What's wrong with using "eras" to think about history?

“Our trip around the sun, it seems, does not neatly correspond to the timing of personal or historical milestones.”

Hello and happy Human Rights Day!

In this month's edition, we are reflecting not only on the past year, but also on our tendency to, well, reflect on past years. And decades. And "eras." In her sophomore effort for New American History, Bunk's Digital Archive Coordinator Kathryn Ostrofsky has a probing piece about standard approaches to periodization in history education. In it, she makes the case for a more layered approach to thinking about the past. As it happens, we've been talking about revamping Bunk's own chronological categories to better reflect, as Kathryn suggests in her piece, the realities of lived experience. Look out for more on that in the coming year.

Elsewhere in the newsletter you'll find a BackStory episode from a couple of years ago that's once again quite timely. It explores the story of Roe v. Wade, and surveys the landscape of abortion rights pre-Roe. We're also featuring a couple of other favorites from the New American History archive: one is a Bunk exhibit about Civil War memory, and the other is an interactive map that makes visible the foreign-born population of localities nationwide over a span of 160 years.

Speaking of favorites – in next month's edition, we'll be including Bunk's Best of 2021 list. If you have any suggestions for history-related digital media that you'd like to see included, please send them along!

- Tony Field
Editor, Bunk

Explore New American History

Featured Work

Seeing Through Time

What we miss when we rely on years, decades, and eras to make sense of the past.
Medium

View

And the rest is (history)

Histories of Time

Everything has a history, including our way of thinking about time. This motley assortment of stories from the Bunk archive is perfect conversation fodder for your holiday gatherings.
Bunk

The Many Lives of Roe v. Wade

A podcast episode about abortion access in America pre-1972, and the people involved in the ruling that may now on the verge of being overturned.
BackStory

Civil War Memory

Robert Penn Warren wrote that the Civil War is "our only ‘felt’ history – history lived in the national imagination.” The dozens of stories in this exhibit suggest he may have been right.
Bunk

Foreign-Born Population

Census data suggest that immigrants are dispersing themselves throughout the country much more than in earlier decades. Use this interactive map to explore immigration trends across the nation from 1850 to 2010.
American Panorama

Learning Resource: The Chinese Exclusion Act

A high-school level learning resource focusing on the the history of Chinese exclusion.
Learning Resources

Overheard

"The anti-evolution movement wasn’t really about banning one specific scientific idea; it was instead a confused and confusing effort to make America great again by purging its schools of science, history, and critical thinking."

— Adam Laats
The Conservative War on Education That Failed
The Atlantic

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