Harvard University Press Blog

The Paradise Papers: Why You Should Care

The trove of records known as the “Paradise Papers” unveiled this week by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has exposed the financial hideaways of iconic brands and power brokers across the political spectrum. Among the revelations resulting from the leak have been ties between Russia and the United States commerce secretary, secret dealings of the chief fundraiser for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the offshore interests of the queen of England and more than 120 politicians around the world. Brooke Harrington, a sociologist who trained as a wealth manager for the investigation that became her 2016 book Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, served as a key analyst for the ICIJ in their work on the Paradise Papers, and has been an increasingly vital source for global media seeking to understand all that’s come to light. Below, Harrington explains why the ongoing exposure of the offshore financial system is about so much more than palace intrigue and political embarrassment.

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“So what?” This question keeps appearing in my Facebook feed, via friends of friends in America, in response to news of the Paradise Papers leak. Some are confused by the complexity of the revelations—what the heck is U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross doing with the Putin family?—and some are distracted by the bizarre array of household names coming together in the story. Fancy Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II having something in common with Martha Stewart and Formula 1 race car driver Louis Hamilton!

What the Paradise Papers tell us, as the Panama Papers did earlier, is that above a certain level of wealth, everybody is using offshore. And they’re not just avoiding tax: lots of people put assets offshore even if they come from places that don’t tax income, inheritances, wealth, or capital gains. They’re putting assets in Bermuda, or Panama, or one of the dozens of other offshore financial centers because they don’t want to pay back their creditors, or submit to fines imposed by a judge, or split assets with a divorcing spouse. Tax avoidance, although it gets the bulk of the media coverage, is only part of that larger, and much more troubling picture.

Leaks like the Paradise Papers tell a story of rampant law avoidance. That’s what really makes the ultra-wealthy different from you and me: for them, the laws are mostly optional. Several of the wealth managers I interviewed for Capital without Borders—people who worked for firms very much like the ones exposed in the recent leaks—marvelled at the degree to which their clients’ wealth and power put them “above the law.” This creates a political problem, especially in democracies where legitimacy depends on all citizens being equal in their obligation to obey the laws of the land. When people see that whole groups of people simply escape that obligation, they get angry and start looking for scapegoats. Thus, Thomas Piketty has linked the use of offshore to the rise of right-wing ultra-nationalist movements, which misdirect that populist anger—encouraging people to blame the poor and marginalized, rather than the lawless ultra-rich.

Thus, my answer to the “so what?” question is political as well as economic. Certainly, the tax evasion part matters tremendously: the former US tax commissioner estimated that honest taxpayers bear an extra 15 percent tax burden to compensate for wealthy Americans’ failure to pay their fair share. And even with honest taxpayers taking up some of the slack, public services like transportation, health care and education still get cut, damaging chances for upward mobility so essential to a dynamic capitalist economy.

Inevitably, this economic stagnation intersects with the concentration of political power to produce conditions that look depressingly familiar to historians: feudal, in fact. When Oxfam reports that just eight people own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of humanity, comparisons to the Middle Ages don’t seem so far fetched. Indeed, this week the Guardian reported that a UK economist believes inequality has become so extreme that we should revisit a medieval document as a model for contemporary action. The Charter of the Forest, which turns 800 years old this year, asserted the right of ordinary people to food and shelter, and challenged that of nobles to monopolize all the resources. That 21st century conditions compel us to re-learn the lessons of medieval history suggests the formidable power of offshore. And that is why we should care.

Social Media and Scholarship (and Impeachment)

On November 10th 2016, it was reported that Google searches for “How to impeach a president” had increased by 4,850%. Fast forward a year, and impeachment is still frequently discussed—and still widely misunderstood. And so last week we published Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, by Harvard’s Cass Sunstein. An urgent addition to our fall list, the book provides an essential guide to what every American should know, and answers important questions like “who impeaches the President?”, “does impeachment mean the president has to leave office?”, and “is impeachment a criminal proceeding?”

This University Press Week we’re joining our sister presses in considering how our publications can cut through the noise and provide the facts. And, just as discussion of impeachment has swirled on social media, social media can help spread word of an important work of scholarship intended to ensure that the swirl’s better informed. Below, alongside a video of Sunstein produced by the virally-minded Big Think, Sunstein’s editor Thomas LeBien writes of the necessity of publishing Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

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For the purposes of this post, you could translate the subtitle of Cass Sunstein’s latest book, Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, as follows: Social Media Doesn’t Contribute to Anything—You Do. Probably there is no one better than a university press editor to remind everyone that, in sentences, subjects and objects matter. Just as it does for citizens in a republic, it matters a great deal if you imagine that social media acts on you and not the other way around. Put differently, I am less focused on whether social media has contributed to the success of a university press initiative than I am on whether thousands upon thousands of individuals have used social media to help spread word of important new scholarship. And that has very much been our hope in publishing Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

Here’s a useful irony. Sunstein has done more than his share of scholarly work to focus the world’s attention on nudges, choice architecture, and the dangers of Internet cyber cascades that encourage each of us to live in a news bubble of the like-minded. Here again, the subtitle to Sunstein’s current book is important. Impeachment isn’t a book aimed at just some citizens—for subsets of people who spend time on Twitter and Facebook loathing or lauding a president or political party. It hopes to inform citizens collectively. It was with this hope in mind that Sunstein wrote the book without so much as mentioning the current president. It was with this hope in mind that Sunstein did not write a book pitched at impeaching someone, but rather wrote a book pitched at guiding American citizens through the Constitutional impeachment mechanism and how it works.

This means, when it comes to social media, that this book should serve as a useful guide for anyone, on any point of the opinion spectrum, thinking about whether and how (and how not) to impeach a president. And therein lies the most vaunted hope. Commercial publishers have become ever more skilled at using social media to toss chum to the like-minded. University press publishers, guided by their non-profit mission, aim to allow readers to use social media for a different purpose. Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide came to be because there was a crying need for authoritative expertise on impeachment. If, as some of Sunstein’s prior scholarship suggests, social media is a vast echo chamber of divisive opinion, then it matters—especially for those of us working to disseminate scholarly insights—that some of those opinions are better informed.

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Head on over to the blogs of Johns Hopkins University Press, Athabasca University Press, and Beacon Press for a few more thoughts on social media and scholarship, or check out a list of everything offered up on the 2017 University Press Week Blog Tour.

“Reminder: Race Is Not a Costume”

In an effort to help forestall the donning of racist Halloween costumes, Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. took the time last week to explain the painful history of blackface and minstrel shows. He was joined in that effort by none other than CUNY Professor Eric Lott, whose writing and thinking have been absolutely critical to our understanding of racial fantasy in American culture for decades, from 1993’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, to Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism, which we published this fall.

Have a look at Wood and Lott’s breakdown of the ways in which the mindlessly offensive racial costuming we see each Halloween is rooted in the history and politics of slavery:

In her 1993 review of the “terrifically smart and unexpectedly timely” Love and Theft, author and critic Margo Jefferson expressed the hope that Lott would pursue the threads of this American racial identity crisis into the twentieth century. With Black Mirror, that’s exactly what he’s done. In a series of chapters addressing such arts and artists as Mark Twain, film noir, Joni Mitchell, Elvis impersonators, Bob Dylan, and Barack Obama, Lott explores the ways U.S. cultural institutions have relied insistently and repeatedly on racial symbolic capital—including and above all blackface—to reproduce white cultural dominance, threatening in the process to betray the racial hegemony that generated those institutions and that they exist in order to maintain.

“What Kind of World Shall We Make Together?”

In the immediate wake of President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, Jed Purdy wrote at Dissent about the ironic possibility of Trump’s action forcing an overdue sense of emergency. Purdy sees in the agonized response to Trump’s announcement a sense that “Paris had come to stand, at least in liberals’ minds, for the thought that the world was bumping toward the right track, that someone out there was doing something about climate change.” For Purdy, though, the political constraints that shaped the Paris accord rendered it largely symbolic from the beginning, too weak by design to avert major climate disruptions. If the Paris Agreement already fell short of the global cooperation necessary to address climate change, what might such a movement look like? Below, in an excerpt from his 2015 book After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Purdy sketches some of the parameters of how the world might democratically shape a way to make human and natural flourishing compatible—even as democracy itself intensifies the emergencies we face.

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Today democratic consent is the only widely accepted way to make political power legitimate, and for very good reasons. It expresses two critically important ideas: that power should not be exercised over people without their consent, and that all individuals should have equal voice in the question of consent—in saying yes or no to a law or a government. But democracy’s standing is less secure than this quick summary suggests. Widespread acceptance of democracy as the standard of political legitimacy can be thin and nominal: it is effectively universal, but not because of deep commitment. In fact, pieties about democracy are now under pressure from, and sometimes yielding to, technocratic government at the heart of the historically democratic world, such as Europe, and assertive authoritarianism in countries such as Russia and China. This newly evident fragility is a reminder that much of democracy’s seemingly universal triumph came from the failure and decline of alternatives, rather than from affirmative democratic success. Moreover, even democracy’s thin universality is novel, a mere wrinkle in history. Less than a century ago, it was common to say that democracies were weak, enervating, feckless, and that stronger, more demanding forms of government must rise to replace them. The romance of authoritarianism was a major theme of the twentieth century, with fascism being only the most indelible instance, and it would be complacent to suppose that the romance will not return. Not all of its variants are revolutionary; indeed, some of the most important today are technocratic and distinctly conservative in their relation to the existing order of power and authority.

Disgust with democracy grows where democracy palpably fails, and failure has recently seemed to be its specialty. Here we return to the ironic awkwardness of calling for more democracy when democracy seems a formula for failure. Today’s American voters, the country’s political parties, and the government they form are unlikely to strike anyone as the source of attractive answers to the question: What kind of world shall we make together? In fact, their answer is already visible in the world we are making, and its drawbacks are evident. Whatever else it means, a call for deepened democracy had better not amount to “More of this, please!”

It will not do to raise pious calls for democracy just because democracy is abstractly a good thing. The Anthropocene question—what kind of world to make together—should be taken as a challenge to democracy. The test is whether citizens can form the kind of democracy that can address the Anthropocene question, the question of what kind of world to make. A democracy that cannot do this will have marked itself as inadequate to its most basic problems.

A commitment to democracy must not be a pious test of faith in a failing system. It must be a commitment to producing democratic politics that can meet these challenges, that can achieve strength and decisiveness of the most delicate kind: in favor of self-restraint.

Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility

Earlier this month, De Gruyter and a number of its partner presses—of which we’re one—launched a portal to provide educational institutions with free access to a collection of books and articles across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Dubbed “Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility,” the initiative is intended to help combat false news sources, to support reflection on the nature of truth and ethics, and to encourage understanding of the struggles facing all members of society.

“Public debates surrounding immigration policy, climate change, international relations, and constitutional and human rights are currently at the forefront of the national discourse, especially, but not only, in the United States. Together, De Gruyter and its partners are keen to support a thoughtful and informed debate on these sensitive and serious issues,” said Steve Fallon, Director of De Gruyter’s Publishing Partner Program.

The collection groups resources into eight topical areas:

• Constitutional History
• Dissent, Truth & Ethics
• Environmental Studies
• Gender Studies
• Geopolitics
• Human Rights
• Immigration & Urbanism
• Islamic Studies

The content includes more than 500 books and selected journal articles from HUP, Columbia University Press, Cornell University Press, Princeton University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, Transcript-Verlag, and De Gruyter. HUP titles on offer include Jeremy Waldron’s The Harm in Hate Speech, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming, and Robert Wald Sussman’s The Myth of Race, among dozens more.

Register with De Gruyter to provide access for your library.

On Preventing Violence Against Law Enforcement Officers

At yesterday’s swearing in ceremony for beleaguered attorney general pick Jeff Sessions, President Trump signed three executive orders regarding law enforcement. One reiterated standing policy against international criminal cartels; another reinforced Trump and Sessions’s inaccurate representations of crime rate trends; and the third declared a new focus on preventing violence against law enforcement officials.

While effectively without substance, the political messaging of that third order is clear: violence against American law enforcement officials is endemic, and, as part of his commitment to restoring law and order, Trump will end it. But it’s simply not true.

In fact, as eminent criminologist Franklin Zimring shows in When Police Kill, the risk of a uniformed police officer being killed by assault has dropped by more than 70 percent since the mid-1970s. And this leads in turn to one of the most important questions facing criminal justice today: why has this enormous drop in police deaths not been accompanied by commensurate reductions in killings by police? If imminent threat to their person is justification for application of lethal force by police, and that threat has been vastly reduced, shouldn’t we expect to see a similar reduction in police use of lethal force?

The reasons for the discrepancy are many and complicated, ranging from outdated police tactics to the risk-reward calculus of local agencies, but one thing Zimring makes abundantly clear is the threat of handguns. Part of the reason why American police kill civilians at rates so far surpassing all other ostensibly peaceful and developed nations is that there are so many more guns in America; more guns equals increased threat to police equals increased use of police force.

From When Police Kill:

Many of the social and cultural circumstances of life in the United States contribute somewhat to a rate of killings by police that is so distinctively high that it represents a difference in kind rather than degree. But as we have seen, one characteristic of American society plays a dominant role in provoking the use of lethal force by police and all but guarantees that rates of killing by police will remain much higher in the United States than elsewhere for the foreseeable future. The singular phenomenon that provokes extraordinary rates of police use of lethal force is the proliferation of civilian ownership and use of upward of 60 million handguns. Firearms of all types are the single most frequently used weapon that threatens the life of uniformed police officers, but the handgun is a special danger in the public places where most police patrol because these are guns that are easy to conceal and carry. And the threat that concealed guns can be used is the single reason that the risk of death of police from on-duty assaults is so many times higher in the United States than elsewhere in the developed world.

The statistical trends in fatal attacks against police officers are the classic good news/bad news anecdote: the good news is that the risk of death from attack while on duty has declined about 70 percent in the four decades after 1976 for officers in uniform, from twenty-eight per 100,000 per year to seven per 100,000 per year. The bad news is that even with these dramatic reductions in death risk, the risk of death from assault for an officer on duty is very much greater than in other developed countries.

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Careful evaluation of different police tactics in confrontations and improvements in vests and other protective gear can continue the long-range improvement in risk reduction for all police. But the prospects of any substantial reduction in civilian handgun ownership and use are not good for any time in the middle-range future. So the threat to police of concealed guns will continue at a magnitude much higher than in other developed nations. And that in turn will continue to provoke use of lethal force by American police at levels much higher than is common in other developed nations.

President Trump’s “Executive Order on Preventing Violence Against Federal, State, Tribal, and Local Law Enforcement Officers” states the administration’s intention to “develop strategies, in a process led by the Department of Justice and within the boundaries of the Constitution and existing Federal laws, to further enhance the protection and safety of Federal, State, tribal, and local law enforcement officers.” It seems that the logical place to start would be gun control.

Research Libraries, University Presses Oppose Trump’s Immigration Order

President Trump’s recent executive order temporarily barring entry into the US by individuals from seven countries is contrary to the values held by libraries and presses, and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) stand unequivocally opposed to this immigration ban.

The order blocks some members of our communities as well as students, researchers, authors, faculty, and their families from entering or returning to the United States if they are currently abroad or leave the country, even if they hold the required visas. The ban will diminish the valuable contributions made to our institutions and to society by individuals from the affected countries. This discriminatory order will deeply impact the ability of our communities to foster dialogue, promote diversity, enrich understanding, advance the progress of intellectual discovery, and ensure preservation of our cultural heritage.

The work we do—particularly the books we publish and collect—illuminates the past and sheds new light on current conversations; informed by this work we believe that the rationale for the ban both ignores history and places assumptions ahead of facts. More importantly, this decision will greatly harm some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. The United States should not turn its back on refugees who are fleeing their war-torn homes and have already endured long, extensive screening procedures in the relocation process.

Finally, while temporary, the ban will have a long-term chilling effect on free academic inquiry. This order sends a clear message to researchers, scholars, authors, and students that the United States is not an open and welcoming place in which to live and study, conduct research, write, and hold or attend conferences and symposia. The ban will disrupt and undermine international academic collaboration in the sciences, the humanities, technology, and global health.

ARL and AAUP have longstanding histories of and commitments to diversity, inclusion, equity, and social justice. As social institutions, research libraries, archives, and university presses strive to be welcoming havens for all members of our communities and work hard to be inclusive in our hiring, collections, books and publications, services, and environments. The immigration ban in its current form is antithetical to notions of intellectual freedom and free inquiry fundamental to the missions of libraries and presses. By serving as inclusive communities, research libraries, archives, and university presses have deeply benefited from the contributions of students, faculty, staff, and scholars of all backgrounds and citizenships.

ARL and AAUP support all members of their communities and all students, researchers, authors, and faculty who are impacted by this executive order. The two associations urge President Trump to rescind this order and urge Congress to intervene on behalf of those affected by the immigration ban.

A Statue for Red Ellen

British MP “Red” Ellen Wilkinson was one of the first female delegates in the United Nations. She played a central role in Britain’s postwar Labour government and introduced free milk and school dinners as education secretary. A passionate believer in social justice in post World War One Britain, Ellen Wilkinson is best remembered for leading the Jarrow Crusade. In October 1936, she was the only woman to march alongside two hundred unemployed shipwrights and steelworkers from Tyneside to London to protest against unemployment and poverty. Now, she is one of three pioneering women to be celebrated in statue form in the UK.

We spoke to Laura Beers, author of Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist, for her thoughts on this significant moment in women’s history:

The decision by Ellen’s first parliamentary constituency of Middlesbrough to erect a statue in her honour is a testament to the great impact on British politics she had. She was a champion of the dispossessed and downtrodden throughout Britain, as constituents in Middlesbrough long remembered her advocacy for Teesside in parliament. Her work to raise the school leaving age to 15 as the first Minister of Education in Attlee’s government was born of a belief that all of Britain’s children should be given the opportunity to realize their full potential, regardless of family or income. She was an important voice in opposition to appeasement in the 1930s and a champion of women’s rights. The work she did for her trade union, her constituents, for women and other politically marginalized groups at home and abroad is finally receiving the recognition it deserves in the city that she represented with passion and dedication from 1924 to 1931.

As Beers shows in Red Ellen, Wilkinson’s tireless work on behalf of her constituents was intimately interwoven with her international concern. From the book:

She brought a Marxist economic analysis into her understanding of both continental fascism and British imperialism; and, in turn, her appreciation of Britain’s role in international affairs affected her analysis of domestic politics. Her feminism was imbricated by class analysis that affected the way she perceived the status of women both at home and abroad. To Ellen, the campaign against mass unemployment in Britain was linked to the movements against fascism and colonialism and the campaign for women’s rights in that each was a crucial front in the war against injustice and human suffering.

From today’s vantage, Beers’s portrait of Wilkinson should reframe our understanding of the British left between the wars and bolster our sense of the possibilities for international social justice coalitions. “Red Ellen’s life story,” writes Beers, “is as much an inspiration for activism today as it is a history of an increasingly distant radical past.”

The Shape of Things to Come

We’re going to be talking about 2016 for a long, long time. Like, forever. But time doesn’t stop, and history doesn’t end, and 2017’s already got a look about it. Here, then, is a slate of new and recent books fit for the shape of things to come.

In Democracy: A Case Study historian David Moss demonstrates that American democracy has survived and thrived from one generation to the next on the basis not principally of harmony but of conflict—sometimes intense conflict—mediated by shared ideals and a common faith in the nation’s system of democratic self-governance. For Moss, the important question is never whether there is tension in our politics, but rather whether that tension is constructive or destructive. But if those shared ideals erode and that common faith starts to go? Buckle up.

Speaking of Russia, Gregory Carleton lays bare how war is the unifying thread of their national epic. Outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, but in Russia: The Story of War Carleton shows how Russians see themselves as surrounded by enemies, defensively fighting off invader after invader or called upon by history to be the savior of Europe or Christianity or civilization itself, often at immense cost.

From the story of Russia to the notion of the “Muslim World,” the longstanding misconception that 1.5 billion Muslims constitute a single religio-political entity. As Cemil Aydin asks in The Idea of the Muslim World, how did such a mistaken belief arise, why is it so widespread, and how can its grip be loosened so that a more fruitful discussion about politics in Muslim societies can begin?

Misconceptions make the world go round, though, and that of the “Muslim World” has helped make the West go right. For that we’ve got Far-Right Politics in Europe, a critical look at the far right throughout Europe that reveals a prehistory and politics more complex than stereotypes suggest and warns of the challenges posed to the EU’s liberal-democratic order. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg make clear that these movements are determined to gain power through legitimate electoral means, and that they are succeeding.

The European far right represents a confluence of many ideologies, but nationalism and anti-immigrant fervor are big in the mix. The movement of peoples rouses passions, but many are actually very confused about how to feel about immigration—they are sympathetic to individual immigrants and their reasons for wanting to migrate, but concerned about the overall impact that immigration is having on their society. In Strangers in Our Midst, political theorist David Miller seeks to balance the rights of immigrants with the legitimate concerns of citizens, and defends the right of democratic states to control their borders and decide upon the future size, shape, and cultural make-up of their populations. But those rights don’t mean that just any border regime is fair or acceptable, so Miller also explains what is owed to different categories of immigrant, and what their responsibilities are once admitted.

Debates over immigration are of course often tied to squabbling over the proper role of the state in providing for those within its borders. The increasingly familiar idea of an unconditional basic income is meant to alleviate the pressures mounting on the traditional welfare state, and two world authorities outline the concept in Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. With trials underway or in the works in Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, France, and even Oakland, basic income seems like an idea whose time has finally come.

Part of the argument for basic income is that it could help to alleviate the economic inequality that characterizes our nations and our world. A couple of years back, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century helped to thrust income inequality into public debate, and now a new volume, After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, is coming to both kick the tires on Piketty’s argument and help steer us towards means of addressing the seemingly intractable problems that he highlights. Edited by Heather Boushey, Brad DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, the book includes work from Paul Krugman, Robert Solow, Branko Milanovic, Emmanuel Saez, and others, along with a substantial new contribution from Piketty himself.

Here in the U.S., every day brings news of how radically president-elect Trump may shift the nation’s course. Healthcare reform has of course been a pillar of his platform, which makes Miriam Laugesen’s Fixing Medical Prices ever more relevant. Fees charged by physicians in the U.S. are the most expensive in the world, and Laugesen uses the book to introduce readers to a largely unknown group called the Relative Value Scale Update Committee, whose periodic advisory recommendations to Medicare set off chain reactions across the entire health care system. Why would a hugely powerful group carry a name so plain? Because if you’re an interest group stealthily controlling American healthcare policy you’ve every interest in bureaucratic cover.

A few more books for Trump’s America: Sam Abrams’s Education and the Commercial Mindset is a careful study of the benefits and limits of applying market solutions to improving education, a cause to which incoming education secretary Betsy DeVos has devoted her life. Carol Sanger’s About Abortion explores the emotional cost and social consequences of terminating pregnancy in the United States, a subject about which there’s loud and contentious public argument but great silence at more intimate levels; the book connects abortion secrecy to the distorted political conversation that results in this flood of state laws attempting to limit abortion access by increasingly bolder means. Lisa Goff’s Shantytown, USA was written as a history but may yet become a travel guide. And Yascha Mounk’s The Age of Responsibility, which shows how the notion of personal responsibility has become central to our moral vocabulary, political rhetoric, and public policies, aims us towards a more equitable future by forcing us to rethink our mutual responsibilities as citizens.

A lot to think about, a lot to read, and much more to come. Be excellent to each other.

Public Syllabi

Two days after nine African Americans were murdered in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June of last year, #Charlestonsyllabus started trending on Twitter, with thousands of people using the hashtag to share resources they found helpful in understanding such a horrific event. As Chad Williams, a Professor of African and Afro-American Studies who sparked the exchange later made clear, he was following the example of Georgetown historian Marcia Chatelain, who created the #FergusonSyllabus as a way for educators to share ideas on how to talk about Ferguson in their classrooms.

#Charlestonsyllabus was widely embraced, and from the loose list of works shared on social media there soon emerged an organized and cohesive syllabus, posted online by the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). The thoughtful curating that took the materials from a firehose of inspiration to a deliberately constructed learning plan is of course the work academics have always done for their courses, but there was something remarkably open and democratic about doing it in public and online. As Williams has noted, the syllabus is more than a list; “It is a community of people committed to critical thinking, truth telling and social transformation.” It’s also now a book available from the University of Georgia Press.

It’s been heartening to see this model of communal thought take hold over the past year, with academics sharing a lead in bringing context and rigor to a public discourse disfigured by news cycles. The Public Books site has been particularly active on this front. In the wake of a Chronicle of Higher Education Trump 101 syllabus that lacked a diversity of voices, Public Books shared Trump Syllabus 2.0, assembled by historians N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain. Then, after the Trump Access Hollywood video surfaced in October, making sexual assault and its denial central to the presidential contest, Public Books posted a Rape Culture Syllabus. In introducing it, Laura Ciolkowski made its purpose clear:

Scholars and activists, poets and playwrights have been writing about rape for centuries. What would the conversation around sexual assault, police bias, and the legal system look like if investigators, police officers, and judges read deeply into the literature on sexuality, racial justice, violence, and power? It is in view of this question that the following syllabus is offered as a scholarly resource—and object of critical discussion and debate—on “rape culture” in the 21st century.

Also this fall, the NYC Stands with Standing Rock Collective produced a Standing Rock Syllabus in solidarity with those working to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. They write:

The different sections and articles place what is happening now in a broader historical, political, economic, and social context going back over 500 years to the first expeditions of Columbus, the founding of the United States on institutionalized slavery, private property, and dispossession, and the rise of global carbon supply and demand. Indigenous peoples around the world have been on the frontlines of conflicts like Standing Rock for centuries. This syllabus brings together the work of Indigenous and allied activists and scholars: anthropologists, historians, environmental scientists, and legal scholars, all of whom contribute important insights into the conflicts between Indigenous sovereignty and resource extraction. While our primary goal is to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, we recognize that Standing Rock is one frontline of many around the world. This syllabus can be a tool to access research usually kept behind paywalls, or a resource package for those unfamiliar with Indigenous histories and politics.

And just this week, a team of historians offered a Prison Abolition Syllabus at AAIHS. Noting the nationwide prison strike, the prominence of Ava DuVernay’s new documentary on the 13th Amendment, and the surging stock prices for corrections-related companies after Trump’s election, the organizers write that the Prison Abolition Syllabus “seeks to contextualize and highlight prison organizing and prison abolitionist efforts from the 13th Amendment’s rearticulation of slavery to current resistance to mass incarceration, solitary confinement, and prison labor exploitation.”

There are other examples (such as the Anna Julia Cooper Center’s Welfare Reform Syllabus), and there are surely more to come. We’re of course happy to see many HUP books and authors listed among the recommended: Crystal Feimster, Estelle Freedman, and Catharine MacKinnon appear on the Rape Culture Syllabus; Ned Blackhawk and Aziz Rana on Trump Syllabus 2.0; Ira Berlin, Stephanie Smallwood, Walter Johnson, and many others on the Charleston Syllabus; and Elizabeth Hinton and Khalil Gibran Muhammad each on more than one. But beyond the satisfaction of seeing these particular books embraced in the public sphere, it’s both gratifying and invigorating to see serious works of scholarship upheld as integral to, as Williams wrote, “critical thinking, truth telling and social transformation.”