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The Supreme Court buliding against a bue sky and green lawns.

Supreme Court ruling: The latest in history of diminishing minority voting rights

Robert D. Bland, University of Tennessee

Divided along ideological lines, the U.S. Supreme Court on April 29, 2026, issued a ruling that severely weakens a provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. That provision, known as Section 2, prohibited any discriminatory voting practice or election rule that results in less opportunity for minority groups to exercise their political clout.

In her dissent on the ruling, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that it is the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

The decision in the case known as Louisiana v. Callais struck down a Louisiana voting district drawn to consolidate Black voters into a district where they would be the majority. The court’s conservative majority deemed the drawing of the district an unconstitutional gerrymander.

That, wrote Kagan, will “systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power.”

I’m a historian of racial formation and electoral and cultural politics in the U.S. I see this decision by the nation’s highest court as the latest in a long line of successful attempts, by both state and federal authorities, to limit the political power of Black Americans and, most recently, to reverse the gains they won in two periods of civil rights advancement.

Etching away at voting rights

Back in 2013, the Supreme Court tossed out a key provision of the Voting Rights Act regarding federal oversight of elections.

In the Louisiana v. Callais case, the court seemed ready to abolish Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

While the conservative majority in Louisiana v. Callais did not explicitly strike down Section 2, the ruling appears likely to nonetheless open the floodgates for widespread vote dilution by allowing primarily Southern state legislatures to redraw political districts, weakening the voting power of racial minorities.

The case was brought by a group of Louisiana citizens who declared that the federal mandate under Section 2 to draw a second majority-Black district violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and thus served as an unconstitutional act of racial gerrymandering.

Initially designed to enshrine federal civil rights protections for freed people facing a battery of discriminatory “Black Codes” in the postbellum South, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause has been the foundation of the nation’s modern rights-based legal order, ensuring that all U.S. citizens are treated fairly and preventing the government from engaging in explicit discrimination.

The cornerstone of the nation’s “second founding,” the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution, including the 14th Amendment, created the first cohort of Black elected officials.

As I highlight in my new book “Requiem for Reconstruction,” the struggle over the nation’s second founding not only highlights how generational political progress can be reversed but also provides a lens into the specific historical origins of racial gerrymandering in the United States.

Without understanding this history – and the forces that unraveled Reconstruction’s initial promise of greater racial justice – we cannot fully comprehend the roots of those forces that are reshaping our contemporary political landscape in a way that I believe subverts the true intentions of the Constitution.

The long history of gerrymandering

Political gerrymandering, or shaping political boundaries to benefit a particular party, has been considered constitutional since the nation’s 18th-century founding, but racial gerrymandering is a practice with roots in the post-Civil War era.

Expanding beyond the practice of redrawing district lines after each decennial census, late 19th-century Democratic state legislatures built on the earlier cartographic practice to create a litany of so-called Black districts across the postbellum South.

The nation’s first wave of racial gerrymandering emerged as a response to the political gains Southern Black voters made during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870s. Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina and Louisiana all elected Black congressmen during that decade. During the 42nd Congress, which met from 1871 to 1873, South Carolina sent Black men to the House from three of its four districts.

Initially, the white Democrats who ruled the South responded to the rise of Black political power by crafting racist narratives that insinuated that the emergence of Black voters and Black officeholders was a corruption of the proper political order. These attacks often provided a larger cultural pretext for the campaigns of extralegal political violence that terrorized Black voters in the South, assassinated political leaders, and marred the integrity of several of the region’s major elections.

Election changes

Following these pogroms during the 1870s, southern legislatures began seeking legal remedies to make permanent the counterrevolution of “Redemption,” which sought to undo Reconstruction’s advancement of political equality. A generation before the Jim Crow legal order of segregation and discrimination was established, southern political leaders began to disfranchise Black voters through racial gerrymandering.

These newly created Black districts gained notoriety for their cartographic absurdity. In Mississippi, a shoestring-shaped district was created to snake and swerve alongside the state’s famous river. North Carolina created the “Black Second” to concentrate its African American voters to a single district. Alabama’s “Black Fourth” did similar work, leaving African American voters only one possible district in which they could affect the outcome in the state’s central Black Belt.

South Carolina’s “Black Seventh” was perhaps the most notorious of these acts of Reconstruction-era gerrymandering. The district “sliced through county lines and ducked around Charleston back alleys” – anticipating the current trend of sophisticated, computer-targeted political redistricting.

Possessing 30,000 more voters than the next largest congressional district in the state, South Carolina’s Seventh District radically transformed the state’s political landscape by making it impossible for its Black-majority to exercise any influence on national politics, except for the single racially gerrymandered district.

Although federal courts during the late 19th century remained painfully silent on the constitutionality of these antidemocratic measures, contemporary observers saw these redistricting efforts as more than a simple act of seeking partisan advantage.

“It was the high-water mark of political ingenuity coupled with rascality, and the merits of its appellation,” observed one Black congressman who represented South Carolina’s 7th District.

Racial gerrymandering in recent times

The political gains of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes called the “Second Reconstruction,” were made tangible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law revived the postbellum 15th Amendment, which prevented states from creating voting restrictions based on race. That amendment had been made a dead letter by Jim Crow state legislatures and an acquiescent Supreme Court.

In contrast to the post-Civil War struggle, the Second Reconstruction had the firm support of the federal courts. The Supreme Court affirmed the principal of “one person, one vote” in its 1962 Baker v. Carr and 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decisions – upending the Solid South’s landscape of political districts that had long been marked by sparsely populated Democratic districts controlled by rural elites.

The Voting Rights Act gave the federal government oversight over any changes in voting policy that might affect historically marginalized groups. Since passage of the 1965 law and its subsequent revisions, racial gerrymandering has largely served the purpose of creating districts that preserve and amplify the political representation of historically marginalized groups.

This generational work is being undone by the current Supreme Court with its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Feb 3, 2026.The Conversation

Robert D. Bland, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The U.S. Constitution with the words "We the People" clearly visible. Image by jaflippo/Adobe Stock.

1776’s Declaration of Independence inspired Washington’s troops to fight against the odds – and also helped bring in powerful allies

Christopher Magra, University of Tennessee

A crowd gathered along the waterfront in New York City in the summer of 1776. The scene they witnessed was terrifying.

The largest expeditionary force in British history sailed into the American harbor. Over 300 ships brought 32,000 professional soldiers and Hessian mercenaries to crush a rebellion.

Nearby, Gen. George Washington’s army gathered to hear their commander read a document that would forever change the nature of their fight: the Declaration of Independence.

And contrary to how Americans now think of that document – as an inspiring declaration that detailed the grievances of Colonists against the British king and announced their independence from Great Britain – what Washington read to his army was also something else.

The Declaration of Independence was America’s first formal declaration of war. It planted a symbolic flag for Patriots to rally around. It transformed illegitimate rebels without hope of foreign aid into state-sponsored freedom fighters eligible for military alliances.

This foundational American text wasn’t just a philosophical breakup letter but a strategic move to secure vital support for the American war effort. America’s first declaration of war was a high-stakes geopolitical gamble essential to achieving independence.

Converting rebels into soldiers

As I and other military historians show in our forthcoming collection of essays, “America’s First War: The Military History of the Declaration of Independence,” the declaration was written within the confines of 18th-century legal standards that strictly governed diplomacy and warfare.

Thomas Jefferson, the foremost writer of the declaration, relied heavily on the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel’s 1758 treatise “The Law of Nations.” Vattel stressed the fact that in the eyes of European courts, providing aid to rebels was a violation of sovereignty and a dangerous precedent.

Vattel argued that for foreign powers to intervene legally in conflicts, the oppressed party had to formally declare its independence and assume the status of a state. Jefferson kept Vattel’s treatise open while he was working on the Declaration of Independence to ensure he used the specific terminology required to transform the American rebellion into a just war.

By framing independence as “necessary,” Jefferson was not just waxing philosophical. He was satisfying the legal requirement set out by Vattel that all peaceful avenues for reconciliation had been exhausted, which justified war to the “Powers of the Earth.”

A formal declaration of war, approved by Congress, increased support for the American military here at home. It rallied a divided and wary population. Even as late as 1776, there were Americans who remained fence-sitters, uncertain about the risks of a total break with the British Empire.

The declaration functioned as a public rallying flag that allowed Americans to identify themselves as a legitimate, unified group. Like Thomas Paine’s widely read pamphlet “Common Sense,” the declaration educated the uncommitted on the inescapable necessity of breaking away from the British Empire:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the declaration reads, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

By framing the fight in the universal language of the preamble, Jefferson sought to inspire and unite disparate Americans through a shared vision of a better life.

In doing so, he helped transform localized resistance movements into a collective national mission. In the words of the declaration, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

The declaration and the American army

This psychological shift was especially critical for the rank-and-file soldiers in the Continental Army.

That’s why, on July 9, 1776, Washington ordered the declaration to be read to his troops in New York. His aim: to provide a fresh incentive for the coming struggle.

This public address was intended to transform the nature of their service. They were no longer disloyal subjects in rebellion against a legitimate sovereign, but soldiers of a new nation defending their own homeland. Through Jefferson’s words and Washington’s address, the declaration fueled enthusiasm for a new political system and rededicated America’s soldiers to a cause that was not yet won.

Washington told the troops he hoped “this important Event will serve as a fresh incentive to every officer, and soldier, to act with Fidelity and Courage, as knowing that now the peace and safety of his Country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms.”

America’s first declaration of war bolstered troop morale at a pivotal point in the conflict. The Continental Army was going to square off against the largest expeditionary force in British history in the summer of 1776. And Washington’s troops consisted of approximately 19,000 militiamen.

The British army had the British navy. Washington had only minimal naval support. The arrival of the first waves of Hessian mercenaries, auxiliaries for Britain, in July 1776 only deepened American resolve to seek out their own foreign military allies.

Forging alliances

The declaration helped bring about much-needed support for the American war effort among foreign governments.

The primary strategic target of the declaration was the Bourbon monarchies of France and Spain, Britain’s chief rivals. The Continental Congress understood that the fledgling United States could not withstand British military might without receiving overseas shipments of gold and gunpowder, in addition to warships, sailors and soldiers.

Silas Deane, the Americans’ first secret envoy, arrived in Paris in July 1776 with instructions to procure equipment for an army of 30,000 men and to inquire about a formal alliance once independence was declared.

Working with the French playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Deane established the shell company Roderigue Hortalez and Co. to funnel secret aid from the French government to America. This clandestine supply chain eventually provided thousands of muskets, field artillery and millions of pounds of gunpowder that made possible the 1777 victory at Saratoga and France’s subsequent formal alliance.

While France provided the bulk of the naval support, Spain’s role was equally critical to the American war effort.

Following the declaration, the Continental Congress intensified its appeals to Spain. Bernardo de Gálvez, the governor of Spanish Louisiana, became a central figure in this secret war. Even before Spain formally entered the war in 1779, Gálvez channeled over $70,000 worth of medicine, weapons and uniforms up the Mississippi River to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. This southern lifeline kept the American war effort viable in the Western theater and forced the British to maintain a defensive posture on multiple fronts.

Reframing the declaration as a strategic war measure highlights the Founding Fathers’ sophisticated understanding of power.

They recognized that each individual’s “unalienable rights” were a fantasy without the “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, [and] contract Alliances.” Jefferson and the members of Congress understood that American freedom required support for the war effort at home and abroad.

By transforming a localized insurrection into a state-sponsored homeland defense and an international conflict, the declaration ensured that the American Revolution would not be a mere sound of one hand clapping, but a successful geopolitical struggle that brought about independence.The Conversation

Christopher Magra, Professor of American History, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Print painting of George Washington surveying land. Painted by Henry Hintermeister. Wikimedia Commons.

Christopher Magra in ‘The Conversation:’ How a 22-year-old George Washington learned how to lead, from a series of mistakes in the Pennsylvania wilderness

A young George Washington was thrust into the dense, contested wilderness of the Ohio River Valley as a land surveyor for real estate development companies in Virginia. Henry Hintermeister/Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Christopher Magra, University of Tennessee

This Presidents Day, I’ve been thinking about George Washington − not at his finest hour, but possibly at his worst.

In 1754, a 22-year-old Washington marched into the wilderness surrounding Pittsburgh with more ambition than sense. He volunteered to travel to the Ohio Valley on a mission to deliver a letter from Robert Dinwiddie, governor of Virginia, to the commander of French troops in the Ohio territory. This military mission sparked an international war, cost him his first command and taught him lessons that would shape the American Revolution.

As a professor of early American history who has written two books on the American Revolution, I’ve learned that Washington’s time spent in the Fort Duquesne area taught him valuable lessons about frontier warfare, international diplomacy and personal resilience.

The mission to expel the French

In 1753, Dinwiddie decided to expel French fur trappers and military forces from the strategic confluence of three mighty waterways that crisscrossed the interior of the continent: the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers. This confluence is where downtown Pittsburgh now stands, but at the time it was wilderness.

King George II authorized Dinwiddie to use force, if necessary, to secure lands that Virginia was claiming as its own.

As a major in the Virginia provincial militia, Washington wanted the assignment to deliver Dinwiddie’s demand that the French retreat. He believe the assignment would secure him a British army commission.

Washington received his marching orders on Oct. 31, 1753. He traveled to Fort Le Boeuf in northwestern Pennsylvania and returned a month later with a polite but firm “no” from the French.

Dinwiddie promoted Washington from major to lieutenant colonel and ordered him to return to the Ohio River Valley in April 1754 with 160 men. Washington quickly learned that French forces of about 500 men had already constructed the formidable Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio. It was at this point that he faced his first major test as a military leader. Instead of falling back to gather more substantial reinforcements, he pushed forward. This decision reflected an aggressive, perhaps naive, brand of leadership characterized by a desire for action over caution.

Washington’s initial confidence was high. He famously wrote to his brother that there was “something charming” in the sound of whistling bullets.

The Jumonville affair and an international crisis

Perhaps the most controversial moment of Washington’s early leadership occurred on May 28, 1754, about 40 miles south of Fort Duquesne. Guided by the Seneca leader Tanacharison – known as the “Half King” – and 12 Seneca warriors, Washington and his detachment of 40 militiamen ambushed a party of 35 French Canadian militiamen led by Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville. The Jumonville affair lasted only 15 minutes, but its repercussions were global.

Ten of the French, including Jumonville, were killed. Washington’s inability to control his Native American allies – the Seneca warriors executed Jumonville – exposed a critical gap in his early leadership. He lacked the ability to manage the volatile intercultural alliances necessary for frontier warfare.

Washington also allowed one enemy soldier to escape to warn Fort Duquesne. This skirmish effectively ignited the French and Indian War, and Washington found himself at the center of a burgeoning international crisis.

Defeat at Fort Necessity

Washington then made the fateful decision to dig in and call for reinforcements instead of retreating in the face of inevitable French retaliation. Reinforcements arrived: 200 Virginia militiamen and 100 British regulars. They brought news from Dinwiddie: congratulations on Washington’s victory and his promotion to colonel.

His inexperience showed in his design of Fort Necessity. He positioned the small, circular palisade in a meadow depression, where surrounding wooded high ground allowed enemy marksmen to fire down with impunity. Worse still, Tanacharison, disillusioned with Washington’s leadership and the British failure to follow through with promised support, had already departed with his warriors weeks earlier. When the French and their Native American allies finally attacked on July 3, heavy rains flooded the shallow trenches, soaking gunpowder and leaving Washington’s men vulnerable inside their poorly designed fortification.

The battle of Fort Necessity was a grueling, daylong engagement in the mud and rain. Approximately 700 French and Native American allies surrounded the combined force of 460 Virginian militiamen and British regulars. Despite being outnumbered and outmaneuvered, Washington maintained order among his demoralized troops. When French commander Louis Coulon de Villiers – Jumonville’s brother – offered a truce, Washington faced the most humbling moment of his young life: the necessity of surrender. His decision to capitulate was a pragmatic act of leadership that prioritized the survival of his men over personal honor.

The surrender also included a stinging lesson in the nuances of diplomacy. Because Washington could not read French, he signed a document that used the word “l’assassinat,” which translates to “assassination,” to describe Jumonville’s death. This inadvertent admission that he had ordered the assassination of a French diplomat became propaganda for the French, teaching Washington the vital importance of optics in international relations.

Lessons that forged a leader

The 1754 campaign ended in a full retreat to Virginia, and Washington resigned his commission shortly thereafter. Yet, this period was essential in transforming Washington from a man seeking personal glory into one who understood the weight of responsibility.

He learned that leadership required more than courage – it demanded understanding of terrain, cultural awareness of allies and enemies, and political acumen. The strategic importance of the Ohio River Valley, a gateway to the continental interior and vast fur-trading networks, made these lessons all the more significant.

Ultimately, the hard lessons Washington learned at the threshold of Fort Duquesne in 1754 provided the foundational experience for his later role as commander in chief of the Continental Army. The decisions he made in Pennsylvania and the Ohio wilderness, including the impulsive attack, the poor choice of defensive ground and the diplomatic oversight, were the very errors he would spend the rest of his military career correcting.

Though he did not capture Fort Duquesne in 1754, the young George Washington left the woods of Pennsylvania with a far more valuable prize: the tempered, resilient spirit of a leader who had learned from his mistakes.The Conversation

Christopher Magra, Professor of American History, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Supreme Court buliding against a bue sky and green lawns.

Robert Bland in ‘The Conversation:’ The Supreme Court may soon diminish Black political power, undoing generations of gains

Robert D. Bland, University of Tennessee

Back in 2013, the Supreme Court tossed out a key provision of the Voting Rights Act regarding federal oversight of elections. It appears poised to abolish another pillar of the law.

In a case known as Louisiana v. Callais, the court appears ready to rule against Louisiana and its Black voters. In doing so, the court may well abolish Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a provision that prohibits any discriminatory voting practice or election rule that results in less opportunity for political clout for minority groups.

The dismantling of Section 2 would open the floodgates for widespread vote dilution by allowing primarily Southern state legislatures to redraw political districts, weakening the voting power of racial minorities.

The case was brought by a group of Louisiana citizens who declared that the federal mandate under Section 2 to draw a second majority-Black district violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and thus served as an unconstitutional act of racial gerrymandering.

There would be considerable historical irony if the court decides to use the 14th Amendment to provide the legal cover for reversing a generation of Black political progress in the South. Initially designed to enshrine federal civil rights protections for freed people facing a battery of discriminatory “Black Codes” in the postbellum South, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause has been the foundation of the nation’s modern rights-based legal order, ensuring that all U.S. citizens are treated fairly and preventing the government from engaging in explicit discrimination.

The cornerstone of the nation’s “second founding,” the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution, including the 14th Amendment, created the first cohort of Black elected officials.

I am a historian who studies race and memory during the Civil War era. As I highlight in my new book “Requiem for Reconstruction,” the struggle over the nation’s second founding not only highlights how generational political progress can be reversed but also provides a lens into the specific historical origins of racial gerrymandering in the United States.

Without understanding this history – and the forces that unraveled Reconstruction’s initial promise of greater racial justice – we cannot fully comprehend the roots of those forces that are reshaping our contemporary political landscape in a way that I believe subverts the true intentions of the Constitution.

The long history of gerrymandering

Political gerrymandering, or shaping political boundaries to benefit a particular party, has been considered constitutional since the nation’s 18th-century founding, but racial gerrymandering is a practice with roots in the post-Civil War era.

Expanding beyond the practice of redrawing district lines after each decennial census, late 19th-century Democratic state legislatures built on the earlier cartographic practice to create a litany of so-called Black districts across the postbellum South.

The nation’s first wave of racial gerrymandering emerged as a response to the political gains Southern Black voters made during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870s. Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina and Louisiana all elected Black congressmen during that decade. During the 42nd Congress, which met from 1871 to 1873, South Carolina sent Black men to the House from three of its four districts.

Initially, the white Democrats who ruled the South responded to the rise of Black political power by crafting racist narratives that insinuated that the emergence of Black voters and Black officeholders was a corruption of the proper political order. These attacks often provided a larger cultural pretext for the campaigns of extralegal political violence that terrorized Black voters in the South, assassinated political leaders, and marred the integrity of several of the region’s major elections.

Election changes

Following these pogroms during the 1870s, southern legislatures began seeking legal remedies to make permanent the counterrevolution of “Redemption,” which sought to undo Reconstruction’s advancement of political equality. A generation before the Jim Crow legal order of segregation and discrimination was established, southern political leaders began to disfranchise Black voters through racial gerrymandering.

These newly created Black districts gained notoriety for their cartographic absurdity. In Mississippi, a shoestring-shaped district was created to snake and swerve alongside the state’s famous river. North Carolina created the “Black Second” to concentrate its African American voters to a single district. Alabama’s “Black Fourth” did similar work, leaving African American voters only one possible district in which they could affect the outcome in the state’s central Black Belt.

South Carolina’s “Black Seventh” was perhaps the most notorious of these acts of Reconstruction-era gerrymandering. The district “sliced through county lines and ducked around Charleston back alleys” – anticipating the current trend of sophisticated, computer-targeted political redistricting.

Possessing 30,000 more voters than the next largest congressional district in the state, South Carolina’s Seventh District radically transformed the state’s political landscape by making it impossible for its Black-majority to exercise any influence on national politics, except for the single racially gerrymandered district.

Although federal courts during the late 19th century remained painfully silent on the constitutionality of these antidemocratic measures, contemporary observers saw these redistricting efforts as more than a simple act of seeking partisan advantage.

“It was the high-water mark of political ingenuity coupled with rascality, and the merits of its appellation,” observed one Black congressman who represented South Carolina’s 7th District.

Racial gerrymandering in recent times

The political gains of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes called the “Second Reconstruction,” were made tangible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law revived the postbellum 15th Amendment, which prevented states from creating voting restrictions based on race. That amendment had been made a dead letter by Jim Crow state legislatures and an acquiescent Supreme Court.

In contrast to the post-Civil War struggle, the Second Reconstruction had the firm support of the federal courts. The Supreme Court affirmed the principal of “one person, one vote” in its 1962 Baker v. Carr and 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decisions – upending the Solid South’s landscape of political districts that had long been marked by sparsely populated Democratic districts controlled by rural elites.

The Voting Rights Act gave the federal government oversight over any changes in voting policy that might affect historically marginalized groups. Since passage of the 1965 law and its subsequent revisions, racial gerrymandering has largely served the purpose of creating districts that preserve and amplify the political representation of historically marginalized groups.

This generational work may soon be undone by the current Supreme Court. The court, which heard oral arguments in the Louisiana case in October 2025, will release its decision by the end of June 2026.The Conversation

Robert D. Bland, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Kim Harrison.

In Memoriam: Kim Harrison, 1963-2025

Kim Harrison.

The History Department lost our dear friend, colleague, and all-round support person when Kim Harrison passed away on December 3, 2025. Kim worked at UTK for over 35 years, most of those in our department as chief administrative specialist and then as budget manager. Kim was devoted to the department and kept us going through multiple department heads, deans, and other administrators, as well as through system changes, sudden policy updates, and new procedures. Even during hard periods in her life, Kim always had a smile for everyone who needed her help or just an ear for their problems. We will miss her.

Kim is survived by her husband, Doug Harrison, her son, Josh Harrison, and three siblings. Her other son, SPC Daniel Harrison, died in service in Iraq. Her parents and one brother also predeceased her.

To honor Kim’s legacy, the History Department has started collecting donations for an award for a high-achieving undergraduate or graduate student who has served, is serving or will serve in any branch of the armed forces. To give, please visit UT Advancement‘s Giving site, noting in the drop down box that your gift is in memory of Kim Harrison.

headshot photo of Ernie Freeberg

Freeberg’s Contributions Continue in Retirement

A picture of Ernie Freeberg

Ernie Freeberg loved working as a journalist for a public radio station in Maine, but his drive to better understand the issues he was covering led to his becoming a historian. For the past 22 years at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, he has become an award-winning scholar and highly valued educator. 

“Being a professor has given me the chance to take a deep dive into some questions that matter to me, and I hope to others, and spend years capturing these ideas in a book—and then translate them into courses that allow me to talk to students about those issues,” Freeberg said. “That’s been a real pleasure and treat and the best reason to do this job.”

While writing his latest book—a cultural history of retirement in America—Freeberg is retiring from UT’s Department of History and returning to Maine. 

A Generous Educator

One of Freeberg’s first students at UT in fall 2003 was Glenn Slater (PhD ’12), now head administrator for Covenant Christian School in Conroe, Texas.

“In his own soft spoken and direct manner, he was absolutely the best teacher I could have had starting back in graduate school after a 15-year hiatus from school,” Slater said. “He knew I was stressed and unsure of myself. He often visited with me after classes to check on me. At the same time, he was firm in his grading and let me know when I wasn’t performing well.”

Blake Barton Renfro (’07) still credits the analytical and communication skills learned through Freeberg to his ability now to work on projects such as a strategic plan for a city and a global leadership development program.

“Ernie oversaw my undergraduate honors thesis and spent a lot of time with me and a whiteboard in a room, helping me think about articulating an idea and getting from an idea to the finish line,” Renfro said.

Keith D. Lyon (PhD ’12) calls Freeberg “the best conceivable mentor.”

“His profound intellect, vast knowledge, keen sense of what is historically and culturally meaningful, boundless generosity, and unerring instinct for high quality writing all served my doctoral dissertation, teaching, and development as a scholar immeasurably,” said Lyon, who teaches history at Copiah Lincoln Community College in Mississippi.

Showing Why History Matters 

Freeberg structured history courses on central questions such as the role of religion in society.

One of his favorite classes to teach examined the life of radical abolitionist John Brown to consider the question of whether violence is ever acceptable as a way to combat an obvious institutional evil. 

“Brown’s life offers a way to explore topics from multiple angles, and when the class puts him on trial at the end, the outcome always comes down to a single vote,” Freeberg said, noting there are good arguments to be made on both sides. “I’m trying to get students to think for themselves, rather than think what I think.” 

Leading History Department

Freeberg served as head of the Department of History for nine years, starting in 2013. He was named the 2023 William and Vicki Brakebill College Marshal, the highest honor awarded by the UT College of Arts and Sciences to a faculty member. 

Professor Monica Black, who worked closely with him as associate head, called his leadership transformative.

“He consistently advocated with university administration to get opportunities to diversify our faculty and make it more representative of the historical discipline,” she said. 

He empowered faculty members to work toward the department’s goals too, she said.

“We made some major revisions to our curriculum to emphasize much more teaching students about historical thinking and historical writing,” Freeberg said. “My main goal, though, was to work with my colleagues to create a collaborative environment where decisions like that were made as a group.”

While he was chair, the department launched a public history course that includes student internships with local historical sites and organizations, taught by Pat Rutenberg. Freeberg also noted Rutenberg’s role in building a bridge program in which faculty members visit Knox County high schools and talk with students in Advanced Placement US History courses. Some students also visit the UT campus for a tour and sample of a college history course.

“Hopefully we recruit some history majors for UT—or for anywhere—out of that process,” Freeberg said.

Going well beyond the history department, Black noted Freeberg’s presence at events across campus. “He was deeply involved in everything and showed the kind of intellectual curiosity that, ideally, faculty model for students,” she said.

Extending UT Expertise

Freeberg has been a master of outreach for the department, across the UT campus and beyond, supporting several partnerships.

Lisa Oakley, vice president and curator of education for the East Tennessee Historical Society met Freeberg in 2003, when she was directing a federal Teaching American History grant and UT’s Department of History was a key partner in training high school teachers. 

“We continued to work together once he became department chair, growing the National History Day regional program we co-sponsored,” she said. The annual event brings middle and high school students to campus for a competition, and Department of History faculty and graduate students serve as judges.

“He built on experiences and successful partnerships, always finding new ways to reach out, as well as welcoming ideas from others,” Oakley said. 

Freeberg also helped highlight local history. For example, he worked with radio station WUOT on projects such as a podcast series on the 1982 World’s Fair, When the World Came to Knoxville.

About a decade before founding the Knoxville History Project (KHP), Jack Neely met Freeberg while pursuing a story for the alternative weekly Metro Pulse.

“I heard about a remarkable irony: that a learned historian of socialism was living in the former home of the legendary Cas Walker, grocer, radio personality, populist politician, proud of his fourth-grade education, and an avowed enemy of socialism, arguably Knoxville’s leading red-baiter of the ’50s. I called Ernie, and we spent a long time talking in that house,” Neely recalled.

Freeberg later became the first president of the KHP board, a position he served in for several years.

“He was an important consultant and supporter through some very difficult times,” Neely said. “I’m not sure we’d be here without his help.” Neely also has enjoyed long conversations with Freeberg about the topics of the professor’s books. “His knowledge and curiosity are both broad-ranging,” Neely said.

“He’s a thoughtful and distinguished fellow, remarkably modest and soft-spoken, considering all he’s done in his life,” Neely said. “For a nationally respected professor and author, he’s much nicer than he needs to be.”

Connecting Individuals to History

Freeberg’s first book, The Education of Laura Bridgman, won the American Historical Association’s Dunning Prize. Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, The Great War, and the Right to Dissent was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and earned two other awards. 

“His books are important to history in the scholarly sense, but all of them are accessible and easy to read. That’s a rare combination,” Neely said.

Lyons, who worked with him on The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America, lauded Freeberg’s ability to connect the individual with history. “Ernie selects a few individuals who are vital to the theme, thoroughly fleshes them out, weaves the history around them, and explains them in terms of the history,” he said. 

Freeberg sees every book as an opportunity to teach himself something new, and in 2020 published A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement.

“Having a historical perspective is hugely important for understanding public issues today, and a number of our faculty are interested in that,” Freeberg said. “We’ve had great success in research that speaks to our academic discipline and contributes to knowledge within the academy, but we also have a number of faculty who are interested in speaking to a wider audience, to help the public understand the value of what we’re doing and to provide some of the tools for people to think historically about the issues we’re facing today.”

Freeberg’s current book project is examining what he describes as an unprecedented moment in American and world history, with millions of people trying to make sense of what to do after retirement. 

The first draft is due next year, and Freeberg plans to continue researching and writing. “I have lots of book ideas, so I don’t really think of myself as retiring so much as getting an opportunity to concentrate on writing,” he said.

By Amy Beth Miller