January 6 and the Politics of History

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By Jim Downs & Jim Downs &

Publisher Description

On January 6, 2021, more than two thousand rioters stormed the doors of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., hoping to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power from former president Donald Trump to his successor, Joseph Biden. The deaths, property damage, and vicious rampage that ensued were witnessed on live television as an unprecedented attack on the democratic process and those who strive to protect it.

As an installment of UGA Press’s History in the Headlines series, this book offers a rich discussion between highly respected scholars on the historical backdrop and context for contemporary issues from the headlines. In addition to the historical context, this conversation demonstrates how historians speak to one another about contentious topics and how they contribute in meaningful ways to the public’s understanding of momentous events. This volume focuses on the historical context of the January 6 attack and employs a free-flowing conversation style that allows the historians a more unconventional format. The participants discuss if—and if so, how—historians should engage in public debates and what that engagement means to their roles as academic authorities in the public.

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1 Review

3.5

Grace🕷️

Created 3 months ago

“I didn’t love how the first part of the discussion was structured it was hard to understand who was talking, but the essay portion was very good.”

About Jim Downs

JIM DOWNS is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the coeditor of Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America.

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North Carolina Women

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Jim Downs

Other books by Jim Downs

Reckoning with History

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Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections

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Remembering the Memphis Massacre

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Sexuality and Slavery

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Beyond Freedom

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Stand by Me

Jim Downs

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North Carolina Women

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Stephanie McCurry

STEPHANIE MCCURRY is professor of history at Columbia University. She is the author of three prize winning books, including Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War and Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South.

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