On October 2nd, 2026, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest welcomed Jamie McGhee, digital artist, graphic artist, and novelist. McGhee spoke about her newest project, funded by a Lepage Center Crisis Moments grant, Hunger on the Tracks — a digital novel and hypertext game. McGhee wants her audience for this project to think critically about the Pullman Strike from an individual human perspective and to learn about strike techniques that are embedded in American history.

“Imagine you are standing in front of a factory in 1894,”[1] Jamie McGhee said to open her presentation, asking that audience members placed themselves in the position of the workers in Pullman, Illinois. McGhee painted this picture with increasing intensity, bringing her audience to a critical moment in the history of the Pullman Strike. She asked we imagine that moment, in front of that factory in 1894, imagine turning with the rest of the picket line to face the oncoming force of federal troops, their guns drawn, their advance imminent. “What would you do? Act? Or hide?”[2]

The hypertext game Hunger on the Tracks gives its players just that choice. When you are put into an impossible situation, what would you do? What would your options even be?

The choice of medium is significant, as hypertext games are designed to engage players through direct interaction with a text. Players click on certain parts of the sentences in front of them and must then choose from a set of possible actions. Choices reveal new text, different dialogue, or perhaps even an entirely new scene[3]. By bringing the story of the strike to a new audience in this way, McGhee creates space to include historical context and small details while not sacrificing the hold on a player’s attention as they look for the next hyperlink.

McGhee explained the pitch for Pullman, Illinois as a “perfect” company town. She stressed that if you lived in Pullman, you worked at Pullman Car Company for a man named George Pullman constructing luxury train cars for the elite. He owned everything. This town was his creation — designed to be completely in his control and therefore free of sin. The Pullman Company would likely say that working there was a privilege. A stable job, a beautiful house, a strong community… What more could an 1890s laborer want?[4] McGhee vividly narrated the development of Pullman, placing her audience within the image she was constructing. Of course, McGhee said, this glittering ideal did not match the reality. Those “luxury” homes promised were actually “crumbling tenement apartments.”[5] Your rent, grocery bill, and everything in between were taken out of your meagre salary and funneled right back into Pullman’s pocket. Now, that isn’t to say there wasn’t luxury abounding in Pullman. But it was reserved for the executives, in a separate part of town.

The land that became Pullman, Illinois was bought by George Pullman in 1880, with the purpose of building a new plant and ostensibly the intention of addressing issues of poverty through a company town. Thirteen years later, though, the Panic of 1893 hit and George Pullman’s first cost cut went straight for his employees’ wages. With wages for even skilled positions not cracking three dollars per day, Pullman quickly became unlivable for most factory workers. George Pullman, McGhee noted, did not lower rent or any other cost of living in Pullman to account for the wages he slashed.

One group of workers, recognizing the injustices they faced, formed a committee and met with George Pullman to ask for a livable wage. McGhee characterized Pullman as the pseudo-benevolent figure he strove to be — he smiled and nodded at the workers’ plea, then turned around and fired them soon after. For the rest of the Pullman workers, that was the final straw. On May 11, 1894, it was time to strike.

Hunger on the Tracks follows Herman Fisher, a worker who gets roped into the strike in its early stages. As one reads or plays along, a series of choices are presented, all based on real-life events. One example McGhee included in her presentation showed a conversation between a couple: the husband, freshly home from an entire day on the picket line, notices his wife is quieter than usual. When he asks what is going on, she reveals that George Pullman has offered her a job at the Hotel Florence[6] as a washerwoman. While this would violate the strike, a point the husband (the player’s character) brings up, the couple needs money to feed their family. McGhee asks her all-important, impossible question at the end of this scene: What do you do?

McGhee’s way of talking about the game was almost theatrical, leading the audience through both the game itself and her process of creating it step by step. She invited everyone to consider the questions the game will pose, while also highlighting the fact that many of the choices presented will be impossible to be truly satisfied with. When trying to upset such a steep power imbalance, sometimes each choice can feel like a loss. The talk gave the audience a strong sense of how the game might go, but McGhee also kept an impressive amount of her work under wraps, evading the potential “spoiling” of the game for people listening to her presentation. Players are going to come to Hunger on the Tracks with different levels of context. Some may know the story of the Pullman Strike inside out, and some may have just heard the name Pullman for the first time. Either way, the player will always have to navigate a set of actions and difficult choices they have never imagined. Even her audience for the Lunch with Lepage, for all the historical context they were offered, only got one example from McGhee’s own text. Everyone left curious about the rest of the scenarios McGhee hinted at now must play the game to find out. McGhee is clearly a very strong storyteller, and so her writing is an enticing incentive to play the full game.

Key moments in the Pullman Strike timeline are punctuated through McGhee’s work, from tensions between workers to major face-offs with government officials. McGhee emphasized her commitment to telling the whole story of the Pullman Strike, and an element of it that needs to be highlighted, unfortunate as it is, is the exclusion of black workers from the picket line. The white factory workers refused to join with the black workers who wanted to fight for the same cause alongside them. Because of this choice, George Pullman offered all the black workers the empty jobs in his factory. They were hated along the picket line for being scalpers, but as McGhee pointed out — what else were they supposed to do? This is one of the choices that she points to as a major “what-if” in the story of the Pullman Strike. Perhaps the outcome would have looked much different had the working-class community seen past racial divides.

As the strike wore on, despite any divisions setting in, the movement began to spread after connecting with the American Railway Union (ARU) and activist Eugene V. Debs. Debs and the ARU called for a nationwide boycott on Pullman railway cars, which was briefly successful. If a train pulled into any station in the US with a Pullman car attached, the workers would refuse to touch the train. While this expansion was promising, the US government was quick to respond and came down hard on George Pullman’s side.

McGhee recounted the swift downfall of the strike, highlighting points that will appear in her game. The Blue Island Uprising was a show of solidarity and an outpouring of frustration from workers that had spread from Pullman to nearby Chicago. Workers rioted, setting fire to buildings and even managing to derail a train. However, these actions gave President Grover Cleveland an excuse to send the National Guard into Chicago in early July. This is a tactic that has been used by many presidents across American history to suppress major labor movements. In Chicago, the guardsmen quickly occupied the city and essentially turned it into a warzone. The strike’s momentum and outward spread were violently crushed. The final act of violence happened at the Panhandle Rail Yards, which is where McGhee began her story. Guardsmen marched towards the crowd of strikers and opened fire, striking not only the workers but also innocent bystanders. The final nail in the coffin of the Pullman Strike had been dutifully hammered in.

While creating a project such as this interactive novella, McGhee went through an immense research period. Relying on collections and archives such as the Newberry Library Pullman Collection, the National Pullman Porter Museum, the Chicago Public Library: Historic Pullman Collection, and the Chicago History Museum, McGhee was able to parse through various kinds of documentation. Much of her research focused on firsthand accounts from during and immediately after the strike, making her project extremely informed on a uniquely personal level, a dimension that is sometimes lost in the story of such a large collective. McGhee also combed through court cases brought against strike leaders, including Debs, and searched these collections for hints of what information or sources were erased in the aftermath as Pullman attempted to recover its image.

McGhee did not dwell for long on this last point, but it is an important one to consider. One is left wondering what could have happened among the strikers or during negotiations that not even McGhee knows about. While success stories for the working-class, such as the Match Girl’s Strike in London just under a decade prior, are empowering reminders of the power in a collective, stories like the Pullman Strike remind us that a happy ending is not guaranteed. And a very real consequence of a failed strike is the erasure of valuable working-class history.

McGhee also spoke to the steps she had to take to bring her vision to life through game development. A significant part of that work was writing and rewriting the script for each scenario a player may come across. She is concerned with setting up a narrative that reflects the experiences of the strikers accurately while also providing players options that take them in different directions. The more behind-the-scenes side of the work interested her audience, and McGhee discussed some of the programs she has used for coding the game. Her recommendation to any aspiring historical gamemaker was to look for programs like Twine that are designed for users without a coding background (and have a robust, supportive community), and the basic programming language CSS.

Another distinguishing element of the interactive novel is its art direction, inspired by political cartoons, which were a very prominent part of media and political culture at the time of the Pullman Strike. Cartoons about George Pullman and the strike against his company featured in McGhee’s presentation and will offer an effective art style for communicating with the player by showing them the medium through which much of the public was likely consuming news about the Pullman Company and the strike in the 1890s.

Ultimately, Hunger on the Tracks is meant to give its audience a chance to see the world of the 1890s through a striking laborer, and perhaps to rewrite the ending and seek a happier one. The choices one makes in the game change everything. McGhee wrapped up her presentation by turning her attention to the current moment. The U.S. labor market is in “freefall” and jobs are becoming harder and harder to find. At the same time, there is an explosion of wealth at the very top; luxury is being flaunted by billionaires much like it was by George Pullman in the 19th century. McGhee insists that the message is not one of hopelessness, but in fact, it is the opposite. She hopes people who play the game might learn that people are not powerless, that we have risen before and we can rise again. On a practical note, McGhee also hopes players will use her game to learn about/test out different organizing strategies. Hunger on the Tracks shows one version of how people in the past organized a strike. We have the benefit of looking back and asking which tactics worked and which did not. Eventually, this theoretical exercise may lead to real action.

In Hunger on the Tracks, Pullman always wins because that is what really happened. After the boycott broke down on July 20, following sustained violence against strikers earlier in the month, the Pullman Factory reopened on Aug. 2, 1894. In order to return to work, Pullman forced his employees to sign a contract of sorts, stating that they would never organize a strike again or ever join a labor union. The point of the game to McGhee is not to rewrite history completely, but to model the kinds of choices faced on the picket line, to push people to learn more about striking, and to interrogate their own priorities. The idea of experiencing history on an individual level through an interactive game is a valuable one, especially in labor history, as we reckon with our own economic struggles and injustice. McGhee’s work offers people an opportunity to explore how workers of the past have responded to mistreatment and will hopefully inspire new thoughts about how strikes can evolve to meet modern needs.

McGhee’s work is an important reminder that labor history is an active part of both the past and the present. McGhee wants her game to function as a place to experiment with organization strategies, and there is value in what is to be learned through that. However, as seen in the Pullman Strike, a key component to resistance against unjust power structures is the tie of community. Once the game has taught what it can, it is then the job of the player to bring that knowledge into real life. That conversation needs to happen within existing communities and jobs but also must extend across disciplines. The Pullman Strike was so concentrated at the beginning because of the way the town had isolated them. Without those barriers, and with the increasing globalization of companies and outsourcing of labor, strikes and other labor movements in the current era must look bigger than anything done before. The expansion of the Pullman Strike by Debs is a good example to start with, and the action McGhee discussed hoping for may follow and grow out of that.

[1] Jamie McGhee, Lunch with Lepage, Oct. 2, 2026.

[2] McGhee, Lunch with Lepage.

[3] IFComp, “About Interactive Fiction,” https://ifcomp.org/about/if.

[4] McGhee, Lunch with Lepage.

[5] McGhee, Lunch with Lepage.

[6] Hotel Florence was a luxury establishment in Pullman where George Pullman himself and the other elite residents of the town were essentially hiding out during the strike.

Lunch with Lepage: Historical Games and the Pullman Strike, a Conversation with Jamie McGhee was originally published in Hindsights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

On February 19th, 2026, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, in collaboration with Falvey Library, welcomed Dr. Maghan Keita, Professor of History and Global Interdisciplinary Studies and founding director of the Institute of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and Africana Studies at Villanova University. Dr. Keita spoke about overlooked historical, sociopolitical, and aesthetic connections between Africa and Europe during the Medieval period and how this scholarly neglect limits our understanding of the era. These themes are the subject of Dr. Keita’s recently published book, Return of the Black Knight: Reflections on Africa and the Construction of Medieval European Identity.

Dr. Maghan Keita is not only a remarkable researcher and historical theorist but also a gifted storyteller. True to form, he opened his lecture with a story, this time from his own childhood. His tale went something like this: One fine morning, a young Dr. Keita, eyes wide, followed his grandfather through the bustling Terminal Tower in Cleveland, Ohio. Together, they wandered the gleaming corridors of the grand department stores, always stopping in front of a beautiful toy shop. Nose pressed against the glass, a young Dr. Keita gazed in wonder at rows of knights in shining armor, each figure meticulously crafted and artfully arranged in the window. Yet, even amidst all the splendor, he sensed something missing. “I was [sic] fascinated by the point that I could not find myself in that space.”

Throughout his career, Dr. Keita has returned to this moment. Graduate school offered Dr. Keita the advising, theory, and training he needed to make sense of his experience. Under the mentorship of Frank Edward Moorer, Dr. Keita encountered an article that would cast a new light on his memory of the store window. This article, “Some Attitudes on English Literature,” by Carter G. Woodson, describes the numerous Black figures who appear in Arthuriana, figures who never appeared in that shop display. He realized that, all along, these Black heroes, “are there and[sic] are missed.” At the time, Dr. Keita filed the article away as it had nothing to do with his project. Some fifty years later, he would return to this secondary source as he tried to make sense of how many historians have been unable to see these figures who are “right in front of [them].”

During the lecture, Dr. Keita explained that while working on his book, Return of the Black Knight: Reflections on Africa and the Construction of Medieval European Identity, he first had to contend with how earlier historical works had shaped our collective view of the medieval period. As a historiographer, Dr. Keita was well prepared for the challenge. He learned through his training that history is more than a collection of facts; rather, it is a constructed narrative. His role is not only to pay attention to the story itself but also how it is crafted, to “critique the historian…to ask questions of the why and the how.” By critically examining a historian’s use of evidence, types of evidence, and conclusions, Dr. Keita can help reveal which perspectives have been overlooked, whether intentional or unintentional. Dr. Keita explained that “in reading differently, we are able to see what is hidden in plain sight.”

Literary works intentionally shaped and constrained conventional views of the medieval period. History is a powerful instrument for legitimizing authority, a fact well understood by historical figures. In the 18th century, as England advanced its imperial ambitions, the construction of history became central to justifying its racial project. The emergence of the historical romance genre during this period was not coincidental; its primary aim was the “creation of a ‘usable’ past that would exploit interpretations of the medieval and Renaissance ages that would lend themselves to a modernist identity[1]. This project included reinterpretations and reimaginations of the medieval and Renaissance world to support this vision.

Literary figures, notably Sir Walter Scott, led a “cutting-edge project…to blanch the Middle Ages.” According to Dr. Keita, Scott’s works intentionally diminish the importance of Black figures; the Saracen, Nubian, Ethiopian, or African characters on Scott’s page bear “little resemblance to the medieval romances from which their images are taken, nor to the ‘histories’ and the historical treatments that were Scott’s sources.[2] Scott’s revisionist project not only relies on the deemphasizing of Black characters but also on the uplifting of white characters. This construction, Dr. Keita argues, is dependent on a “‘shared fiction between writer and reader’ which Anglicizes the British past through its concentration on the ‘conflict between Norman and Saxon.’”[3]

This revisionist project continued well into the 19th and 20th centuries, a process Richard Wagner helped to advance. During his lecture, Dr. Keita highlighted how Richard Wagner contributed to the whitening of the medieval period. He argues that “Wagner had clear purpose for his work and its role in the construction of Germany and a German people.”[4] Like Scott, Wagner constructs a whitened vision of the medieval world. Wagner’s source material, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, presents an “indelible ‘dark, abiding, signing, Africanist presence.’”[5] Wagner’s reconstruction completely erases this presence to preserve a white supremacist vision. For an author to “attempting to construct race/nation/empire in the modern age,” the answer was simple: the sources needed to be rewritten.[6]

To radically reexamine the medieval world, Dr. Keita sought to study texts that are at the heart of how we see the period: Arthuriana. During his lecture, Dr. Keita explained that the Arthurian legend is a “construction of fifth-century, Romanized Britain.”[7] To understand Arthur and his court, Dr. Keita argued, we must understand this Roman context. Between the 2nd and 5th centuries, the second-largest garrison of the Roman Empire was in Britain. This garrison, like other imperial garrisons, would have reflected the empire’s demographics. Historical estimates indicate that of the between “42,000 and 47,000” men stationed in Britain, about “10–25%” of soldiers were Africans[8]. Records and accounts illuminated that these African soldiers were not just infantrymen but also “men of substance and power.” Contrary to what this revisionist history suggests, an “African presence in Europe from the classical period onward is no anomaly.”[9] Men of African descent were not just “part” of this British court but set the tone as men-at-arms.

Though elided by the literary canon, medieval Africans were cultural producers. Illustrating this, Dr. Keita described the influence and power of women known as the qiyān, or singing girls. By examining not only the women themselves but the subject of their songs, Dr. Keita finds a medieval world that defies assumptions about race, gender, and class. In returning to the original sources, he found that the “cultural production of the ages to come was being shaped by these women.” As Dr. Keita reminded, these were women who “were enslaved; many of whom were of African descent, and women who, in ways beyond their numbers, influenced traditions that would broker the modern.”[10]

Dr. Keita’s lecture exposed just how high the stakes are when it comes to the stories we tell about history. Many people question the relevance of the medieval world to our lives now, but Dr. Keita powerfully demonstrates its ongoing influence. Ignoring the medieval past, and history more broadly, is not just common — it is dangerous. The evidence is everywhere, splashed across our screens. Pete Hegseth emerges as a modern crusader, invoking the language of holy war in discussions about Iran and echoing Trump’s claims that “they always hated Christians.” This way of thinking carries real consequences. As Dr. Keita notes in his epilogue, these leaders are “propelled and informed by a Europe and a Middle Ages that are all white, all Christian, and dominated by men at arms.”[11] Yet, the historical record tells a far more complex story. Despite this, military leaders and politicians alike repeat these narrow narratives, shaping public discourse. For instance, Senator Lindsey Graham declared, “This is a religious war, and we will determine the course of the Middle East for a thousand years.” Adding to this chorus of voices, House Speaker Mike Johnson has called Iranians followers of a “misguided religion.” Finally, Secretary of State Marco Rubio insists war is justified because Iran is “run by lunatics — religious fanatic lunatics.”[12]

The “why” of Dr. Keita’s book is abundantly clear: monolithic interpretations of history are power weapons wielded by those in power to shape our world and restrict resistance. These selective histories narrow our perspective and often go hand in hand with efforts to erase or silence anything that challenges them. Dr. Keita’s nod to ongoing censorship battles at the President’s House site in Philadelphia highlights how this is taking place right in front of our eyes. The restoration of some of these panels offers slight glimmers of hope. As Dr. Keita writes, “in spite of the elisions, the attempts to whitewash, to cancel the cultural creations and the very existence of those most marginalized, they simply refuse to go away.”[13] Now more than ever, we need to read history with care, to look beyond what is immediately in front of us. Resistance, as Dr. Keita clearly illustrated, demands reimagination.

[1] Maghan Keita, Return of the Black Knight: Reflections on Africa and the Construction of Medieval European Identity, (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2026), 77.

[2] Keita, Return of the Black Knight, 116.

[3] Keita, Return of the Black Knight, 127.

[4] Keita, Return of the Black Knight, 132.

[5] Keita, Return of the Black Knight, 132.

[6] Keita, Return of the Black Knight, 134.

[7] Keita, Return of the Black Knight, 22.

[8] Keita, Return of the Black Knight, 79.

[9] Keita, Return of the Black Knight, 79.

[10] Keita, Return of the Black Knight, 153.

[11] Keita, Return of the Black Knight, 145.

[12] “A Conflict without Reason Has Become a Dangerous Holy War.” The Nation. March 6, 2026. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-iran-religious-war-crusades/.

[13] Keita, Return of the Black Knight, 151.

Lunch with Lepage: Reimagining the Medieval World with Dr. Keita was originally published in Hindsights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Wednesday, April 15th, Dr. Gina Talley, Assistant Teaching Professor of History at Villanova University, presented her research at “Architect Julia Morgan: Feminist Mythmaking and the Search for Female ‘Firsts’ in the 1970s,” a Lunch at Lepage. Julia Morgan is Dr. Talley’s first subject from a larger project aimed at investigating the lives of women who deliberately chose to remain unmarried and childless in the early 20th century. Although Julia — as Dr. Talley insists on calling her, for the purpose of humanizing the subject, rather than Miss Morgan, as she was known among colleagues and clients — never commented on these lifestyle choices, her life was defined less by domesticity than her work as an architect, from her studies in Paris to her projects in the American West.

Julia Morgan is synonymous with Hearst Castle, known formally as La Cuesta Encantada, a historic estate in San Simeon, located on the Central Coast of California. The castle was conceived by publishing tycoon and politician, William Randolph Hearst, in the early 1900s, and remains a museum open to the public, a National Historic Landmark and California Historical Landmark. Dr. Talley asserted that while Hearst Castle made Julia Morgan worthy of study, there is much more to her life and legacy that was worth uncovering.

William Randolph Hearst was widely disliked and reviled due to his pioneering of sensationalist “yellow journalism,” featuring scandals, fabricated stories, and exaggerations to drive newspaper circulation. By the mid-1930s, he owned twenty-eight major newspapers, including the San Francisco Examiner and the New York Journal. He is immortalized in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) through the character of Charles Foster Kane, a man who loses his soul to power and wealth. Despite this, Hearst maintained a 30-year architect-client relationship with Julia, marked by deep collaboration, mutual respect and trust for the realization of artistic visions.

In her thirty-seven years as an architect, Julia designed more than 700 buildings. She was the first female graduate of the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, an institution known for training the greatest artists and architects in Europe, and the first licensed female architect in California.

A San Francisco native, Julia attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied engineering, as there was no architectural program, and graduated in 1894 before traveling to Paris to prepare for the Beaux Arts entrance exam. Upon her return to the United States, she opened her own architecture firm in 1904, and it remained open for forty-seven years. During this time, from 1919 to 1947, she collaborated with William Randolph Hearst and oversaw the construction of Hearst Castle.

Dr. Talley described Julia as an “imperfect hero.” Her occupation as an architect placed her in a complicated and undefined space within the Progressive Era, a period in American history marked by multiple social and political reform efforts. “She doesn’t fit in,” Dr. Talley remarked, “she wasn’t an academic…a settlement house worker…a reformer…an artist…[or] the wife of a wealthy man.”

Nonetheless, she operated within a social context that regarded her identity as a female architect with suspicion and subjected her to double standards. Her contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, known for his work like his contribution to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, did not complete his undergraduate degree and began his career working at a prestigious architecture firm in Chicago. Meanwhile, Julia needed more education to be taken seriously. Yet, she is not known as a singular genius. Her name does not grace the façade of her buildings. She first received academic attention posthumously in the 1970s from an independent researcher.

Dr. Talley argued that the “resurgence in interest on Julia Morgan reflected the Women’s Movement’s search for female ‘firsts’ and feminist heroes.” Sara Boutelle Holmes, an architectural historian, moved to Northern California and began to work on rediscovering Julia Morgan. She proved to be a difficult subject due to the lack of available documents and sources — Julia did not submit her work to architectural magazines or enter competitions. As a result, she was transformed into a “one-dimensional female hero.”

Julia Morgan Architect, published in 1988, is written for a popular and architectural audience. The “sparsely footnoted” biography reflects a lack of robust source material for Julia, but a deep sense of affection and a desire to ensconce her legacy.

The lack of primary source material attributed to Julia is a result of her personal papers being destroyed by her direction at the end of her life. Dr. Talley posited that perhaps she did not think she was worth remembering or that she wanted to hide a part of her life. A close look at the few source that survived the fireplace points to the conclusion that Julia wasn’t interested in ensconcing herself in popular memory as a “female ‘first.’”

During her time in Paris, Julia maintained correspondence with her cousins, Lucy and Pierre, in New York. These letters capture her voice. In them, she chronicled the process of taking and failing the Beaux Arts entrance exam three times as well as her experiences with and thoughts on gender discrimination. Dr. Talley noted that Julia did not challenge gender norms, but she did comment on them. She found relief that she faced discrimination based on her gender and not on her intelligence or ability as an architect. Her most feminist remark was about her continued efforts in taking the entrance exam: she “wanted to show [young girls] are not discouraged.”

This is my second time becoming acquainted with Julia Morgan. The first was as a sophomore in Dr. Talley’s Investigating U.S. History course during our unit on the Progressive Era. Dr. Talley instilled in me an appreciation for engagement with primary source material. Although Julia’s correspondence offers less than what a biographer would want, it does illuminate her awareness of the gender barriers and restrictions that she faced, as well as a desire to be seen simply as a person with a vocation, a talent and a desire to create.

During the Q&A session, I asked Dr. Talley about her conjecture on Julia’s life. She replied, stating that she believes that Julia was content with her career. She was successful, even without intense emphasis on her “firsts.” To her, success was achieved through owning her own business, catering to clients and following through on projects. In this sense, Julia’s life resists the tendency within women’s history to frame significance only through exceptionalism or overt activism. Rather than a conspicuous figure, she appears as someone who navigated professional success in a quieter, more ordinary way — one that is no less meaningful but often goes unrecognized or is later overstated to fit a narrative of greatness.

Dr. Talley concluded her presentation with an excerpt from Lois Romano’s opinion essay, “The Truth About Mary Todd Lincoln,” in anticipation of her upcoming biography on one of America’s most famous widows. In ways different than Julia Morgan, Mary Todd Lincoln has been reduced to the wife of the slain “Great Emancipator” and vilified as economically irresponsible, mentally unstable and disloyal by male historians, morphing her into a one-dimensional figure, ignoring her steadfastness and perseverance. Romano writes that “[r]etelling the story of a woman today requires motivation to correct the historical record.” This is a call to action for the preservation of sources constructed by women and the advancement of the study of women’s histories in the public history space.

Beyond Hearst Castle: Rethinking Julia Morgan’s Legacy in Women’s History with Dr. Gina Talley was originally published in Hindsights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Albert Lepage Center’s “Is There A Border Crisis?” event invites curiosity and contemplation with its title. Moderated by Daniel Cortes, a Villanova Law professor and Director of the Center for Asylum, Refugee, and Emigrant Services, this event explores these issues by asking a fundamental question: does a crisis exist?

Donald Trump’s second presidential term has been marked by increased in efforts to sharply reduce all immigration into the United States through executive action. The high volume of actions has contributed to media oversaturation: the volume of information on immigration-related actions from enforcement shifts to notification of ICE activity has kept the border crisis a central, daily policy focus. This issue has moved beyond personal devices and now permeates both private and public life across the United States.

The panel featured presentations and remarks by Dr. Mary Mendoza, Assistant Professor of History at Penn State University, Dr. Hardeep Dhillon, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and Lori Nessel, Professor of Law and the Director of the Center of Social Justice at Seton Hall University School of Law. The panelists placed the topic of immigration within a historical context, to promote a deeper understanding for current events that contribute to the issue’s relevance and the construction of a border crisis.

Dr. Mendoza’s work is primarily concerned with the socio-ecological system and literal construction of the border. In addition to the physical structure, her work considers how nature influences the border’s manufacture, where pest control acted as the catalyst. In the earlier 20th century, the U.S.-Mexico border was not a hard barrier. The region functioned as an intertwined, interregional economy rooted in ranching. The border developed a racialized character in part due to insect-born disease affecting agriculture.

Around 1911, the U.S. government supported the construction of some of the first border fences across the U.S.-Mexico boundary to control livestock movement, especially to prevent disease. This disrupted local commerce; as a result, ranchers lobbied for exemptions or special permissions. In the early 1900s, a fatal cattle fever outbreak spread by ticks from Mexican cattle caused severe losses to the U.S. cattle industry. During this period, Mexican cattle were increasingly framed as biologically inferior, or disease compared to U.S. cattle. This bovine superiority mirrored ideas about human racial superiority, blurring the lines between the language of animal health and social and racial hierarchies.

In 1916, a Typhus outbreak near the Southwestern border near El Paso, Texas emboldened the U.S. Public Health Service to institute mandatory screenings, disinfection and quarantines for Mexicans crossing into the United States. Although framed as “public health,” these practices were often degrading, violent and amplified the idea of a crisis. This resulted in the border space becoming a tool of control.

In the post-war era, Mexican laborers brought to the United States through the Bracero Program, designed to fill labor shortages in agriculture and railway industry, were subjected to intense medical inspections, including being sprayed with DDT, an agricultural pesticide used to control disease-carrying insects, and later linked to reproductive issues and cancer in humans.

Dr. Mendoza highlighted how Mexican women migrants navigated this system by capitalizing on gender norms to avoid inspection and scrutiny or to gain entry. The permanent settlement of migrants in the United States was constructed as a social threat, especially through rhetoric that cast their U.S.-born children as “staining the social fabric” of the nation. The use of dehumanizing metaphors of migrants as disease, fungus or parasites echoed earlier public health framing and has continued to apply to people. Dr. Mendoza’s presentation solidified the idea that the “crisis” at the border was constructed over time through policy decisions, public health narratives, and racialized fears.

This history made me think about how similar language still appears in contemporary debates about immigration, where migrants are often framed as threats to public safety or national identity. The Trump Administration has consistently employed several key metaphors and rhetorical patterns of migration as an “invasion,” migrants as “criminals” or “predators” and the nation as a “home under threat.”

Dr. Dhillon’s presentation was rooted in her experience as a legal historian. Her work explores how the border is a mobile apparatus woven into the fabric of daily life. In her presentation, Dhillon presented legal status as a tool of inequality, as state officials have historically used legal definitions of race and citizenship to determine who has access to rights, resources and political power.

Dhillon used the landmark Supreme Court case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) involving the children of Chinese immigrants as a historical example of how legal frameworks were used to restrict rights for certain racial groups, even for those born on U.S. soil, including Asian Americans. These legal mechanisms demonstrate that borders are not just geographic lines, but also boundaries of rights. Dhillon argued that there is no singular border or crisis — exclusion and control are enabled by a constructed legal architecture that shapes who is included and who is excluded throughout the country. The crises are plural, permeating through every aspect of American life from the legal to the public health space.

Lori Nessel’s presentation illuminated on how similar legal strategies continue to operate today. As a legal advocate for immigrant populations, Professor Nessel discussed “redefin[ing] winning” cases in a moment where there is a constant need to push back against an unjust system. As the Director of the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall University School of Law, Nessel works closely with law students on asylum cases. She recounted a story of an unlawful detainment by ICE and the clinic’s valiant efforts, along with the local community, to locate the individual to fight for his release. Nessel commented on the current administration’s strategy to send detainees to jurisdictions where due process is often lacking. The opacity of ICE operations, manifested in their secretive practices and the transfer of detainees into legal “black holes,” makes pursuing justice extremely difficult.

Despite this, Nessel asserted that the border crisis should not solely be attributed to President Trump and his administration. The border crisis is not solely the result of one figure or administration; it is also driven by broader systems, funding structures, and messaging strategies that influence public perception and policy.

As someone starting law school this fall, participating as an audience member in this panel reignited why I wanted to pursue law in the first place: the deep intersection between history and the law. These presentations highlighted the importance of understanding the origin of our laws and its historical application for full application or use. I was filled with excitement as I am soon to embark on my journey to becoming a lawyer, an advocate for these communities and an individual dedicated to ending this ongoing crisis of dehumanization.

The event concluded with a Q&A section. One question that generated significant discussion was: What is new about this present crisis? The panelists equally contributed to answering this question. Despite a long history of targeting Mexican Americans, and a lesser remarked history of deporting citizens, the United States is deporting U.S. citizens in higher numbers. The violence against white allies, like Renée Good and Alex Pretti, is another defining and uncommon aspect of this crisis. Additionally, the scale of money in ICE funding and the incarceration of detainees is turning border control into a business.

The audience’s fascination with the perceived uniqueness of the current crisis is understandable. This concern stems from a broader sense of national unease, fueled by a constant stream of negative news that offers a multisensory experience of the human rights crises that occur in our neighborhoods, our grocery stores, our gas stations, our schools, on our morning commutes. The main takeaway is that this is nothing new. While the method of information dissemination might have evolved drastically in the last century, xenophobia and racism have developed alongside the nation itself. The “border crisis” is learned behavior; public and political reactions to immigration are not spontaneous, but shaped by historical patterns of exclusion.

Is There A Border Crisis? was originally published in Hindsights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the spring of my junior year, I met Gwendolyn Hoyt. A quick Google search reduces her to the appellant in the landmark Supreme Court case, Hoyt v. Florida (1961), that upheld the constitutionality of gender discrimination in the jury box. She was “a woman [who] killed her husband.” Her conviction of second-degree murder by a jury of twelve men was upheld at every level.

My initial reaction was to ask “Why?” Why did Gwendolyn Hoyt kill her husband? Why why did the jury that decided her fate contain no women?

On Wednesday, February 25th, I introduced Gwendolyn Hoyt to an audience at “Women on Juries: The Fight for the Right,” a Lunch with Lepage event, dedicated to the research of my History Capstone Project.

We must examine Gwendolyn Hoyt and her husband, Clarence, in the same way the Tampa Tribune had in their coverage of the mariticide, as the “Slayer” and the “Victim,” respectively. In a legal sense, Clarence is the victim; the Tampa Tribune is correct to label him so. On the other hand, “Slayer” is not a general legal label. Confined to a niche doctrine within civil law, the term aptly appears in media or rhetorical descriptions, sensationalizing violence in a vivid, theatrical way that can bias how a person is perceived. Gwendolyn is not given the standard, impartial legal label like “offender” or “defendant.” Instead, she becomes a figure synonymous with slaughter, execution and massacre; the Tampa Tribune transforms her into an archetype of brutality. This was an exercise in interrogating language, especially the language of blame and victimization. The Tampa Tribune was not only reporting on the facts of the case, but the facts of post-war American society rooted in domestic containment and conscience of Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name” (the epidemic of unspoken unhappiness and emptiness felt by white, middle-class, college-educated American housewives in the post-war who were stifled by conventionality). The story of repeated infidelity on Clarence’s part that led to a mutual assault and battery charge, divorce and remarriage, and Gwendolyn’s epilepsy died with him; what remained was a stripped account that recast Gwendolyn as a disgruntled, mentally ill housewife who murdered her husband.

It is no wonder that her jury, likely filled with husbands, fathers, and veterans, delivered an expedited verdict.

My intent was to interrogate the Hoyt decision and the social, political and legal circumstances that allowed for its ruling, including antecedental case material. I sought to examine the evolution of the legal jurisprudence of gender-based discrimination in jury service, concluding recognition of this practice was not motivated by a concern for expanding women’s rights, but protecting male litigants and safeguarding states’ rights.

The Sixth Amendment protects the fundamental right to a trial by “an impartial jury.” Overtime, courts have interpreted and reinterpreted the requirements for impartiality; historically, this meant jurors free from personal bias and outside influence and drawn from the local community.

Before the Civil War, jury service was intimately tied to a restricted definition of citizenship, limited to white, male, property-owners or taxpayers. Black men — freed or enslaved — were excluded from participation. The 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford decision formalized that Black Americans were not citizens. The postbellum adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the Dred Scott case by defining national citizenship, guaranteeing equal protection, and ensuring due process against state violations.

In the 1873, Strauder v. West Virginia decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment confers upon Black Americans “the right to exemption from unfriendly legislation against them distinctively as colored,” marking an important step in using Equal Protection to combat racial discrimination at the federal level. Strauder, a formerly enslaved Black man, was convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death. He appealed, arguing that the West Virginia statute confining jury service to “white male persons” violated his rights as a defendant under Equal Protection. This case established expectations for the demographics of a trial jury as “a body of men composed of…persons having the same legal status in society as that which he holds,” codifying the relationship between citizenship, civic duty, and civil protection.

In October 1961, Dorothy Kenyon, working for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), cited Strauder in her amicus brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of Gwendolyn Hoyt. Her colleague, Pauli Murray, a prominent Black feminist lawyer and activist, requested a copy of Kenyon’s brief as the only example of a Supreme Court amicus brief supporting the rights of women since 1907. In her work for then-President John F. Kennedy’s Commission of the Status of Women, she proposed a reexamination of the Fourteenth Amendment as it applied to women. Murray argued that race and gender are “comparable classes” used to impose “implications of inferiority,” making the two types of discrimination legally comparable. Kenyon capitalized on this rationale in her amicus brief, comparing the historical enslavement of Black Americans to the experiences of American women to argue they should be able to to enjoy the fruits of their citizenship.

Within Equal Protection jurisprudence, racial injury functions as the paradigmatic model of constitutional discrimination, structuring how all subsequent claims of inequality — including sex discrimination — must be articulated and recognized. Kenyon understood that new claims could not enter constitutional law on their own terms, but only through translation into an already established grammar of racial exclusion, which both enables recognition and limits how difference can be understood.

Kenyon and Murray were pioneering activists, working in the footsteps of suffragists that demanded courts include jury service as a right guaranteed alongside the vote. In the context of the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled that Equal Protection did not automatically apply to all citizens in the 1880 Ex parte Virginia decision. It was ruled that suffrage did not imply the right to jury service. Following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, state courts re-examined the logic behind historical cases that addressed implications of the Fifteenth Amendment for Black citizenship. Rather than reopening these settled matters, the courts adapted their foundational legal reasoning to conclude that citizenship implied other rights. However, the power to prescribe the qualifications of jurors fell to the states, including the making of discriminations.

In 1927, only nineteen states allowed women to serve on juries. A system of automatic exemption was adopted by many, requiring that a woman affirmatively register willingness to serve, and upheld by the Supreme Court even after the Civil Rights Act of 1957 federally standardized a woman’s ability to serve as federal jurors.

In Florida, where Gwendolyn Hoyt lived, automatic exemption was adopted. From 1953 to 1957, the Hillsborough County clerk limited the number of women on the list of eligible jurors to twelve, despite having 220 eligible women out of a possible 10,000. The proportion of women on the jury list to the total was less than five percent, an issue raised by Hoyt’s attorneys at her trials. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court failed to consider the rights of women on both sides of the law, as members of the court and participants in a criminal suit. Hoyt was committed to state prison in December 1961 and released on parole in July 1964, after having served less than three years of her sentence, after which her name is forgotten for a decade.

In the 1975 Taylor v. Louisiana case, the Supreme Court ruled that systematically excluding women from jury panels is unconstitutional. Billy Taylor was indicted, tried for aggravated kidnapping and rape charges and convicted by an all-male jury. In his appeal to the Supreme Court, he claimed that his Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial was violated as the jury lacked female representation from the community and women represented 53% of the citizens eligible for jury service. Beyond the statistical disparity, Taylor’s challenge was rooted in a strategic legal gamble: the contention that a jury scrubbed of female perspectives deprived him of a more empathetic or balanced judgement. By excluding women, the state essentially hand-picked a demographic Taylor believed was predisposed to a harsher brand of justice, denying him the “fair cross-section” essential to a truly impartial trial. Like Florida, Louisiana interpreted the Nineteenth Amendment very narrowly and adopted a system of automatic exemption for women. The Court ruled in favor, effectively overturning the Hoyt decision, which was referenced sixteen times.

The Taylor ruling was treated as a victory for American women. It was the nail in the coffin for the systematic exclusion of women from jury service. The Supreme Court addressed the discrepancies between the rulings in Hoyt and Taylor, providing that Hoyt was decided because “there was ample reason to treat all women differently from men for the purpose of jury service and to exclude them unless they volunteered.” The Court maintained that they did not deny Gwendolyn Hoyt “due process of law or equal protection of the laws.” The Court failed to rule unconstitutionality on the Florida State statute because Hoyt’s appeal did not “involve a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a jury drawn from a fair cross section of the community,” although Dororthy Kenyon reminded the Court otherwise.

To the Supreme Court, Billy Taylor’s Sixth Amendment rights were more at risk than those of Gwendolyn Hoyt. The Court was more concerned with protecting the rights of the defendant to request a jury of one’s peers as a condition of their citizenship than with women’s rights to serve on a jury. The Court ruled in favor of the male defendant’s rights, not necessarily for the sake of advancing gender equality. Justice Byron White, who wrote the opinion of the Court for Taylor v. Louisiana, said: “We are also persuaded that the fair-cross-section requirement is violated by the systematic exclusion of women…if [women] are systematically eliminated from jury panels, the Sixth Amendment’s fair-cross-section requirement cannot be satisfied.” The true legacy of Taylor is safeguarding the rights of male defendants.

My research is dedicated to ensuring that Taylor is remembered that way and that Gwendolyn Hoyt’s story is not forgotten, nor simplified in a way that diminishes her case as legal precedent for a legal victory that made her rights an afterthought.

As a student of history, I have spent countless hours in and out of the classroom near primary source material, which has encouraged me to think critically about how the story before me is being told. Perspective and power work in tandem: someone’s narrative is often elevated at the expense of others. This inquiry has reaffirmed to me that history is filled with narratives and testimonies of people that time will never know because of various social, political, and economic factors that suppress their voices.

I came to know and understand Gwendolyn Hoyt as I traversed through the law school application process, from studying for the LSAT to submitting my deposit to Brooklyn Law School. As I prepare to embark on the next part of my academic journey, I carry with me a solemn promise to “remember the ladies,” in the words of Abigail Adams, and strive to illuminate the voices of the marginalized, the abused, the silenced, and the misunderstood.

From Hoyt to Taylor: Gender, Justice and the Myth of Power was originally published in Hindsights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dr. Eliza Gettel never set out to become a historian. Her winding path to history began somewhere between Greek and Latin classes at the College of the Holy Cross and social archaeology studies at the University of Southampton.

A recipient of a full merit scholarship in Classics, Dr. Gettel arrived at the College of the Holy Cross with every intention of dedicating herself to the discipline. She applied herself tirelessly, taking every opportunity to advance her studies, from studying abroad to completing two theses. “I knew I wanted to dig deep,” Dr. Gettel commented on this period of time. Language studies, perhaps one of her most impressive accomplishments, became a central focus during these years. On campus and abroad, Dr. Gettel further refined her existing language skills. Her hard work paid off; by graduation, she had taken “nine years of Latin, five years of Ancient Greek, two years of modern Greek, two years of Italian, and one year of German.”

Dr. Gettel attributes some of her undergraduate success to her early discussions with advisors.

Visting office hours early allowed Dr. Gettel to build strong relationships with her mentors who could help her lay out her postgraduate plans. In addition to helping her prepare years in advance for graduate applications, these mentors also helped her understand where she “fit in the field.” It was during these conversations that her advisors broke the news: she was a historian at heart. “It was fairly clear to everyone around me that I was meant to be an ancient historian,” Dr. Gettel remarked about these meetings. Although she had considered getting a PhD in Archaeology, her advisors insisted that Ancient History was the best path for her. Dr. Gettel recounts that her advisors lovingly explained that she actually wasn’t interested in the “objects themselves but rather the stories that they gave [her] access to.” Although she had only taken one history course (for Classics credit), she did apply to study ancient history. Initially unconvinced she would be accepted, she ultimately received several offers to study Ancient History and chose Harvard, where she was able to defer to do a Fulbright year at the University of Southampton to study social archaeology. “I didn’t need the year to fit a narrative [for a PhD],” Dr. Gettel recalls about the experience. As a result, she felt free to play around with new theories and methods. She describes this experience as “a perfect bridge” between her previous work at Holy Cross and her future work at Harvard. In this program, Dr. Gettel had the opportunity to expand her horizons and add new theories on “institutional history, agency, personhood, and cultural change.” to her scholarly toolbelt. These theories, which still inform her work, also encouraged her to become a “more flexible thinker” who could question the “many assumptions that people make about the world.”

Dr. Gettel put this new flexibility into practice as she began searching for her dissertation topic, reading read books in both Greek and Roman history as she prepared for her comprehensive exams. One of the many books she read was Dr. Emily Mackil’s Creating a Common Polity: Religion, Economy, and Politics in the Making of the Greek Koinon, which argued that local political communities known as koina (singular koinon) permeated all aspects of Greek life, presenting Dr. Gettel with an interesting puzzle. She wondered, “How could political structures that were so important in Greek life just disappear under Roman rule?” Like any good historian, Dr. Gettel looked to the surviving evidence for answers and found much more than she ever expected. Equipped with a growing pile of evidence, Dr. Gettel made this puzzle the subject of her dissertation.

To unravel this mystery in her dissertation and her ongoing book project, Dr. Gettel turns to sources she never expected to work with when she started her PhD: inscriptions and coins. Despite a learning curve, Dr. Gettel found these sources to be essential for understanding how koina persisted and evolved under Rome’s rule. Inscriptions offer Dr. Gettel a glimpse into how Greek citizens saw themselves and their political structures in a changing world. Dr. Gettel also uses these sources to reveal overlooked connections, highlighting how koina functioned within a multi-scalar, interconnected system. Using these sources to dispel widespread assumptions about koina and their supposed incompatibility with empire, Dr. Gettel seeks to answer questions that are still relevant to this day, such as “How do we conceptualize an empire?” and, “What does it mean to be an imperial citizen?”

For those who assume that ancient history is just “boring military stuff,” Dr. Gettel’s classes prove that it is so much more. Pedagogy is important to Dr. Gettel. As the co-chair of the Association of Ancient Historians’ Committee on Teaching, she understands the difference that effective teaching techniques can make. In both her undergraduate and graduate classes, she creates opportunities to make ancient history come to life. One strategy Dr. Gettel deploys in the classroom involves a role-playing scenario from Reacting to the Past in which students act out historical debates in 403 BCE Athens. During this exercise, students not only immerse themselves in Athenian history but also begin to understand how contingent historical processes are. Dr. Gettel particularly enjoys this exercise because it engages history majors and non-majors alike and gets them excited to participate.

During our interview, Dr. Gettel kept bringing our conversation back to one theme: accessibility. Ancient history is a language-intensive subfield, which makes it feel inaccessible to many. As a scholar and educator, Dr. Gettel constantly grapples with this reality. As a result, Dr. Gettel designs her coursework with accessibility in mind, leaning into exercises that help level the playing field for her students. Dr. Gettel uses visual exercises, like coin analysis, because they are accessible to all students and are an excellent tool for teaching a class to recognize and use historical evidence. Whether her students are interested in ancient history or are simply there for a general requirement, they leave with sharply honed skills that they can apply to their other coursework and life outside the classroom.

As I sat down to speak with Dr. Gettel, I was excited to learn about her extremely rigorous scholarship and her unique background, but, as someone studying Progressive Era sewer development, I never expected we would share common historical ground. However, throughout the interview, we kept returning to themes that connected our work: empire and citizenship. These moments offered me a small glimpse of the incredible way Dr. Gettel thinks about history and the way she explores questions that resonate across the discipline. I left our conversation inspired and motivated to find ways to extend my own work.

Dr. Gettel embodies the creativity, flexibility, and intellectual rigor that define the Villanova history department as a whole. Whether it’s advice on fellowships or insights on asking good historical questions, Dr. Gettel has so much to offer students who seek her out.

Faculty Profile: Dr. Eliza Gettel was originally published in Hindsights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Sunday, Bad Bunny, the Grammy Award-winning artist born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, told a story of Puerto Rican culture and heritage in a thirteen-minute halftime show for Super Bowl LX to celebrate the island where he was born and its place in the American story. The mostly Spanish-language performance was studded with cultural and political symbolism, live nuptials, and special appearances by pop singers Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin. This spectacular redefined what it means to be an American, in an age where that is largely determined by one’s legal status, concluding with a quotation displayed on a screen attributed to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

In response, President Trump took to Truth Social to participate in an epidemic of hatred against Latin American people and communities: “The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER! It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence. Nobody understands a word this guy is saying…This ‘Show’ is just a ‘slap in the face’ to our Country.”

Funny, that successful, creative, and excellent are the exact adjectives I would use to describe Bad Bunny’s tribute to the greatness of the Americas, including the United States, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California on Sunday evening.

Trump’s criticism of the lack of English in the Halftime Show does not come as a surprise. In March 2025, he signed Executive Order 14224, establishing English as the official language of the United States, and Congress is working on making this policy federal law. The English-only movement is as old as the United States itself and has been deeply engrained in Puerto Rican history. After the territory was acquired at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898, English was declared “the official language of the school room” in attempts to foster cultural assimilation, following alongside concurrent actions in the Philippines and Hawaii.

The United States’ historical response to ethnic and cultural diversity has been to promote American identity as English-speaking, Protestant, and white, rejecting groups that fail to identity with or assimilate to these categories. Legislation continues to be a tool used to limit immigration in general or exclude certain groups from entering the country.

The negativity and criticism surrounding Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX Halftime Show, led by the Trump administration and its sycophantic retinue, is indicative that the United States continues to recognize that its founding ideals of freedom, liberty, and justice for all are conditional and were never meant to apply broadly. Exclusion is deeply intertwined in the foundation of our nation. The history of the United States has always been about debating one central question: who belongs here?

I am not a member of the Latin-American community, but I am the child of a Portuguese immigrant, and the Halftime Show sparked an unexpected emotional connection. Growing up, I was made very familiar with my mother’s experiences emigrating to the United States in the early 1980s, including struggles to learn and speak English, assimilate culturally, and foster a sense of belonging in a place that consistently and constantly aimed to remind her that she did not. Even after naturalization, American society continues to send this message to her.

I have always been proud that my mother is an immigrant. In elementary school, I did not shy away from shepherding my classmates to a globe and tracing my finger over a small, Western European country the size of Indiana. I thought that living “in between” cultures, languages, and identities was cool. And I still do.

I remain proud to stand in the legacy of immigration, bilingualism, and biculturalism. That is why the Halftime Show meant so much to me. Bad Bunny donned a custom Zara jersey with his mother’s surname — Ocasio — on the back to honor his maternal heritage. I carry my mother’s surname — Monteiro — in my own. I have four names, not three in the traditional English sense of first, middle, and last. Having this “extra” name anchors me to a legacy of immigration and migration that lives with me, a daily reminder that I stand on someone else’s shoulders. At the beginning of the show, the audience is transported to the sugar-cane fields of Puerto Rico as Bad Bunny traverses the landscape peppered with community scenes. I was struck by the group of elderly men playing dominos, a symbol of connection and community, and I was reminded of my maternal great-grandmother, Avó Ção, as we called her, who spent her afternoons playing Sueca, a popular Portuguese card game passed down from generation to generation, outside her apartment with her neighbors. Even the image of a young child sleeping at a family party was an experience that myself and my cousins all shared growing up.

I saw parts of the show that resonated deeply with my own experience, and parts that were unfamiliar, rooted in Puerto Rican history and culture. Watching it, I was struck by how music and celebration can be an act of pride and rebellion. To witness people embracing joy so openly, despite histories of marginalization, reminded me that basking in happiness can itself resist oppression. Immigrant and minority communities can reclaim through culture: speaking their language, practicing their customs, celebrating their heritage. That is a form of claiming space in society, asserting that one’s identity matters. To me, that is a profoundly American act.

To rival the NFL Halftime Show, the “All-American Halftime Show,” sponsored by Turning Point USA and headlined by Kid Rock, was presented as a response to the choice of the “foreigner,” Bad Bunny, as the chosen artist and featured a patriotic display supposedly rivaling the Puerto Rican-born singer’s, meaning that it included songs in English sung by artists from the continental United States. The presence of the Spanish language and near-total absence of English was deeply concerning to conservative commentators and lawmakers. In the United States, bilingualism is dangerous, especially if that second language is Spanish. Language and accent are markers historically used to deny belonging and humanity. Recently, the Latin American community is being disproportionately targeted by ICE raids under the Trump administration’s mission to implement mass deportations. A controversial 2025 Supreme Court ruling has ultimately given ICE the green light to profile Latin-Americans, using factors like speaking Spanish, having an accent, or working in certain jobs as justification for detaining people.

The Super Bowl LX Halftime Show gave space to the American communities across different cultures that are denied dignity in the United States by refusing to bow to linguistic standards. This moment belonged to the people of Puerto Rico and the countries that make up the Americas, not just the United States. This moment belonged to immigrants and their children who live in the shadow of their forebearers’ sacrifice and bravery. This moment has signaled a shared vulnerability across cultures to create a moral obligation for solidarity across minority, immigrant, and diasporic communities. This moment has signaled that although we may speak in many different tongues, love is understood in all languages.

The Politics of Language at the Super Bowl XL Halftime Show was originally published in Hindsights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Tuesday, January 27th, the Lepage Center hosted its inaugural event of the Spring 2026 semester, “Media, Pop Culture & History,” a virtual panel discussion, moderated by Villanova History Department faculty, Dr. Gina Talley. The panel included four scholars and educators from around the Midwest.

Dr. Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Chair of the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, began with a brief presentation centered on critiquing ‘reflectionism,’ the idea that films mirror their contemporary society, reflect on national debates, cultural anxieties, and historical moments. “Film provides inadvertent allegories of contemporary history,” she remarked. In her book, The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975, she analyzes what narratives surrounding apartment living reveal about the Eisenhower years and the values that American society placed on marriage and suburban living. Similarly, in her most recent publication, Unhomed: Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema, she focuses on “films about the tramp” to uncover a long history of “tramp scares,” public anxiety about nomadic, often homeless people, in the post-Civil War period through World War I. Wojcik encouraged the audience to “think of films as reflecting history, while avoiding projecting preconceived notions of the past.”

In the following presentation, Dr. Makeba Lavan, Assistant Professor of English at Grinnell College, followed by pushing the audience to consider, “How do we decide what stories to tell?” In her courses, Dr. Lavan is preoccupied with examining why many movies and television programs featuring Black characters focus on pain, historical (as in the context of slavery) or otherwise. She provided an overview of the types of courses she teaches that examine this central question. In her 200-Level: Adaptation course, students explore various adaptations, with the intent of garnering a deeper understanding about the lack of film adaptations made for or directed by people of color. In her 200-Level: Traditions in African American Literature course, her students view several films, beginning with The Birth of a Nation (1915), the first film screened in the White House, which glorified white supremacy, depicting the KKK as heroes, and ending with Passing (2021, based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel), a film that Dr. Lavan heralded as a story of “what whiteness and blackness mean.” These films are just two examples she uses to teach students about propaganda, the impact of state-sponsored propaganda on notions of racial difference, and the beauty of well-executed literary adaptations that accurately reflect the author’s intended effect on audiences.

Dr. Lavan’s discussion of The Birth of a Nation and Passing pushed me to think more critically about how dominant narratives are often presented as historical truth rather than constructed stories. The example of The Birth of a Nation demonstrates how powerful media can be in shaping perception while erasing Black voices and perspectives. This reflection reminded me that it is important not to passively accept the stories placed in front of us, but to remain attentive to the narratives that are missing and the power structures that determine which stories get told.

Dr. Peter Raleigh, an educator of Ancient and Medieval history, concurred that films are a great source of educational and instructional material for students. “Students derive so much of historical imaginary from works of popular culture and mass media,” he said in the opening remarks of his presentation, “the core question is: how do we address that?” Dr. Raleigh used Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and Zach Snyder’s 300 (2007) as examples of films that reflect on the argument and rhetoric of the United States’ 2003 Invasion of Iraq. 300, a film about the Battle of Thermopylae during the Greco-Persian Wars of the 5th century, is rooted in a conversation about “the heroic defense of Western civilization against the Middle Eastern ‘other.’” Dr. Raleigh asserted that 300 is a teachable film, allowing for greater conversation in the classroom about orientalism, a concept integral to the analysis of pre-modern and contemporary relationships between the West and the Middle East.

Films and other media can be useful starting points for conversation. They give us something familiar to engage with and then open the door to deeper discussions. Dr. Raleigh’s example of 300 demonstrates that films can be analyzed to help us understand contemporary conflicts and broader implications of justice and power. This connects back to Dr. Wojcik’s presentation, regarding how media can serve as a time capsule of a specific time period, allowing historians to analyze how the wider public felt about particular issues, such as the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

Finally, Dr. Jeremiah McCall, longtime teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School and author of books on Ancient Roman history and history in games, spoke on “games about the past.” As a Roman historian, Dr. McCall prides himself on close interaction with historical sources. As an educator, he underlined the importance of making sure that “students [know] how they know what they know” which is often achieved through a mediated experience in a classroom with an educator who can provide the historical context necessary for fruitful learning. Dr. McCall cited Monopoly — originally derived from Elizabeth Magie’s The Landlord’s Game — as an example. “The point of the game is that players are meant to feel really bad about exploiting people and taking all of their money,” he said. “That’s the part that everyone likes.” Additionally, games about mutually assured destruction “have people enjoying blowing [other] people up.” For these reasons, Dr. McCall stressed that “mediated game experiences [are] really important as educators.” Otherwise, students risk conceptualizing selective interpretations of the past through their understanding of the game histories. Often, the central player identity in the game is a white, heterosexual male that requires the help of non-player agents or nonplayer characters (NPCs), often represented as tools or instruments that could help or hurt the central player. This can be especially problematic in colonial games. On this issue, Dr. McCall argued that this responsibility “depends on [game] designers and [game] design,” who should seek out historians to curate an accurate, diverse and educational game experience.

In all, the panelists concurred that media is a point of entry for students into the discipline of history, which can be a double-edged sword for educators. As Dr. Wojcik commented during the Q&A portion, students “need history to understand film, but film opens up the history.” In a classroom viewing of Casablanca (1942), her students’ conception of the “bad guys” allowed for further learning and discussion about Nazism and French colonialism. Exposure to media allows for the introduction of narratives and people that consumers would not have otherwise known. For this reason, film, television, literature and games are a great avenue for curiosity, exploration and new learning.

This event could not have come at a more perfect time. With a slew of anticipatory historical TV shows and films, including a new season of Bridgerton on Netflix, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. These programs are sure to open the door for fascination with various historical periods and eras; however, accompanied by the hullabaloo of Hollywood is a vacuum of historical context and understanding. Bridgerton has been praised for its “color-conscious” casting, reimagining a Regency England where Queen Charlotte alleged African ancestry led to racial equality for people of color, subverting the all-white period drama. Yet, Emerald Fennell, the director of upcoming adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, has been under fire since the film’s development for her choice to cast Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, a character interpreted as a personal of color. This has elicited conversations about artistic interpretation and the integrity of literary adaptations. The conversation by the panelists has illuminated the need for mediated experiences. This is not to say that films, TV shows, and games must be enjoyed in the presence of an educator, transforming an outing to the movie theater into a screening of an educational film from our elementary school days. Nonetheless, it is important that consumers of historical media be exposed to supplementary materials, potentially including an educator or historian, that can allow for more fruitful viewing.

Media, Pop Culture & History Event was originally published in Hindsights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On January 3rd, 2026, President Donald Trump announced that the United States had launched a military strike on Venezuela and had captured the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cillia Flores, for transport to New York City for U.S. legal proceedings. Operation Absolute Resolve was completed on the thirty-sixth anniversary of the surrender of General Manuel Noriega, the former de facto leader of Panama wanted by U.S. authorities for racketeering and drug trafficking, to American forces.

In 1990, then-President George H.W. Bush defended the mobilization of 14,000 U.S. armed forced in Operation Just Cause by citing four primary reasons: protecting 35,000 American lives in Panama, defending democracy and human rights, combatting drug trafficking, and preserving the integrity of the Panama Canal treaties, negotiated by former President Jimmy Carter. The murder of U.S. Marine First Lieutenant Robert Paz in Panama City in December 1989 by Noriega’s military and police force, the Panama Defense Force (PDF), and subsequent ill-treatment toward a U.S. Naval officer and his wife served as moral justification, moving Bush to proceed in Noriega’s capture.

Thirty-six years later, the politics, the lawfulness and the scale of U.S. involvement are different. In 1990, the United States apprehended Noriega in the context of a full-scale military invasion with intent to get in and get the dictator out. The United States did not linger, only long enough to oversee the swift transition to a new, democratic government under Guillermo Endara before withdrawing. In 2026, while there are no U.S. ground troops or diplomats officially in Venezuela, the United States is lingering.

In the words of President Trump, “[w]e’re in charge.”

The history of U.S-South American relations is marred by attempts by the United States to assert dominance over the Western Hemisphere. In the 19th century, when many South American countries gained their independence from European powers, the United States adopted a foreign policy position that opposed any European interference in the Western hemisphere, known as the Monroe Doctrine. In 1904, then-President Theodore Roosevelt issued The Roosevelt Corollary, an addition to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting the United States’ right to intervene in Latin American nations to prevent European intervention, establishing a paternalistic tradition in American foreign policy to justify intervention, financial oversight and military occupation. This continued into the Cold War era, as the United States grew into their self-proclaimed title as the “international police power” of the free world by supporting coups or anti-communist regimes to weaken Soviet influence.

At the end of the 20th and into the 21st centuries, U.S.-Venezuelan relations slowly deteriorated, culminating in the situation faced presently. Venezuela has remained an oil-dependent economy with oil accounting for 90% of the country’s exports and proceeds from oil sales encompassing much of the government’s budget. In 1998, Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela. His ideology, known as Chavismo, combines elements of socialism, populism and nationalism, among other political and economic ideas. He opposed the U.S. influence in Latin America and promoted alliances with countries like Cuba, China and Russia. Chavismo is inherently threatening to American ideology because it views the United States as an exploitative and interventionist power. This is not entirely false. Venezuela holds the world’s largest oil reserves and access for the United States means potentially displacing oil from other less friendly nations, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. The United States’ interest in Venezuela’s oil is less about market efficiency and more about asserting national independence by undermining the sovereignty of other nations.

In 2013, after Chávez’s death, then-vice president Nicolás Maduro succeeded him and was subsequently elected to presidential office. Maduro was faced with the country’s declining economy, hyperinflation and large-scale anti-government protests and civil unrest. In 2015, the first opposition-controlled National Assembly in two decades was elected. Barack Obama, then-President of the United States, said that Venezuela was a “threat to its national security” and denounced Maduro.

Following Maduro’s re-election in 2018, the National Assembly declared the election illegitimate and supported Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader who announced that he would assume the office of interim president until free and fair elections could be held. Guaidó’s legitimacy was recognized by the United States, Canada, most of the European Union and the Organization of American States. Maduro continued to retain support from China, Cuba, Russia and Turkey. This period saw an increase in U.S. sanctions against the Maduro government, including targeting oil shipments to Cuba and third parties linked to Venezuela’s oil sector. Maduro received support from Russian troops to evade these sanctions on the oil industry. At the same time, several countries asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate alleged crimes against humanity in Venezuela, including allegations of excessive force, arbitrary detentions, torture and other abuses during the anti-government protests, particularly in 2014 and 2017.

In 2019, the United States and Venezuela officially severed diplomatic ties following the suspension of consular services in Venezuela. However, as international support for Juan Guaidó weakened, Maduro’s position recovered on the international stage, as he received support from the elections of leaders who were more friendly to him in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil.

In his first term, the Trump Administration charged Maduro with leading the Cartel de los Soles, a loose criminal network tied to senior Venezuelan officials who have allegedly profited from drug trafficking and extortion. On January 20th, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14157, which paved the way for criminal organizations and drug cartels to be named foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), including Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan street gang. These cartels and organizations join other groups that have legal, financial and immigration restrictions due to their engagement or capacity or intent to engage in terrorism, including Al-Qaeda, ISIS and Hamas. The Order asserts that “[t]he Cartels…[have] flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs” and their “activities threaten the safety of the American people, the security of the United States, and the stability of the international order of the Western Hemisphere.” The solution is “total elimination of these organizations’ presence.”

On September 2nd, 2025, the United States carried out its first strike against an alleged drug-carrying vessel that departed from Venezuela and was operated by Tren de Aragua. Trump affirmed that all eleven people onboard were killed. Although U.S. officials said the vessel was engaged in drug trafficking, the government has not publicly released evidence to substantiate that claim or allow independent verification. On November 13th, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced Operation Southern Spear, a military and surveillance campaign aimed at targeting drug trafficking in the Caribbean. Three days later, on November 16th, Secretary of State Marco Rubio formally labeled the Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization. Since September, thirty-five strikes have been carried out through this military operation in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 115 people. This has signaled a change in policy for the U.S. approach to maritime drug smuggling off the coast of Latin America, which was historically been treated as a law enforcement issue handled by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The domestic and global response to these strikes had people questioning their legality and lethality. A classified memo from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is said to be the Trump Administration’s legal justification for the strikes, concluding that the fishermen aboard the vessels were “combatants” as the United States is in a state of armed conflict with drug cartels. Legal experts and human rights groups have challenged this reasoning, arguing that drug smuggling has historically been treated as a law enforcement matter rather than armed conflict under international law. The memo has not been made public, limiting independent scrutiny of the administration’s legal role. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a complaint under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) “seeking the immediate release” of this document to ensure the “informed public debate about the U.S. military’s unprecedented strikes.” It seems reasonable to interpret the classification as signaling that the DOJ is aligned with the current administration’s approach, effectively endorsing the strikes as a legally defensible course of action.

The magnum opus of Operation Southern Spear was the successful capture of Nicolás Maduro at the beginning of the new year and the Trump Administration’s promise to “run” Venezuela “until such time that we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition” of power.

Trump has framed Maduro’s capture as a “law enforcement operation.” This event has created tension between the United States’ legal system and international law. This is where Noriega comes into play: it is the legal precedent for Maduro’s abduction. During his trial, Noriega claimed that as head-of-state, he was entitled to immunity from prosecution. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Miami rejected his claim, noting that the United States had never recognized him as Panama’s legitimate leader and that charges of criminal acts were personal, not official. As endowed in Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the Executive Branch is responsible for recognizing and legitimizing heads of state in other countries. The Court cited the Ker-Frisbie Doctrine, which maintains that U.S. Courts have jurisdiction over criminal defendants irrespective of the way the defendant has been brought before them, even though kidnapping, to legitimize the Court’s jurisdiction over his case, despite his forced abduction.

The Toscanino Dictum provides an exception to Ker-Frisbie given that the circumstances of the apprehension shock the conscience of the court, such as torture or extreme brutality, which would violate due process. However, this is a purely theoretical construct and is unlikely to be used by courts in the Maduro proceedings.

United Nations (UN) experts “strongly condemned” the capture of Maduro as a violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State. UN Secretary-General António Guterres confirmed the United States’ violation of the UN Charter and international law, warning of the establishment of a dangerous precedent.

The reality is the capture, abduction, kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro is an event that stands within the broader United States legacy of foreign intervention, including Panama and extending to conflicts in Iraq, Vietnam, and other Latin American countries, like Guatemala, Chile and Nicaragua. The United States has historically pushed the limits of international legal norms in the name of national security or law enforcement, from narcotics to terrorism to ideological threats to democracy.

Additionally, on November 28th, 2025, Trump granted Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras, a “full and complete” pardon, after being convicted in a U.S. federal court in March 2024 for conspiring to import cocaine into the United States, using and carrying machine guns and destructive devices to advance trafficking, and conspiring to use such weapons and sentenced to forty-five years in prison. This action considering the recent developments in Venezuela suggest a structural weakness in U.S. anti-drug policy. Enforcement is contingent on political alignment rather than consistent legal standards. While allied former leaders convicted of drug trafficking may receive clemency, adversarial regimes face aggressive prosecution or military action, undermining the credibility of the anti-drug mission. If the United States continues to view itself as the “international police power” of the free world, it seems that it will turn a blind eye to misconduct, as long as these perpetrators continue to remain loyal, and crack down on regimes that support American enemies elsewhere.

Today, the “Donroe Doctrine” is a terrifying version of the historical Monroe Doctrine that moves the United States to a more offensive position on the international stage against countries like Russia and China. In addition, the move to “run” Venezuela for an indefinite and vague amount of time arguably fits modern definitions of imperialism under the guise of counter-narcotics, democracy support and defense interests. This “War on Drugs” ushers in an increased U.S. hyper fixation on the Western Hemisphere and a willingness to threaten and apply force at a scale that has not been seen in decades. Trump has sought to annex Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, and recently refused to rule out the use of military force in its potential annexation, sparking confrontation with Denmark and the European Union. The Trump Administration is expanding upon 19th and 20th century foreign policy initiatives that incompatible with the current geopolitical order, which could potentially pose a threat to the existence of NATO and escalation between the United States, Russia and China.

Noriega’s Ghost: The Return of U.S. Interventionism in Venezuela was originally published in Hindsights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of Villanova University’s fiftieth annual Hunger and Homeless Awareness Week, on Tuesday, November 11th, the Lepage Center hosted their final “Crisis Moments” event of the fall semester. “Crisis of Housing,” a webinar featuring expertise from scholars in the fields of history, urban studies and sociology was moderated by Dr. Anna Duensing, the Albert R. Lepage Endowed Professor in History at Villanova University. “People are thinking about the roof over their heads,” she remarked, “or the lack thereof. Hopefully this conversation can [provide] historical context…and [demonstrate] how we can imagine a future.”

The webinar began with Dr. Rae Baker, an assistant professor of history and Educational and Community-Based Action Research (ECAR) at the University of Cincinnati and a critical human geographer, which means that her research takes a critical approach to focus on the immediacy of actions to uphold human dignity, prioritizing collaboration with people “on [the] front lines” of housing crisis work. Dr. Baker was drawn to the mission of the Lepage Center and its commitment to “creat[ing] a more historically informed public.”

In December 2019, Dr. Baker began collaborating with Alex Ferrer, a PhD candidate at UCLA studying geography, to create a “living archive” of the experiences of tenant organizers, legal aid workers, tenant activist scholars and policy practitioners on the front lines of housing justice and eviction defense work during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dispatches from the Threshold: Tenant Power in Times of Crisis contains chapters from seventeen cities in five countries analyze what barriers on the front lines felt elevated in 2020–2021 due to pandemic conditions. These included personal health concerns, the role of police and policing (especially police interactions with tenants), and how race and racial discrimination affect housing inequality. Dr. Baker stressed the importance of reflecting on racialized dispossession and histories of generational housing loss. She cited that Black tenants had a higher rate of eviction during the pandemic. Additionally, Indigenous removal served as an example of generational housing loss, where attempts at cultural erasure and the reality of the legal frameworks of land treaties and agreements disproportionately affect housing access for Indigenous people into the present.

Carl Gershenson, Director of The Eviction Lab at Princeton University, the first national database of eviction filings in the United States, followed, filling in the qualitative gaps in Dr. Baker’s presentation. “Is there a housing crisis?” Gershenson queried at the beginning of his presentation. “The real question is: for whom?” Homeowners are not in crisis — American renters during their prime childbearing years are.

Gershenson explained that young adult homeownership peaked in 1980 and has been in decline ever since. Most people in their prime years for “childbearing and parenthood” are renters. According to his research, an average salary of $12,000 is needed to buy a median home. As a result, people are forming fewer households. The percentage of the population who head a household are lower than at the beginning of the millennium, indicating a trend of more crowded living.

7.6 million individuals are threatened with eviction in the United States each year. And 40% are children. According to Gershenson’s research, children and young adults aged 0–20 are most likely to experience an eviction. He expanded on the experiences of pregnant women and mothers, citing that women are at a greater at risk for eviction than men during childrearing years. Additionally, 25% of Black households with children experience eviction filings each year.

The result is homelessness, which is a “manifestation of the housing crisis,” as Gershenson remarked. “As housing becomes more expensive in city, county, and metro areas, [the] rates of homelessness go up.” He hypothesizes that the United States may be moving into an era where homeownership may become “caste-like.”

This is where Dr. Nancy Kwak, a historian of the postwar and Cold War period and a professor of History at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD), comes in. She began her presentation with an image of a $1.8 million home in La Jolla, a wealthy neighborhood of San Diego. “The housing crisis is not just about working people not being able to afford housing,” she began. “It is about thinking deeply about inequitable growth.”

As a historian, Dr. Kwak has been interested in studying housing on a global scale and the Cold War implications of American housing around the world. She continued: “I look at how we as a public form stories and shape questions about what equal access to housing means.” Dr. Kwak collaborated with undergraduates at UCSD and the San Diego History Center to create an exhibit on the lost neighborhoods of San Diego. The project interrogated “what it means to live in a city built on many stages of housing inequality.”

In her presentation, Dr. Kwak explained that there has been a long process conducted by private industries and government entities to build housing into a tool of investment instead of a basic human need. The housing crisis has explicitly racial dimensions beginning with the Indigenous housing crisis through land displacement and violent urban evictions in the 19th century of Asian residents in urban dwellings. Dr. Kuwk also highlighted the rise of tenements and industrial slums, ghettoization and racial zoning in Hoovervilles, post-1945 housing shortages, growing affordability after 1970, economic recessions and the COVID-19 pandemic as important events in the timeline of the history of the American housing crisis.

Of the most recent housing crisis, Dr. Kwak concurred with her preceding panelists, citing rising numbers of rent-burdened or severely rent-burdened households. “It’s pretty clear that the homeownership success story is a white story in this country,” she commented, citing stagnant and declining homeownership rates in the postwar decades.

Dr. Kwak encouraged panelists to think about the relationship between housing cost and housing benefit. “How can we move toward specific policies that address inequality?” she asked. Dr. Kwak believes the solution is found in valuing memory and building more inclusive politics of housing justice.

The “Crisis of Housing” webinar confirmed the presence of a housing crisis in the United States. During the Q&A portion of the event, the panelists concurred that housing reforms require federal attention. Attending the webinar was eye-opening, as it highlighted not only the systemic nature of the housing crisis but also the deeply personal impact on families, particularly children and communities of color. I was struck by how historical patterns of racial and economic inequality continue to shape housing access today, and it reinforced for me the urgency of reframing housing as a basic human right rather than a commodity. The panelists’ emphasis on combining research, activism and historical awareness made me more aware of how complex and interconnected these issues are.

Crisis of Housing was originally published in Hindsights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.