Professor Kathleen Belew discusses hopes of building an initiative at Northwestern and protecting democracy

As extremist rhetoric and violence in America increases, journalists have continually turned to Kathleen Belew, an Associate Professor of history at Northwestern, who has studied and written extensively on this threat to democracy.

She spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2018, paperback 2019). In it, she explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies.

At Northwestern, she will work with colleagues to build a “History of the Present” initiative and teach courses in American history and the history of violence.

“I am delighted to work at Northwestern, where we are training journalists through Medill. One of the things I’ve learned during the press cycle of ‘Bring the War Home’ is the importance of figuring out how to bridge the divide between history and journalism.”

“History of the present as a method is about figuring out how to tell stories about the very recent past in ways that are not just a road map of where we are and how did we get here – although that is part of it – it is also thinking about the ways that history might reveal contingencies, roads not taken and courses of action that might not have been visible otherwise. So, expanding the realm of what’s possible by looking at history,” explained Belew in an interview with Northwestern Now.

Continue reading the interview Northwestern Now’s article, “White power and the militant right, from a historian’s point of view.”