History Department

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Peter Faneuil: Boston benefactor and slave trader

“Boston is built on the business of slavery, whether that’s slave trading or trading with the slave economies in the Caribbean,” added Jared Ross Hardesty, a history professor at Western Washington University.

2023-09-13
Meet Max Stone, Western's new student trustee 2023-06-26
The Beloved, Besieged Humanities Classroom: Education reformers have killed the joy of learning. Let’s recapture it

These are tough times for humanities professors. Flip through The Chronicle and the disillusionment jumps off the page. Post-pandemic students are disengaged. Colleges are …

2023-04-24
'Community' the central theme to visiting Fulbright Scholar's time at Western 2023-02-07
Professors Turn to ChatGPT to Teach Students a Lesson

Last month a professor at Weber State University in Utah asked a new artificial-intelligence chatbot to write a tweet in his voice.

Within a few minutes the application, called ChatGPT, had spit out a dozen messages that captured Alex Lawrence’s tone and personality. His first reaction…

2023-01-25
Acclaimed poet Paul Ceballos coming to campus Feb. 2 2023-01-24
ChatGPT Advice Academics Can Use Now

Remind Students to Think.

Johann N. Neem, professor of history, Western Washington University

With ChatGPT, a student can turn in a passable assignment without reading a book, writing a word or having a thought. But …

2023-01-12
Boston takes rare step of apologizing for its role in slavery and its lasting harm

About a quarter of all white Bostonians who had estate inventory taken between 1700 and 1775 owned enslaved people, according to Western Washington University history professor Jared Ross Hardesty, who is quoted in the resolution. At the peak of slavery in…

2023-01-04
Old North Church, a beacon of freedom, grapples with its own ties to slavery

Nearly a decade ago, Boston’s Old North Church opened a Colonial-themed chocolate shop named for Captain Newark Jackson, a prominent early member of the historic church and a pillar of Boston’s lucrative chocolate trade with the British in the 1700s.

For years, Colonial…

2022-12-01
A Usable Past for a Post-American Nation

It was the evening before the Fourth of July in the last year of his tumultuous presidency, and I sat in front of my television transfixed and horrified as Donald Trump delivered a speech at Mount Rushmore, ostensibly a celebration of American independence but in fact a call for resistance.…

2022-07-13
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