Writing

I used to do almost all of my non-scholarly writing here, but I’m increasingly being invited to write for other folks too. Here’s a nearly-complete list of my work elsewhere:

• How the US Midterms Became a Referendum on Republican Paranoia, Prospect Magazine, November 6, 2018.
• UNC’s Moment to Lead—Or Not, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 22, 2018.
• In 1934, an American Professor Urged that Jews Be Civil—To the Nazis, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 3, 2018.
• Trump’s Uplifting “Baby Hope” Story Masks a Dark History, Huffington Post, February 7, 2018.
• Extremism Isn’t Going Away. So How Do We Talk About the Nazi Next Door? NBC News, December 6, 2017.
• Rescuing Norman Rockwell’s Progressive Legacy from a Right-Wing Cartoonist, Hyperallergic, February 17, 2017.
• Why We Should Lower the Voting Age in America, Rolling Stone, November 3, 2016.
• Free Public College: Utopian No More, The Chronicle Review, September 25, 2016.
• Regulating Too-Big-to-Fail Education: Next Steps for the Department of Education (with Chris Hicks), AFT position paper, June 22, 2016.
• There’s No College PC Crisis: In Defense of Student Protesters, Rolling Stone, December 2015.
• Student Protests, Then and Now, The Chronicle Review, December 11, 2015.
• How Cameras Have Shaped Student Protests (interview), The Atlantic, November 13, 2015.
• How the Missouri Protests Might Change the Game for Other Colleges (interview), The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 13, 2015.
• Trauma and Trigger Warnings in the History Classroom: A Roundtable Discussion, The American Historian, May 2015.
• “Trigger Warnings” Don’t Interfere With Learning, They Enhance It, syndicated op-ed column, July 2014.
• Another College Under Fire for Mishandling Rape Case, RH Reality Check, July 14, 2014.
• Why I’ll Add a Trigger Warning, Inside Higher Ed (and reprinted in Slate), May 29, 2014.
• Advocates Respond to White House Report on Campus Sexual Assault, at RH Reality Check, May 2014.
• Don’t Look Now, a re-examination of the mythology of the Kitty Genovese case, at The New Inquiry, March 2014.
• Making the case that we’re currently experiencing a golden age of teenage sexual responsibility at RH Reality Check, March 2014.
• An essay on the coercion of testimony from rape and domestic violence survivors at RH Reality Check, February 2014.
• My essay “Community and Social Media” appeared in the Routledge Social Media Handbook, published in 2013.
• I contributed an essay to an April 2012 Boston Review roundtable on the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement.
• The blogpost What I Saw at #OccupyWallStreet Last Night, and What I Saw When I Left appeared in the 2012 anthology Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement.
• My doctoral dissertation, “The United States National Student Association: Democracy, Activism, and the Idea of the Student, 1947-1978,” can be downloaded here in PDF form. Since it’s more than five hundred pages long, you may find this extended table of contents useful. If you need a non-PDF version of either of these documents for accessibility reasons, I’d be more than happy to provide one.
• When I was still an undergrad I wrote a short history of the United States Student Association for distribution to USSA members at conferences. I’ve revised and updated it pretty regularly over the years, and the most recent version is available online here.
• The essay “NSA and Post-War Student Activism Before 1960” appeared in the anthology American Students Organize: Founding the National Student Association After World War II.
• The essay The Teaching of American History in a Time of National Crisis, an assessment of a national survey of college students’ historical knowledge, appeared in the Radical History Review, issue 85.
• The article “Questions of Communism and Anticommunism in Twentieth-Century American Student Activism” appeared in Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research, vol 26 no 3.
• The article “Student Activism in the United States Before 1960: An Overview” appeared in the anthology Student Protest: The Sixties and After.

Note: A few people have asked about scholarly work I’ve presented at academic conferences. None of those papers are online at the moment, but I’d be happy to share them by email.