A new film about the African Americans who fought in the U.S. military in the late 1800s and early 1900s will feature expert commentary from Ryan Booth, an assistant professor of history at Washington State University.

“Both the Buffalo Soldiers and the Indian Scouts were created by an act of Congress in 1866 and essentially acted as the constabulary for the West up until the advent of World War I,” said Booth, whose research specifically focuses on the U.S. Indian Scouts. “The conundrum in all of this is why did Black and Native men take up arms to serve the country that had oppressed them for centuries?”

As Booth wrote in this 2021 piece for the Washington State Magazine, the 1800s must have seemed like living inside a tornado—everything upside down and nothing firm to hold onto.

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WSU Insider 

A new exhibit at Washington State University’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections showcases the fight by Mexican American migrant workers in southcentral Washington for better working conditions and wages. Titled “La Causa: Social Justice Activism in the Yakima Valley,” the exhibit opens with a reception at 3 p.m. Tuesday, March 29, at MASC’s Terrell Library ground floor location.

“La Causa is the fight of Mexican American farmworkers in the United States to improve their working conditions and their lives,” according to Lipi Turner-Rahman, instructor of history and the exhibit’s curator.

“Most people associate La Causa with California’s San Joaquin Valley and Cesar Chavez. Washington State has one of the largest Mexican American farmworker communities in the United States. The story of their struggle to improve their lives by organizing has often been marginalized. The struggle for better wages and working conditions erupted in a walkout and a hop strike in 1970. La Causa tells the story of that struggle and the strike.”

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WSU Insider

As the Russian military amassed on the Ukrainian border, various voices on the American right rushed to commend or excuse Vladimir Putin, the architect of the coming invasion. Their main motive seemed obvious: to appeal to Trump’s base by projecting onto Putin precisely what appealed to Trump himself—the image of the world leader as super-tough hombre.

Rapture. End Times. World War III. Such prophesies—including those that bring Russia into the mix—are nothing new. In certain American strands of apocalyptic thought, adherents have long put a Russian spin on the end of the world. Matthew Avery Sutton, the author of American Apocalypse, reflected in 2015 (in the aftermath of Putin’s takeover of Crimea) that as long ago as the 19th century, preacher John Nelson Darby fingered Russia as the West’s possible antagonist in a face-off between Christ and the Antichrist. Rumors of Russia’s potential role in the end of days surfaced again 100 years ago (during the country’s revolutionary transition to Communism); during the atomic- and nuclear-weapons race of the mid-1900s; and, closer to our day, during periods of conflict in the Middle East.

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Vanity Fair

The war in Ukraine has reignited beliefs among some conservative evangelicals that Russia could help fulfill biblical prophecies about the end of the world.

For many White evangelicals, Russia is part of that narrative, said Matthew Avery Sutton, a Washington State University history professor and author of “American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism.”

“The apocalyptic obsession ebbs and flows in moments of crisis,” Sutton said. “We’re at another moment where prophecy is invoked to make sense of current events.”

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The Washington Post