Historista Presents: The Resistance Files

Like many of you, I have been thinking a lot in recent weeks about how best to resist the current administration and its destructive and hateful policies and actions. I have considered what skills, tools, and access I have, and how I might use them on behalf of my fellow humans who are and will be targeted, marginalized, and silenced by the administration and its enablers in Congress.

One of the tools that I have is this blog. Up to this point I have mostly used Historista as an author platform for myself, and as a place to post light-hearted pieces about the weirdness of academia.

Now I want to use it as a stronger force for good.

So I am offering up Historista to my network of smart, thoughtful friends and colleagues who have been writing eloquent mini-essays on a variety of subjects as Facebook status updates and Twitter threads. This is an open invitation to you to expand those posts into longer pieces that will help us all understand this infuriating and challenging moment in American cultural and political life, and its very real effects. I will post them in a series called The Resistance Files.

This is a response to historian Matthew Pratt Guterl’s call for writers to “find those impacted by Trump—and by Trumpism more generally—and share their stories” and to “use our platforms to amplify their voices and focus on their struggle to survive in the age of white nationalism, tracing the material impact of Trump’s autocratic racial regime.”

I’m hoping this will also give people another way to contribute to the Write Our Democracy movement, and be a part of its mission to “elevate the narrative surrounding democracy; better educate young future citizens; and mobilize writers who want to put their pens into political practice.”

To submit a piece or a pitch for The Resistance Files, email me at mkn@historista.com.

 

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