 1776, Congress highlighted the Boston Massacre in its list of grievances against George III. The 11th complaint drew directly from the Massachusetts legislature’s complaint seven years earlier: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.” It was not the violence that so horrified colonists; it was the lack of legislative consent.

    Despite the striking parallels, the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year were not just retreads of the Boston Massacre. For the Redcoats, face coverings and anonymity were not options; they had been living among Bostonians for a year and a half, becoming neighbors and sometimes even family. No one claimed the troops had legal immunity, and even the royal governor, who had requested the troops, believed in holding individual soldiers accountable for their actions.

    In those ways, the shooting in Boston defied fewer norms than the activities of ICE in Minneapolis two and a half centuries later. Even so, the Boston Massacre and its consequences were no small part of the forces that impelled colonists toward a final break with the British empire.

    Serena Zabin is the Stephen R. Lewis Jr. Professor of History and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College and the author of “The Boston Massacre: A Family History.”

    The “Road to 250” series is an initiative of Historians for 2026, a group of early American academics, public historians, archivists, and educators devoted to shaping an accurate, inclusive, and just public memory of the American Founding for the 250th anniversary.

    Made By History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

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  • Frederick Douglass’ critical lesson for the 250th: ‘Contend, contend’

    Frederick Douglass’ critical lesson for the 250th: ‘Contend, contend’

    As the country moves toward the 250th celebration, the official directive from the Trump administration is clear: be proud, be grateful, and rejoice in our great nation. This rosy narrative overlooks the global political conflicts, fractured economy, and longstanding racial and gendered inequalities that have shaped our country from its founding. These difficult realities are not footnotes to American history but a reminder of all of the ways that our nation continues to fail to live up to its espoused values. This is why one of the greatest speeches in American history resonates this time of year and especially on the eve of our nation’s 250th birthday: Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

    Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass escaped from bondage to become the foremost African American abolitionist, orator, and intellectual of the nineteenth century. His famous “Fourth of July” speech is a profound declaration of faith in the promise of America and its “saving principles.” In this speech, delivered pointedly on July 5, 1852, not July 4, in Rochester, New York, Douglass argues that the foundations of American democracy are not fundamentally rotten, just mistaken in their implementation, and that the values enshrined in the founding mythology and documents might yet redeem America from its sins. It is a galvanizing and patriotic text, and it anticipates what W.E.B. Du Bois would say in 1935 in Black Reconstruction in America: that “democracy died save in the hearts of Black folk.”

    But this year, a different piece by Douglass resonates: “The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition,” written in 1893, just two years before he died. In that pamphlet, Douglass criticizes another national commemoration that asked Americans to set aside painful realities in favor of a more flattering narrative. His argument—that the struggle against racial injustice must continue not because success is guaranteed, or even likely, but because it is the right thing to do when confronted with injustice—continues to matter today.

    The pamphlet, “The Reason Why: The Colored American is not in the World’s Columbia Exhibition,” had to be distributed and discussed from the Haitian exhibition space at 1893 World Fair in Chicago because African Americans were denied any real role in the Fair.Courtesy of NKCDC

    In this pamphlet, Douglass protested the World’s Fair in Chicago, a grand celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 arrival in the “New World.” The fair, Douglass argued, distorted American history by erasing the contributions of Black Americans whose labor and suffering had made that very “progress” possible. By this time, Douglass had witnessed the Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction and the violent undoing of Reconstruction. He had seen the Supreme Court strike down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. As white Americans imposed the brutal logic of Jim Crow across the nation, Douglass came to believe that the consciences he had spent his life appealing to had been so corrupted by white supremacy that they could no longer be relied on to redeem America.

    And yet, in the closing passages of the pamphlet, Douglass did not embrace despair or advocate for retreat. Instead, he offered the metaphor of a ship that must embrace the dangers of the open sea. The ship might remain safely anchored in harbor but this safety, he argued, is deceptive. The ship must weather the storm. And he followed it up with something even more profound: “Next to victory is the glory and happiness of…contending for it. Therefore, contend, contend! That we should have to contend and strive for what is freely conceded to other citizens without effort or demand may indeed be a hardship, but there is compensation here as elsewhere. Contest is itself ennobling. A life devoid of purpose and earnest effort is a worthless life. Conflict is better than stagnation.” For Douglass, the act of contending itself is meaningful. The struggle testifies to the injustice it intends to repair.

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    The origins and reception of the pamphlet reveal the fault lines in American society at the end of the 19th century. Douglass had appealed to Black communities across the nation for funds to print the pamphlet and had received almost nothing. Discouraged, he told his collaborator, Ida B. Wells, that he wanted to abandon the effort. It was Wells who insisted otherwise, organizing with many Black women’s organizations to raise the necessary resources. Ironically, the man who would close his pamphlet urging Black Americans to “contend, contend” had to be persuaded to continue contending himself.

    The reception of the pamphlet was divided and harsh. Many prominent white journalists called Douglass a complainer. Even within the Black press, there was hardly consensus. Some Black journalists endorsed his indictment of the fair while others argued that Black economic and educational enfranchisement were more important than another lament of prejudice. This was a broader debate within the Black community that Douglass did not settle in the pamphlet. What he offered instead was something harder and arguably more important today: the argument that we must continue to fight even when we are not winning the war.

    This is an extraordinary argument coming from Douglass at the end of his life. He had every reason to give up the fight. He had spent decades working to change America, and America had proven far more resistant to that change than he had originally hoped. And yet he insisted: contend, contend.

    At this moment of democratic fracture and racial retrenchment in America, Douglass’s argument deserves a second hearing. The Supreme Court has dismantled affirmative action, executive orders have unraveled federal civil rights commitments, and disparities in housing, education, healthcare, and criminal justice persist and deepen. The fight against racial injustice must continue not because we can be assured of our triumph but because our commitment to America’s “saving principles” should not falter even when those principles seem out of reach. Douglass’s refusal to abandon the fight—his willingness to steer into the storm—is not merely a biographical detail about an American at the end of his life. It is an argument about what it means to celebrate America and her saving principles.

    Happy 250th birthday, America. Contend, contend.

    Dr. Amy Gais is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Comparative Literature and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Coerced Conscience (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and is currently working on a book project on dissimulation, resistance, and freedom in African American political thought.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • The biggest U.S. commemorations happen when we need them the most

    Though much has changed since America’s last notable birthday in 1976, there are many echoes of the Bicentennial’s circumstances and its opportunities in 2026. In yet another time of uncertainty and pessimism, this 250th birthday, like the Bicentennial 50 years ago, offers Americans an opportunity to reconsider their connection to the past and their vision for the future.

    The Bicentennial babies are turning 50 this year.

    Following one of the most fractious decades in American history, the years approaching the Bicentennial were marked by upheaval. In 1973, the OAPEC oil embargo created a gas crisis that contributed to a global recession and inflation as high as 12%. American lost confidence in their leaders, especially after Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency in August 1974, following two years of fallout over the Watergate scandal. The rights revolution of the previous decade brought issues such as race, gender, and sexuality into mainstream media. Countless laws and social norms changed, sparking backlash among conservatives.

    These circumstances caused many Americans to wonder what was worth celebrating in 1976. Many marginalized groups questioned whether they should celebrate the Bicentennial at all. A broad array of social and civil rights movements seized on the Bicentennial as an opportunity to challenge the triumphal narrative familiar to so many Americans. Their efforts brought into stark relief the paradoxical relationship between the rhetoric surrounding the nation’s founding and its history of oppression. And the conversations that emerged around confronting this more complicated history shaped the Bicentennial’s commemoration and its longer-term impact.

    The circumstances surrounding America’s 250th anniversary are strikingly similar. Political scandals have threatened to engulf the current administration, as the nation has again found itself mired in an unpopular foreign war and a gas crisis, with prices nearly doubling in the last year. Years of inflation have led to a cost-of-living crisis for many Americans. And the last twenty-five years have produced an even greater distrust of institutions such as the government, the media, and the church. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that nearly 60% of Americans think the nation’s best years are behind us. As during the Bicentennial in 1976, many Americans are again wondering what about the nation’s past and present is worth celebrating.

    Challenging circumstances, however, are not unique to the last two anniversaries. In 1876, Americans commemorated the Centennial in the wake of an economic panic in 1873, increased immigration, the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, and a constitutional crisis brought about that year by one of the most fiercely contested presidential elections in the nation’s history. In such circumstances, the 1876 commemorations looked toward the future. They were marked by a growing sense of the United States being poised as an industrial power to take its place on the world stage, and by the efforts of African Americans and suffragists to realize a future of equal citizenship and rights.

    In contrast, there was much less enthusiasm during America’s 150th in 1926. With the economy booming, many Americans of the roaring 20s did not need the anniversary. In other words, anniversaries of the Revolution have mattered most during the nation’s most trying times. When the American experiment seems closest to failure, we have used our anniversaries to engage in conversations about the meaning of the past and the future we want to create.

    Federal funding also impacts how these anniversaries are celebrated, and in that regard, the Bicentennial and the 250th could not be more different. In the 1970s, the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration gave countless grants to small groups, institutions, and projects across the country. Those grants helped fund local programs, the preservation of local historical sites, and the creation of new sites and museums. In the years leading up to 250, however, there has been a rapid change in the federal funding landscape for historical sites and projects.

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    Significant cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities and other agencies have meant fewer grants and resources to support similar local and historical projects like in the years leading up to 1976. As a result, institutions, historical sites, and museums—large and small—have had to take it upon themselves to both produce and fund meaningful programming for the public. From larger institutions like the Museum of the American Revolution to countless institutions in small towns and counties across the country, Americans have been forced to take responsibility for commemorating 250 for themselves and their fellow citizens. But following the model of 1976, they are working to foster conversations about the complexity of the past alongside visions of the future. And as with the Bicentennial, the greatest opportunities for reconnecting with the nation will come from the work done at the local level.

    Ultimately, the 250th is not just a historical anniversary; it is a civic opportunity. And that opportunity is not limited to July 4, 2026. Revolutionary anniversaries will continue on the national and local levels for more than a decade, eventually culminating with the bicentennials of the Constitution in 2037 and the Bill of Rights in 2039. And like the bicentennials for those events, these 250th commemorations will provide a platform for Americans to reconsider what the revolution and its ideals mean to them in the present moment. The work done by independent and local institutions and organizations across the country will again give Americans the tools and the impetus to engage with the past in meaningful ways. When we seize those opportunities, we become part of the nation’s long tradition of using our anniversaries of the Revolution to imagine a new and better future.

    Michael D. Hattem is the author of The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History and is an America250 Media Fellow of the Jack Miller Center.

    The “Road to 250” series is an initiative of Historians for 2026, a group of early American academics, public historians, archivists, and educators devoted to shaping an accurate, inclusive, and just public memory of the American Founding for the 250th anniversary.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • America’s rich tradition of July Fourth protest is worth recalling

    America’s rich tradition of July Fourth protest is worth recalling

    No Kings and other protests opposing the policies and executive overreach of the Trump administration continue to draw crowds across the country, most recently on Flag Day, June 14, which was also the president’s 80th birthday. While critics have denounced these demonstrators as un-American — House Speaker Mike Johnson called a 2025 No Kings march a “hate America rally” — those voicing dissent, pushing for change and speaking truth to power are, in fact, participating in a tradition at our nation’s core.

    That tradition dates back to July 4, 1776, when the Continental Congress, citing a list of grievances, declared independence from the rule of a would-be despot, King George III. The founders’ act of resistance set an example that ordinary Americans would follow. According to historian David Waldstreicher, citizens in the early republic used celebrations not just to commemorate independence, but to lay claim to the lofty principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, namely that all are created equal, that they have unalienable rights, and that government is instituted to secure those rights, deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.

    The custom continued for two-plus centuries, with Americans regularly marching, picketing, or otherwise taking to the streets on the Fourth to realize a more perfect union.

    Centennial International Exhibition, 1876.Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

    Perhaps the most famous Independence Day protest occurred in 1876 in Philadelphia. As tens of thousands gathered for the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park to celebrate a century of American progress in the arts, in industry, and in economic development, Susan B. Anthony protested the fact that half the nation, women, remained unable to vote and were thus without the unalienable rights named in the declaration.

    Anthony and a determined group of suffragists attempted to introduce a statement drafted by the National Woman Suffrage Association into the exhibition’s official proceedings. When Joseph Hawley, president of the United States Centennial Commission, prevented the women from doing so, Anthony led a procession to Independence Hall, where she read aloud the suffragists’ “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States” to a crowd that quickly gathered around her. Patterned after the original declaration, the text condemned the government for denying women the franchise, before ending with a clear demand: “We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.”

    It took decades of nonviolent action before Congress passed the 19th Amendment, granting women the constitutional right to vote. But Anthony’s principled stance contributed to a rich history of July Fourth protests that continued a century later, as the nation prepared to mark the Bicentennial.

    On July 4, 1976, approximately 10,000 to 15,000 demonstrators massed in Washington, D.C., on America’s 200th birthday. Assembled by the People’s Bicentennial Commission, a New Left group, near the Jefferson Memorial, they marched to the U.S. Capitol under a banner reading, “Independence from Big Business.”

    The group’s populist call for economic democracy resonated in the mid-1970s, when the country was still reeling from a divisive war (Vietnam), a constitutional crisis (Watergate), and an economic recession that saw both inflation (5.97% in July 1976) and unemployment (7.6%) soar. Many people signed the commission’s “Declaration of Economic Independence” calling for limits on concentrated corporate power in the interest of the common good. “We, therefore, the Citizens of the United States of America,” the declaration stated, “hereby call for the abolition of these giant institutions of tyranny … to provide for the equal and democratic participation of all American Citizens in the economic decisions … that effect … our Nation.”

    Other protests occurred across the country, in Detroit and Chicago, as well as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Even Salt Lake City witnessed a small demonstration — albeit on Saturday, July 3, so as not to disturb the Christian Sabbath.

    Marchers with the Rich Off Our Backs Coalition demonstrate at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia on July 3, 1976.George D. McDowell Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Photographs

    The largest gatherings, though, were in Philadelphia, where more than 3,000 demonstrators gathered in Norris Square, under the auspices of a group called the Rich Off Our Backs Coalition, to march for jobs and income and economic justice — backed by fatigue-wearing Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who chanted: “One, two, three, four, we won’t fight a rich man’s war.”

    Another group, the July 4th Coalition, rallied 30,000-plus in Fairmount Park, site of the Bicentennial, to demand Puerto Rican independence, greater rights for Black Americans, Native Americans, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, and much else. Karen DeCrow, president of the National Organization for Women, reread the declaration Susan B. Anthony had introduced a century earlier to flag the limited progress the nation had made toward gender equity since 1876. Black Panther leader Elaine Brown, a native Philadelphian, decried America’s 200-year history of racism.

    A group of Native Americans leads a July 4th Coalition protest parade at 33rd and Diamond Streets in Philadelphia on July 4, 1976.George D. McDowell Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Photographs

    Despite opposition — Mayor Frank Rizzo famously requested 15,000 federal troops to maintain order — the demonstrations remained peaceful. Organizers won plaudits even from those who did not necessarily agree with their critiques. Protesters had a right, The Inquirer editors agreed, to call attention to America’s shortcomings, as they saw them. Dissent was as integral to the Fourth of July as bunting and brass bands: Its existence confirmed “the strength and genius of American democracy.”

    Today, according to polls, Americans typically mark Independence Day by barbecuing, shooting fireworks, going to the beach, viewing a parade, traveling, watching patriotic movies, or relaxing at home. Participating in a protest, demonstration, rally, or other nonviolent action does not rate a mention.

    That’s certainly understandable. These days are exhausting, and we all just want a break, a moment to have a laugh with family and friends.

    Yet, America’s rich tradition of July Fourth protest is worth recalling, especially at a time when the nation’s democratic institutions are under stress, for it once served as an essential tool that enabled Americans to hold their leaders to account for the words of 1776. We, the people, have never quite realized those words — written principally by a slave owner, Thomas Jefferson.

    But for 250 years and counting, the Declaration of Independence has set a “moral standard,” as historian Pauline Maier has argued, to which not only feminists and civil rights activists but civil libertarians and laborers have turned time and again in pursuit of liberty from their oppressors, be those would-be tyrants, foreign or domestic.

    M. Todd Bennett, a professor of history at East Carolina University, and David McKean, former director of policy planning in the U.S. Department of State, are the authors of “The Flag Was Still There: A History of the American Experiment in Five Anniversaries” (PublicAffairs, 2026).

    Made By History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

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  • Conservative education warriors have reshaped GOP politics — even if their crusades often fail

    Conservative education warriors have reshaped GOP politics — even if their crusades often fail

    Since its founding in 2021, the educational advocacy group Moms for Liberty has been mobilizing conservative mothers across the country against school curriculum they deem indoctrinating, un-American, anti-Christian, and antithetical to their understanding of family values.

    They’ve targeted books that explore LGBTQ+ themes, transgender athletes, and curriculum they deride as critical race theory or as too focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. More broadly, they claim to be fighting to protect their parental rights to control what their children learn.

    Members of Moms for Liberty have earned seats on school boards, garnered national media attention, and infiltrated the highest levels of conservative policymaking. According to cofounder and CEO Tina Descovich, she has visited President Donald Trump’s White House more than a dozen times.

    Moms for Liberty has also made waves in the Philadelphia suburbs, especially in Bucks County, which boasted the largest leadership team of any chapter in the country by April 2025. At a Harrisburg-area event last October, Descovich said: “I am very familiar with Bucks County. Before I knew it existed, I knew the [Bucks County] Beacon existed because they were writing trash pieces about us.”

    Groups like Moms for Liberty have proved effective at making political noise — and even notching some policy wins, at least temporarily. Yet, the group is really just a continuation of a decades-long crusade by conservative white women to weaponize public education in the service of a right-wing agenda. While it has largely failed to transform American curriculum, this push has turned these women into key figures in Republican politics who have made fighting the culture wars a GOP priority.

    The modern conservative movement since World War II owes much of its success to the work of grassroots education warriors.

    These women proudly embraced traditional gender roles. They saw them as a marker of success because many women in their mothers’ generation had to work outside of the home to make ends meet in the Great Depression and wartime years.

    Even as some of these conservative women became full-time political activists, they claimed the mantle of traditional homemakers and mothers — which aroused charges of hypocrisy from critics. Yet, they argued that their advocacy work in the traditionally male world of politics and education policy was wholly consistent with traditional gender roles because protecting innocent children from worldly dangers was a natural role for women and mothers.

    At their kitchen tables and in PTA meetings across the country, these “suburban warriors” launched far-reaching campaigns against sex education, multicultural curriculum, and other aspects of schooling they deemed antithetical to traditional American values.

    In the 1970s and 1980s, as the political parties realigned, these conservative education warriors emerged as a crucial Republican constituency and a core part of the New Right coalition. These white women were galvanized by the recent gains of the Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision — which provided a right for women to have legal abortions under certain circumstances — and debates over the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which they claimed (without evidence) would decimate the female homemaking role.

    These recent changes threatened to disrupt what the conservative women argued were divinely inspired gender roles, which were embodied by the “traditional” nuclear family of a working male breadwinner, a female homemaker, and kids. They feared that big government-backed forces might take away this ideal life, which many had only recently achieved.

    Increasingly, these women looked to public schools as the place to fight their crusade. Taxpayers funded the schools, and they were responsible for shaping the next generation of Americans outside of parental control.

    In 1974, the education wars burst onto the national stage in Kanawha County, W.Va., thanks to an ugly and violent struggle over school textbooks. The controversy began after Alice Moore, a 29-year-old mother and the lone woman on the county school board, objected to a newly adopted language arts curriculum she deemed indoctrinating, racially divisive, and steeped in “secular humanism.”

    This latter concept wasn’t new. It dated to the late 19th century, and argued that people could gain knowledge through reason, intellect, and logic rather than relying upon religious teaching.

    Yet in the 1970s conservatives thrust it into the spotlight, because they needed a fresh villain. Tried-and-true messaging on anti-communism had grown stale. But pushing secular humanism as the latest liberal conspiracy aligned with the New Right’s renewed focus on faith, family, and traditional gender roles, while energizing Christian conservatives.

    Moore and her allies saw secular humanism as increasingly influential in education — and as incredibly hostile to Christianity and their narrow definition of divinely inspired traditional family values. It further alarmed them because they saw secular humanism as teaching students to challenge their parents’ authority. Within a few years, the once obscure concept would become the New Right’s star bogeyman.

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    Throughout the fall of 1974, Moore read excerpts from the textbooks before the school board. She singled out Black nationalist Eldridge Cleaver, whose writings allegedly produced “racial hatred” toward white people. She also took issue with “dialectology,” a study of dialects that included lessons on African American vernacular — what she called “ghetto dialect” — that she believed to be antithetical to American speech.

    By October, the controversy had produced two shootings, dozens of arrests, and multiple rounds of bombings, boycotts, and school bus blockades.

    Moore’s crusade against secular humanism in West Virginia quickly caught the attention of national conservative organizations. The Heritage Foundation featured Kanawha County in its 1976 study, “Secular Humanism and the Schools: The Issue Whose Time Has Come.” Phyllis Schlafly — the country’s most famous anti-feminist at the time — jumped into the fray, claiming that public education promoted “a tolerance of violence, theft, adultery, obscenity, profanity, and blasphemy.”

    In part because organizations like the Heritage Foundation and Schlafly’s Eagle Forum highlighted Moore’s activism for like-minded conservative women, it inspired conservative mothers across the country to wage their own crusades against dirty textbooks. In the ensuing years, they launched repeated battles against seemingly subversive curriculum.

    In 1983, in rural East Tennessee, fundamentalist mother Vicki Frost waged her own legal battle against the Hawkins County school board after discovering objectionable material in her daughter’s reading textbook, including alleged depictions of telepathy, witchcraft, and black magic that violated her religious beliefs.

    In Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education — a case that became known as “Scopes II” because of Hawkins County’s proximity to the original Scopes trial — Frost and her fellow plaintiffs alleged that the school board’s policies violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. Their legal counsel came courtesy of Concerned Women for America, whose founder, Beverly LaHaye, took Frost on a national speaking tour to publicize the alleged dangers of modern textbooks. Although the plaintiffs lost their case on appeal, LaHaye deemed the case a “PR success” that “identified us as a friend of the family.”

    The result epitomized the outcome of the broader education wars. Fighting against offensive school curriculums turned many conservative women into key figures in the culture wars, with substantial reach and political impact. They quickly became politically astute grassroots organizers who leveraged their identities as white Christian homemakers and mothers to argue for an educational system rooted in Christianity, the traditional nuclear family, and American exceptionalism.

    The impact of these organizers, however, hasn’t necessarily come in the classroom. Most of Moore’s “dirty books” found their way into the Kanawha County curriculum. Frost and the plaintiffs in Hawkins County ultimately lost their case on appeal. In recent years, the majority of school board candidates backed by Moms for Liberty have similarly suffered defeat.

    Yet, these organizers have been able to mobilize thousands of culturally conservative women — particularly other white Christian mothers — and bring them into the Republican Party. Their involvement has driven the GOP to make the culture wars a key component of the party’s identity.

    These earlier crusaders also created a language that remains a staple of conservative critiques of public education to the present day. More than five decades after Moore’s war, conservative organizations continue to emphasize “parental rights,” “family values,” and “school choice” in their efforts to influence American education.

    When groups like Moms for Liberty claim public schools are indoctrinating children with “woke” ideologies such as critical race theory, they rely upon a well-established playbook that conservative women have drawn upon for more than half a century. Despite mixed results in America’s actual classrooms, their political activism has proved a tried-and-true means for both enflaming public opinion and solidifying the role of self-proclaimed traditional mothers and homemakers within modern conservatism.

    Allen Fletcher is a public historian and journal editor with research interests in Appalachia, gender, and the history of American education. His current book, “Building Schools, Building Communities: Appalachian Women and the Struggle for Educational Change,” is under contract with LSU Press.

    Made By History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • Florida shows how not to teach U.S. history on the republic’s 250th anniversary

    Florida shows how not to teach U.S. history on the republic’s 250th anniversary

    The state of Florida recently released a new American history high school course with a conservative tilt. Troublingly, it glosses over the relationship between the founders and slavery—a topic that should in 2026 promote a rich understanding of the U.S. past, but one that has also been a subject of controversy, including in Philadelphia at the site of the President’s House. In fact, slavery was central to the economic growth and expansion of the young republic, so much so that it would take a long and brutal war to get rid of it. As Abraham Lincoln, dealing with slavery during the Civil War, put it: “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.”

    On the 250th anniversary of the founding of the American republic, it bears repeating that the history of the United States is neither the linear, uninterrupted history of American exceptionalism that the Florida framework promotes nor is it solely an unremitting story of racism and reaction. Students benefit from learning about the brutality of slavery as well as the bravery of those ordinary Americans, men and women, Black and white, who resisted it. Emphasizing just one part of this equation is incomplete and bad history.

    The Florida course framework portrays the founding generation of American revolutionists as unanimously antislavery. The truth is more complex. While most of the northern founders like Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay lent the prestige of their names to abolition societies, most southern founders did not. Their actions reflected the reality on the ground. Between 1779-1804, northern states gradually abolished slavery. But southern slavery not only persisted but expanded considerably in the early American republic. If the founders were unanimous, what explains this divergence?

    While Jefferson and Madison professed to abhor slavery in their writings, like most southern enslavers they did not free their slaves. Jefferson made an exception for his own progeny, freeing select enslaved people. During his presidency, George Washington famously pursued his slave Ona Judge, who had escaped enslavement, with a relentless energy. However, New Hampshire authorities refused to render her back to the President—a signal of diverging attitudes and policies about slavery in the early republic.

    Washington did become the only prominent member of the so-called Virginia dynasty of Presidents to free his slaves on his death. It was a belated gesture. As the Black abolitionist Reverend Richard Allen noted in his eulogy of Washington in 1799, “he dared to do his duty, and wipe off the only stain with which man could ever reproach him.” While Washington was lauded as the Father of the Nation, few southern slaveholders followed his example, as Allen had hoped.

    The Florida history standards also present the U.S. Constitution, which was signed in 1787, ratified in 1788, and went into effect with the launch of the federal government in 1789, as an antislavery document rather than one that contained expedient compromises on the issue of slavery. One particularly egregious example of this relates to the three-fifths clause, which counted the enslaved population at a three-fifths proportion for representation and taxes. The Florida guidelines consider this an antislavery clause because the enslaved population was not counted fully. But this compromise led to southern domination over the federal government until Lincoln’s election as it gave the slave states disproportionate representation in Congress.

    The framers of the Constitution were careful not to use the words slavery and slaves in the fundamental legal document of the republic. Instead, they employed euphemisms such as “persons held to service” or “all other persons.” But that did not prevent contemporary abolitionists from bemoaning its fugitive slave clause, a part of the Constitution that gave southern laws of slavery extraterritoriality in the free states—an endless source of political friction between the states—and the continuation of the African slave trade, an execrable commerce whose tortures were well known then, until 1808.

    While Florida students under the new guidelines would learn about a debate among abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass on whether the Constitution was a proslavery or antislavery document, they would miss other important context. For example, the guidelines elide the equally important debate among abolitionists on the extent of the complicity of American churches in upholding slavery. Instead, abolition is framed as a Christian movement—with no mention of the schism over the issue of slavery leading to religious divisions that still exist today, including northern and southern Methodist and Baptist denominations.

    The framework also includes words of praise for proslavery theorist John C. Calhoun, a planter politician from South Carolina, as a constitutional thinker. Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson are portrayed as “honorable,” pious, and militarily skilled with little mention of their cause of human bondage, which Ulysses Grant called “one of the worst for which a people ever fought.” Mississippi’s “Declaration of the Immediate Causes which induce and justify Secession” clearly stated: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”

    Indeed, Lee’s army enslaved free Black people in Pennsylvania while retreating from Gettysburg in 1863—not a very honorable thing to do and explicitly condemned in the Bible as man stealing. But this context is missing in the new Florida guidance.

    The histories of Reconstruction and the Progressive era are not particularly well understood by the public. The Florida guidelines portray Lincoln as being at odds with Radical Republicans who implemented Reconstruction. He wasn’t. It also casts Andrew Johnson as continuing his “lenient” policy to the south, a canard that Johnson assiduously promoted to oppose Reconstruction. In fact, before his death, Lincoln became the first U.S. President to endorse Black citizenship and male suffrage, the cornerstone of Reconstruction. Radicals such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner as well as moderate Republicans like Lincoln championed the constitutional amendments and federal laws that comprised Reconstruction.

    Echoing a viewpoint espoused by white Southern elites at the time, Reconstruction gets short shrift and is deemed a failure in Florida’s new standards. Actually, the Reconstruction amendments and the first federal civil rights laws were tremendous achievements. We know the first 10 amendments to the Constitution as the “Bill of Rights” today because the author of the consequential Fourteenth Amendment that established national citizenship by birthright or naturalization, John Bingham, gave them that moniker and it eventually stuck. And Reconstruction didn’t fail; a systematic campaign of domestic racist terror in the south and reactionary judicial decisions by the United States Supreme Court overthrew it.

    The Jim Crow era that followed became a cautionary tale of how quickly and completely a country can lose its democracy and rights gained. But the Florida guidelines casts more than half a century of Jim Crow as a blip or aberration from a national history otherwise committed to democratic ideals.

    Students will be better prepared to be citizens of the republic when presented with differentiated historical narratives rather than having sanitized versions of the past served up to them. The Florida standards not only whitewash the past, they evoke an unchanging founding moment and pristine originalism—as though Americans in the founding era did not argue, debate, or change their thinking about slavery over time.

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    It also distorts how Americans continue to fight to expand—or curtail—access to rights and democracy more broadly. For instance, Progressive era reforms that included government regulation of the economy and working conditions are portrayed as “unbound by traditional constitutional restraints.”

    Most historians argue that our modern democracy was founded during Reconstruction, whose seeds later grew in the 20th century and were expanded by the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s. But, as in previous eras, the fundamental questions remain contested and unsettled. That is both clear in the historical record and the foundational knowledge students must understand to continue to expand or improve our democracy today.

    Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and author most recently of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • After a century of false starts, soccer has taken off in the U.S.

    The 2026 FIFA World Cup — which includes six games in Philadelphia — has taken the U.S. by storm. The excitement generated by the tournament reflects how, in contemporary American society, soccer has become a feature of everyday life.

    Parents drive their kids to and from soccer practices and fork out large sums of money for travel games. At the professional level, Major League Soccer (MLS) and the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) are thriving. The U.S. women’s national team has won a record five Olympic gold medals and four World Cup titles. Even European soccer has taken off with American fans: this year, the English Premier League (EPL) season opener between Chelsea and Manchester City drew close to 2 million viewers in the U.S.

    The meteoric rise of soccer in the U.S., however, is a recent phenomenon. While Americans have played the game for centuries, it struggled to take off in the U.S. A number of factors drove soccer’s struggle to catch on, including ideas about masculinity and Americanness, a lack of infrastructure and the failure to build robust college soccer programs. Yet, in the 21st century, immigration, demographic shifts, technological changes and the rapid growth of youth soccer have transformed the landscape. Soccer has moved from a fringe and unpopular sport to become one of the most popular sports in America — even ahead of baseball according to one poll.

    In 1869, Rutgers beat Princeton 6-4 in the first American collegiate soccer game. By the early 20th century, teams like Fall River Football Club had become established enough to play against European teams including the Glasgow Rangers and Sparta Prague.

    Bethlehem Steel, based in Bethlehem Pa., was one of the most dominant teams in the early 20th century. It built what was widely regarded as the first soccer specific stadium in the U.S. and went on to win a record five U.S. Open Cups.

    Although the game seemed to be taking root — especially after the formation of the American Soccer League (ASL) in 1921 — it was predominately an amateur sport, even as professional soccer took off in Europe.

    The ASL hit rough shoals in its earliest days: only three of the initial clubs returned for a second season. Financial struggles were quite common in the league, and crowds were sparse.

    In the early 20th century, the near absence of soccer on American college campuses entrenched its status as a fringe sport. Other sports like baseball and basketball were taking off on campuses at the time, a signal of what sports young people were interested in playing. The problem was compounded by the lack of a national administrative structure, which ensured that almost no organized soccer took place beyond high school.

    Soccer also suffered from the lack of physical infrastructure. While sports like baseball and basketball developed at the professional level in the U.S. — including the construction of stadiums and arenas — soccer was forced to rely on baseball stadiums for games. For instance, Grand Avenue Baseball Ground in St. Louis, hosted four U.S Open Cups between 1929 and 1948 while also serving several Major League Baseball teams. Soccer in 20th century America simply wasn’t a robust enough business to justify the construction of multimillion-dollar stadiums.

    These challenges and tribulations plaguing soccer had a significant impact on sport’s growth in the U.S.

    At the college level, the game remained on the periphery of the American sports landscape. In 1939, only eight universities and colleges had men’s soccer teams and there were no interregional matches or postseason tournaments. It would take another 20 years before the National Collegiate Athletic Association sponsored a postseason soccer championship.

    Meanwhile, American football remained dominant on college campuses. Commenting in a New York Times article on soccer, an official from an unnamed American university argued that it was a good sport and must be played “in addition to football but should not supplant the latter game.”

    Soccer was stuck in neutral, even after two rival professional leagues, the National Professional Soccer League and the United Soccer Association, merged to form the North American Soccer League (NASL) in 1968.

    In 1975, the arrival of Edson Arantes do Nascimento — better known as Pelé — was supposed to change everything. Following sustained lobbying from New York Cosmos General Manager Clive Toye and intervention by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the superstar agreed to bring his talents to the U.S.

    Hopes, however, for a soccer revolution never truly materialized. While Pelé drew huge crowds to his games, his proclamation that soccer had “finally arrived in the United States” proved to be only hype. A decade after his heralded arrival, the NASL actually collapsed due to ballooning costs — leaving the U.S. without any serious professional league for several years.

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    No one was quite sure precisely why the most popular global sport couldn’t break through in the U.S. Some observers wondered if the problem was that the sport simply wasn’t American.

    The game ran afoul of American ideas of masculinity, which were primarily associated with aggression and capacity for violence, both of which were celebrated aspects of football. Dick Young, the former sports columnist for the New York Daily News once described soccer as “a game for commie pansies.”

    While sports like baseball and basketball weren’t as violent as football, they had the built in infrastructure — stadiums, robust college programs, big money television deals — and cultural cachet from a century of being in the top tier of American sports. Soccer lacked these advantages, and its inability to overcome the deep seated stigmas about the game kept the sport on the margins of the American sports landscape throughout the late 20th century.

    In the 21st century however, everything has shifted. The structural barriers holding soccer back began to erode, starting with youth leagues. Youth soccer grew in prominence, including the development of travel leagues. This growth, in turn, produced a pipeline of talent for professional soccer teams. Highly skilled American players like Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie have become global superstars.

    Major League Soccer, which launched in 1993 as part of the U.S. bid for the 1994 World Cup, was initially treated as a retirement league for star players with declining skills. Yet, the emergence of this homegrown talent pipeline created a pool of exciting young players for MLS teams.

    Immigration has also bolstered soccer, both in terms of generating interest in the MLS and in expanding the talent pool. Reforms to immigration policy in 1965 created opportunities and demographic shifts that peaked in the early 2000s. Scholar Maurico Espinoza-Quesada argues that the majority of immigrants coming to the U.S. in the 21st century were primarily from “soccer-crazed countries in Latin America, Europe and Africa.”

    Tapiwa Gumunyu, a Zimbabwean immigrant living in Ohio, has attended several Columbus Crew matches with his family. Such matches have become social events for the relatively small Zimbabwean community living between Ohio and Kentucky. Similar trends can also be observed among Latin American communities that have brought their global soccer zeal to different cities across the US.

    MLS clubs have recognized the potential business opportunities offered by immigrant communities. The Seattle Sounders, for one, have tried to grow their fanbase by broadcasting their games in Spanish. Ric Jensen, a scholar of sport fandom and management, argues that MLS clubs regularly recruit “well-known Hispanic players to maximize sponsorship dollars” and expand their fanbase among Hispanics.

    Looking at the U.S. men’s national team, it’s also hard to ignore the impact that immigrants and their descendants have had on the growth of soccer in America. The U.S. has benefited immensely from players who would otherwise play for different countries altogether. Folarin Balogun could have played for England and Nigeria. Haji Wright was eligible to play for Ghana but like Balogun, chose to play for the U.S.

    The popularity of the game among immigrant communities has undoubtedly played a major role in elevating the MLS and injecting a generation of talented players and passionate fans into the local game.

    The popularity of soccer in the U.S. has also extended to foreign leagues — and technology has played a role in this shift. The internet and social media have created an interconnected world that allows fans to engage in rivalries and subcultures across previously unprecedented distances. There is now a generation of Americans who passionately identify as die hard “Culers” (Barcelona fans) or “Gooners” (Arsenal fans) despite never having set foot in Spain or England.

    One recent poll even suggested that soccer had surpassed baseball to become the third most popular sport in the U.S. Given how quickly soccer has grown, it seems possible that after decades of false starts, the sport may finally soon come to rival football and basketball atop the American sports landscape.

    Abraham Seda is an assistant professor of history at Lafayette College. He is currently writing a book on boxing and colonialism in Rhodesia.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • Lotteries and other school equity reforms can have mixed results

    Lotteries and other school equity reforms can have mixed results

    As final grades post, lockers empty and end-of-year celebrations draw to a close, anxiety about the future looms. For many children in Philadelphia a lottery determined where they’ll head to school next year. The city is far from alone in adopting a practice that one online forum likened to “wading through some kind of toxic gas.” The goal, broadly speaking, is to ensure that any student anywhere can benefit from excellent schools despite entrenched housing segregation in many of America’s cities.

    Yet, despite the endorsement of the Nobel Prize committee, the question of whether these lotteries actually enhance equity is complicated.

    Consider the case of Washington D.C., where 76% of the public school system is Black and Hispanic, 43% of students are designated as “at risk” academically and 15% are English language learners. For more than a decade, the city has embraced what is called the “common lottery.” Families enter for a variety of reasons, including seeking a particular type of education—dual language immersion, or an arts-centric curriculum—or even looking for a school in close proximity to a caregiver’s workplace. For some students, the lottery has offered a ticket to a superior educational experience than the one at their neighborhood school. The history informing the adaptation of the common lottery, however, suggests that such a fix can both promote and evade equity, serving as a bandaid to old, not fully healed wounds.

    Over a half century ago, Washingtonians came together to rethink how place determined the quality of education. In 1967, local activist Julius Hobson successfully sued the superintendent of schools for discriminating against Black and poor public school children. Federal Judge J. Skelly Wright, who previously desegregated schools in New Orleans, ordered multiple remedies, including boundary revisions to foster racial and socioeconomic integration.

    To fulfill one of the court’s mandates, in February 1968, a group of 35 civic-minded residents from every section of the city formed a committee to redraw how the district set attendance boundaries. After several weeks of deliberation, the committee produced six maps and settled on two, one for junior high schools and one for high schools, to present to the board of education. On May 8, 1968, the nine-member board approved the changes, affecting approximately 9,000 of the District’s 146,000 students.

    Yet, the ink had barely dried on the new maps when the school board considered additional revisions to school assignments. Enrollment patterns explained some of the changes, such as long-awaited school construction to alleviate overcrowding. But other changes looked more like carving out loopholes, blurring the lines between families’ legitimate appeals and race and class biases.

    In July 1969, the school board laid out the list of reasons that might justify a student transferring from their assigned school to one outside of their assigned geographic boundary. They included “medical reasons,” “diplomatic requests” and “gross inconvenience to parents and/or family routine.”

    The board also unanimously approved shifting 21 students, 18 white and three Black, from Gordon Junior High, located in Georgetown, to Alice Deal Junior High in upper Northwest, a historically white and affluent area of the city. In 1970, Gordon Junior High was only 53% white, whereas Alice Deal was 60% white. School board member Albert Rosenfield proposed the change on behalf of his well-to-do, well-connected constituents. For Rosenfield, the city “must have a tax base,” and appeasing a few families, some with seats in Congress, could prevent their exit and help sustain the city’s coffers.

    Concerned white parents who believed the transfers “enhance[d] segregation” quickly sued the board, and the court agreed.

    Yet, the legal victory didn’t stop the school board from implementing quieter administrative measures which enabled parents to justify transferring their children to schools outside of their assigned boundaries to alleviate a purported burden. For the 1971-1972 school year, families submitted 700 appeals at the elementary school level and 1,639 for junior high and high school. The district approved 90% of transfer requests for elementary school students and over half of those coming from secondary students.

    And so, by the 1980s, even though the boundary changes were supposed to help equalize educational opportunities regardless of one’s address, a system of widespread exemptions had created had made that promise illusory for many families. For example, in the spring of 1983, a third of Alice Deal’s 987 students were from outside of the school’s geographic boundaries. Their families had successfully navigated the sysem, which now determined which students could get exemptions on a first come, first served basis. Parents could even claim that “curriculum offerings” necessitated a transfer. This approach to fairness spurred competition for entrance into some prestigious schools. In 1986, approximately 175 parents assembled overnight outside of district offices for a chance to claim a coveted spot in their school of choice.

    Over the next 40 years, families’ ability to navigate the public school system only grew more complicated: controversial school closures, expanding citywide (or magnet) school options and the emergence of charter schools all affected how students could pursue a public education. Recognizing the burden to families and school administrators, in 2014, D.C. Public Schools and most charter schools turned to a common lottery to streamline the application process. (That same year, the district also accepted recommendations for boundary revisions, the first since 1968.)

    The lottery was a well-intentioned step toward expanding educational opportunity—and it has worked for many families. For the 2026-2027 school year, 74% of the 20,987 families who tested their luck received good news: a chance to enroll at one of their selected schools. And in recent years, the district’s new Equitable Access option gives students who are “at-risk” academically a higher chance of success on lottery day.

    Of course, none of this matters for some families; indeed, according to the D.C. Policy Center, residents in the city’s Jackson-Reed High School feeder pattern were the least likely to use the lottery, opting instead to attend their in-boundary school assignment, or a private school. But for those who want, or need, the lottery, as the state superintendent remarks, it provides a chance to take advantage of “the strength of so many D.C. education programs and the meaningful learning experiences they create.”

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    Still, luck isn’t a guaranteed pathway to equity. The lottery made no matches for one quarter of this year’s applicants, who may or may not get off of waitlists.

    The good news is the district has witnessed the dividends of more systemic efforts to nurture students. In math, researchers recently crowned the nation’s capital first among 38 states for “academic recovery” following the Covid-19 pandemic; and the same goes for reading performance among 35 states. But the work continues. As the city prepares to search for new leadership over D.C. Public Schools, the district is still chasing pre-pandemic benchmarks, and despite evidence of progress, nationally, math (ranked 27th) and reading (ranked 45th) are two subjects ripe for growth.

    Philadelphia public schools, which also offers a lottery, is currently bracing for school closures and hundreds of teacher and staff cuts in response to a budget deficit. Lotteries can be useful additions to the equity landscape, but they can only do so much to reach the most vulnerable students.

    Erica Sterling is an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • Reflecting Pool’s algae bloom and peeling paint reflect Trump’s treatment of U.S. history

    President Donald Trump’s latest D.C. renovation, painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American Flag Blue,” to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday has instead turned the symbolic heart of the National Mall Algae Bloom Green. The paint is peeling, and the water is a swampy muck.

    Trump has asserted, without evidence or corroboration, that vandals cut a 250-foot gash into the new lining and poured corrosive chemicals into the basin. Yet, the explanation for what has happened appears to be more mundane and predictable than the cloak-and-dagger sabotage Trump has suggested. Rosalina Stancheva Christova, an aquatic ecologist from George Mason University’s Algal Ecology Laboratory, sampled the water and found an ordinary, non-toxic bloom — the kind any ordinary swimming pool owner has fought in their own backyard.

    And yet, the problem with the renovation runs far deeper than all of this. Trump’s painting project reflects a fundamental lack of understanding of the original purpose and vision for the reflecting pool. For more than a century, the basin has functioned as a civic mirror, a place where visitors could see themselves reflected alongside the monuments that commemorate the nation’s story. Today that possibility is gone.

    The roots of the reflecting pool lie in the “City Beautiful” movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Gilded Age and decades of laissez-faire growth had left many of America’s cities in disrepair, full of tenement districts, boss-run wards and blight.

    American architects Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Augustus Saint-Gaudens wanted to change that, and they were inspired by European urban renewal projects like Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s redesign of Paris. In 1893, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, they explored the principles that spawned their movement to reimagine American cities — demonstrating how monumental architecture and carefully designed landscapes could express civic ideals.

    Their experience in Chicago helped to convince the men that beautiful, orderly, civic space could repair the disordered industrial cities the Gilded Age had left them. Their vision reflected a broader Progressive Era faith that urban renewal and public investment could address the social problems of industrial America while restoring civic pride through monumental construction projects designed to project an image of a robust and resilient nation.

    In 1903, all four architects became members of the Senate Park Commission (McMillan Commission) whose mandate was to replace decades of haphazard development in Washington D.C. with a coherent civic plan.

    They set their sights on the National Mall, which was, at that time, a disunified Victorian garden punctuated by marshland with a public green transected by a railroad depot and tracks.

    The commission’s 1901 report complained that the mall “has been diverted from its original purpose and cut into fragments, each portion receiving a separate and individual informal treatment, thus invading what was a single composition.” Their redesign plans aimed to unify the space into a legible and cohesive civic story and the reflecting pool eventually became the spine for that narrative.

    Over the next two decades, the McMillan Plan gradually reshaped the mall.

    Architect Henry Bacon was charged with designing the Lincoln Memorial. In 1911, he completed his first sketches, and he incorporated the commission’s vision by extending the mall’s central axis westward and anchoring it with the reflecting pool. Bacon imagined the pool as a mirror reflection, where visitors could see both the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. As a result, Bacon created a linear and legible connection between the man who presided over the creation of the republic at one end and the man who led the nation through the war for its preservation at the other.

    The future Reflecting Pool site facing west toward the Lincoln memorial in 1921. National Park Service

    In 1919, the Army Corps of Engineers began excavating a former Potomac marshland known as the Kidwell Flats, to enable construction of the pool. The project took four years and was still under construction at the time of the Lincoln Memorial’s dedication in 1922.

    The pool quickly became a symbolically rich venue for crucial moments in U.S. history. In 1939 the African American contralto Marian Anderson sang from the memorial steps to a crowd of approximately 75,000 people massed along the pool after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her perform at Constitution Hall.

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    Twenty-four years later, a quarter million people lined both banks of the pool to hear the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaim his dream, to challenge the nation to complete the unfinished journey toward racial equality and achieve a meaningful resolution of the issues that had nearly destroyed the nation.

    Marian Anderson performs from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on April 20, 1952, in this image showing the Reflecting Pool and the Washington Monument. . Anderson’s accompanist is Franz Rupp, lower left, at piano. (AP Photo/Henry Griffin, File)Henry Griffin

    The pool reflected those crowds, those moments and those movements only while they occupied the space. Each reflection vanished and was replaced by another individual, another gathering, another episode in the nation’s story.

    Yet, despite its symbolic significance and its success as a site for large scale civic dialogue, from a physical standpoint, the pool faced problems almost from day one. At issue was the soggy foundation created by the choice of marshlands for the reflecting pool’s site.

    This 1922 photo was taken at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. Nearly from the start, the Reflecting Pool faced structural problems.Library of Congress

    During its construction, the Army Corps of Engineers had attempted to mitigate the potential problem with concrete support beams and a drainage system undergirding the pool. But almost immediately these mitigation systems proved inadequate. The result was cracks and leaks that have plagued the pool for its entire lifetime.

    Numerous administrations have tried to solve the issues. In 1986, the Reagan Administration drained the pool and poured an entirely new concrete foundation. Even this did not solve the problem. The pool continued to leak nearly 30 million gallons per year.

    In 2011, Barack Obama’s administration undertook another round of renovations. While matters improved, the pool still leaks 16 million gallons of water per year.

    The current issue with the reflecting pool and Trump’s response to it, however, go well beyond structural inadequacies and sabotage theories. They reflect a lack of understanding about the pool’s purpose.

    In April, Trump posted a doctored image of himself and his officials in swimsuits lounging in the reflecting pool, a woman in a bikini reclining in the water beside them. But the pool is a mere 18 inches deep, not swimming pool/ lounging depth and Bacon never intended anyone to use it that way. He built a basin you stand beside because its work happens in the mind of the person at the rim. Trump’s artificial intelligence revisionism gets the object exactly wrong — an instrument of contemplation made over into the feature of a tacky resort.

    Trump directed the Department of the Interior to repaint the pool in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary and used an emergency exemption to award a no-bid contract to a company that specialized in painting swimming pools. The result essentially took an area that was a swamp, before its transformation into a civic mirror, and returned it to a swamp. An algae-greened surface now sits where the reflection used to be, and the connection the pool held, the citizen to the monuments, individual to the national story, has been severed.

    When the pool functions as a mirror surface, it is a monument that embodies an evolving republic rather than a finished one. Trump’s swamp has transformed it into a static, murky image that defies the idea of a nation moving forward. As this history makes clear, the health of the republic depends on its ability to see itself clearly, and Trump’s algae-infested reflecting pool is a symbolic reflection of a nation and a history he and his administration continue to try to obscure from clear view.

    Susan Deily-Swearingen holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of New Hampshire, and has taught at multiple universities since 2015. She has a forthcoming book about the persistent legacies of the U.S. Civil War in contemporary politics and society, and frequently writes about historical memory and the echoes of the past in the modern world.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • The history of American Jews exposes the fundamental questions of citizenship

    The history of American Jews exposes the fundamental questions of citizenship

    The history of American Jews’ citizenship makes the president’s case to eliminate birthright citizenship, now awaiting a Supreme Court decision, no surprise—but this should offer little comfort.

    The central plotline of the story of Jews in the United States tends to revolve around citizenship: Jews arrived, gained citizenship, the end. Yet this story accounts for neither how citizenship has worked for Jews nor how it works in general. A far more accurate history of Jewish citizenship in the United States exposes the persistent political questions asked, answered, and unresolved when policymakers try to decide who is and isn’t “American.”

    For the past 250 years, American leaders have used citizenship law to draw and re-draw the lines of individual belonging through collective categories. From the beginning, Congress granted “any alien being a free white person” access to citizenship, writing into naturalization law in 1790 broad thresholds for membership. In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment revolutionized citizenship by opening it to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” Yet Congress also legislated that for the purposes of naturalization, “all persons” only included “free white persons” and “aliens of African nativity…and African descent,” not Chinese people or “Asiatics.”

    Jews who immigrated from Europe tended to gain access to naturalization as “white” under citizenship law, but government officials found Jews a useful—and sometimes confounding—guide to help them apply the law, even when Jews were not directly involved.

    Take a 1909 naturalization appeal from four men, described in their rejected application as “Armenians by race.” The men were not Jewish, but Judge Henry Cabot Lowell, who presided over their appeal, nonetheless found himself contemplating Jewish citizenship. Harvard-educated and hailing from an elite Boston family, Lowell consulted scientific treatises to conclude that “Hebrews” and Armenians were both “Asiatic” in origin. Prevailing scientific racism of the day convinced him that neither met the threshold of whiteness. As he wrote in his decision, it was “hard to find loophole for admitting the Hebrews” to citizenship. But at least until Congress acted, he saw no reason to exclude Armenians if Jews could benefit from the loophole.

    Jewish leaders panicked when they witnessed high-level government officials slotting them into racialized categories other than “white.” They understood that the historical fact of citizenship would not necessarily protect Jews in years to come, especially as eugenicist ideas gained traction among policymakers designing new restrictive immigration laws. In the early 20th century, elite Jews lobbied politicians, filed reports, intervened in naturalization cases, and testified at congressional hearings to bolster Jews’ claims to citizenship. Their efforts met partial success. As passed in the 1920s, immigration quota laws dropped the classification of Jews as “Hebrews,” instead counting Jews among others of their same “national origin.” Still, the countries from which most Jews immigrated, such as Russia and Poland, now faced some of the harshest restrictions.

    In practice, the new quota laws reduced the number of Jews who could naturalize and raised suspicion about those who did. Foreign-born Americans from many different backgrounds experienced discrimination that legal status did not avert.

    But accusations of foreignness and dual loyalty clung to Jews in unique ways, as illustrated by a remarkable case from 1947. That year, a naturalized Jewish man sought to return to the United States after living in British-mandate Palestine for over a decade. Detained by U.S. border control agents, the Ukrainian-born man learned that his American passport had been revoked under a 1940 law that prohibited naturalized citizens from living abroad for over five years. Native-born citizens were not subject to the same law. The ACLU, American Jewish Committee, and American Jewish Congress seized on this fact to call the law unconstitutional and defend the Jewish man on his appeal. But for the Jewish organizations, the constitutional violation was a piece of a much larger threat to Jewish citizenship in the United States. When Congress authorized the 1940 statute, it did so under pressure from a State Department official who insisted that “these Zionists” regularly manipulated the protections of American citizenship for their own nationalist ends.

    The court rejected the Jewish man’s appeal, and in doing so diminished the distinctly Jewish dimension of the case by tying him to other naturalized Americans, such as Japanese-Americans, whose constitutional rights to equal protection could be overridden by national interests according to recent Supreme Court precedent.

    Citizenship debates routinely entangled Jews’ status with that of other groups because the categories of citizenship were neither self-evident nor self-executing. Only in motion, by scrutinizing groups, comparing them to one another, and gauging the changing winds of national interests, did government officials bend citizenship to their will.

    In a remarkable exchange on the Senate floor in the spring of 1964, two senators debated the exclusion of religion from proposed anti-discrimination legislation targeting federally-funded programs. Albert Gore, Sr., a Democrat from Tennessee, contended that Jews lacked shelter under the law’s categories of “race, color, or national origin” because Jews were a religion. Joseph Clark, a fellow Democrat from Pennsylvania, countered that those categories protected Jews just fine because many Jews lacked any faith, so whatever discrimination they faced must be race-based. Signed into law that summer as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the statute (unlike many others in the same law) did not include religion among its protected categories.

    For many decades, the question of Jews’ standing under Title VI seemed to be resolved in practice, as government officials and Jewish leaders agreed that its jurisdiction did not include Jews. But it was only a matter of time before the answer faded back into a question.

    Over the last two decades—and especially since Oct. 7, 2023—government officials and many Jewish leaders have argued that Jews should have standing in anti-discrimination laws on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Detractors argue that Jews—or certain expressions of Jewishness such as Zionism—do not fit squarely into those categories. The arguments matter because the categories of citizenship law are consequential, but their answers aren’t intrinsic to citizenship. Rather, citizenship remains a tool to ask questions about belonging; as political aims change so too will its meaning.

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    For American Jews, citizenship has not offered a singular point of arrival or a final answer to the puzzle of national belonging. This lesson from the history of American Jews may offer some reassurance that Trump’s bid to overturn birthright citizenship is just another stop on a zig-zagging journey. Whether the Supreme Court endorses the administration’s tendentious reading of the 14th Amendment or not, the twisted and entangled process of arguing over citizenship will continue.

    A less sanguine lesson from the same history should warn all American citizens that an attack against birthright citizenship is an attack against them. No one is naturally or natively a citizen, wherever they were born. Political leaders are constantly remaking citizenship—just look at how the categories used to define, question, or defend Jews have changed over time. The protections of citizenship are as mutable as they are unreliable.

    Faith in any fundamental meaning of citizenship not only misses the point but also carries profound risk. Even the most capacious understanding of citizenship will not resolve the question of human belonging, but the starkly narrow one on offer from the Trump administration today threatens our ability to keep asking the question.

    Lila Corwin Berman is a professor of history at NYU and author of Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.