How the Union Lost the Remembrance War
“The victors of the American Civil War failed to write their story into the history books, leaving a gap for the mythologizing of the Confederacy.”
“After the American Civil War, there was what historian Robert J. Cook calls a ‘robust and purposeful narrative’ of the Union’s defeat of slavery and the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans,” Matthew Wills writes to introduce this piece. But by the end of the nineteenth century “remembrance of Union victory had ‘lost its cultural and political sway.’”
Wills examines how narratives shape history and contribute to the formation of mythologies that reflect the values of the culture that creates them.
What Are We Getting Out of Mythology?
According to Seamus Sullivan, ancient mythology appeals to us because “[s]tories that acknowledge and commemorate sadness and loss are a psychological necessity, particularly if you are living through years in which great sadness, loss, and moral injury are taking place.”
The Best Historical Crime Novels
Exploring a historical era through crime is a particularly interesting way to explore that society, says award-winning novelist Anna Mazzola. Here she recommends five fabulous works of fiction that bring to life the impact of crimes in historical settings, from Victorian Britain to 18th-century Jamaica.
These Are the 10 Old Television Series Every Kid Needs to Watch
“I just turned 60,” John McWhorter tells us, and “I want my tween daughters to have at least a sense of what was on television in what they regard as antiquity, the 20th century.” Here is his list of single episodes of 10 iconic series that he sees as “a useful lesson in social history.”
The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder
WHAT MAKES YOU you? The question cuts to the core of who we are, the things that make us special in this universe. The converse of the question raises another kind of philosophical dilemma: If a person isn’t himself, who is he?
The sense of self is the key concept in narrative identity theory. This heartbreaking piece tells the story of a young man with frontotemporal dementia, a disease that destroys parts of the brain necessary in constructing and maintaining that sense.
Hidden in plain sight
“Jewish children who were ‘hidden’ in Christian families during the Holocaust have much to teach us about memory and trauma”
Carolyn Ariella Sofia describes how meeting the Polish-born American writer Jerzy Kosinski prompted her to attend graduate school to study writings by survivors of the Holocaust who, as children, had lived as members of Christian families:
The more I learned about the psychological dynamics that followed such children into their adult lives, the more I came to wonder how the suppressed child would express themselves in the grown-up texts they produced. Would their books involve dual perspectives, a split viewpoint that incorporated the child’s experience in hiding, with the adult reflecting on it? Memory for this group came in traumatic fragments, so would I find that too? Would the inner, suppressed self ever act up and perform a secret action?
Should an AI copy of you help decide if you live or die?
“Doctors share top concerns of AI surrogates aiding life-or-death decisions.”
One source of science fiction is a consideration of how technology, when pushed to extremes, might affect human existence. I wonder how long it will be before we see a novel centering on the topic that Ashley Belanger, a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, examines in detail here.
Learning about Language: An In-Class Activity
“A scholar of the medical humanities shares ideas for helping students discover how language shaped past cultural attitudes—and still shapes them in the present.”
Language is a social construct created by particular societies or cultures. Here JSTOR Daily looks at a class created by Maria Rovito, Instructor of Medical Humanities at Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. The purpose of the class is to remind students that “language is never neutral. In medical fields, it builds the scaffolding of what we call ‘real’ or ‘imagined’ illness, ‘abnormal’ and ‘normal,’ and the ‘sick’ and the ‘healthy.’ It determines who gets care, who gets believed, and who gets dismissed.”
Pandemic Journaling Project Reminds Universities of their Impact
“’Universities can be both a window into stuff that’s happening and a door to new ways of asking and reflecting’”
When the COVID-19 pandemic set in, anthropologists Sarah Willen of the University of Connecticut and Katherine Mason of Brown University created “a dataset to help people in the future understand the experience of living through a pandemic.” This article from the University of Connecticut reports on the research from this project based on “the community-engaged goal of meeting a shared human need.”
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
I’ve always been interested in medical humanities, ever since The Bellevue Review was first started.