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Opinion: Stop dismissing Standing Rock Sioux as dupes

Lawrence Hatter
Hatter

Sinister forces are at work in North Dakota. At least that was the claim of the state’s former lieutenant governor, whose paranoid fears were right out of the eighteenth century, writes Lawrence Hatter, assistant professor of early American history at Washington State University.

Taking a leaf from a political playbook as old as the American Republic, then-Lt. Gov. Drew Wrigley dismissed the Standing Rock Sioux opposition to the planned oil pipeline in that state as the work of ominous powers. “The Native Americans are being used, absolutely being used,” Wrigley told reporters Dec. 8, “by these outside agitators.”

His statement could just have easily have been made in 1786 as 2016.

Dismissing the Standing Rock Sioux as dupes is a strategy intended to discredit the grounds of their opposition, while also undermining their efforts to form a broader coalition for political mobilization against the North Dakota pipeline.

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Grand Forks Herald

With 75 years of perspective, we can re-examine the legacy of Pearl Harbor even as we honor those who served

By Raymond Sun, associate professor of history, WSU Pullman.

The living memory of the attack on Pearl Harbor is almost extinguished. It’s time to rethink how we want to remember Dec. 7, 1941, 75 years later—and beyond.

Ray Sun
Sun

To acknowledge the many negative effects that the memory of Pearl Harbor had on how Americans fought the Pacific War is not only intellectually and historically honest, but provides the moral integrity required to build a national memory that can guide us wisely in the present when facing severe challenges about race, religion, refugees, immigration and national security. This is neither to deny the honor due to the dead of Pearl Harbor, nor to displace the site from its central place in American memory.

Seventy-five years later, we have a great opportunity to craft a more mature, complex understanding of the multiple legacies of Pearl Harbor.

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The Spokesman-Review

Rapture Me Up, Daddy: Trump, the End of the World, and Me

More than 40 percent of Americans believe that the Second Coming will take place by the year 2050, with that number rising to 58 percent among white evangelicals.

Matthew Sutton
Matthew Sutton

“Among lay people it’s just a given that the Rapture’s going to happen,” says Matthew Avery Sutton, history professor at Washington State University and author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, in an interview with VICE. “Most evangelical churches would be shocked to find out that this is a 150-year-old concept and not a 2,000-year-old Biblical concept.”

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VICE

Fossatti made the most of her 102 years

Alice Fossatti died Sunday at age 102. Her spitfire personality propelled her through the Depression, a 73-year marriage, motherhood, 23 years of teaching kindergarten at Hawthorne Elementary School and decades of communing with her inner artist.

Brigit Farley
Farley

Washington State University history professor Brigit Farley recalls how Fossatti validated and affirmed her pint-size pupils. Later, when Farley started teaching at the college level, the two discussed the teaching profession and the importance of lifting up students and teaching them to be kind thinkers.

“I think she would say that the most important thing in teaching little kids was instilling confidence and belief in themselves,” Farley said. “That’s the foundation she built in them. That’s something I very consciously took from her in my own work. Turns out that is as important when people are 25 as it is when they are just five.”

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East Oregonian

Opinion: Donald Trump, the herald of evangelicals’ end times

Matthew Sutton
Matthew Sutton

Matthew Avery Sutton, a history professor at Washington State University, is a Guggenheim Fellow and author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. In his recent op-ed for the Seattle Times, Sutton examines the views of many evangelical Americans who see Donald Trump’s candidacy as a harbinger of the second coming of Jesus Christ.

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Seattle Times