New River Valley Times

‘Remarkable’ UVA Students Expand Possibilities Through Washington Post Partnership

“I opened my phone to the Washington Post and just started scrolling down,” Bell said. “And then, ‘Oh my gosh, there it was!’ I immediately started screen-shotting and sending it to every person I’ve ever known.”

Bell is a graduate history student in the University of Virginia’s “Bridge to the Doctorate” program within the College of Arts & Sciences. The Arkansas native is working on a thesis about African American memory of slavery and the Civil War. Before coming to UVA, she served in the Peace Corps. She also holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Arkansas and a master’s from Boston University

And, as of two months ago, Bell is a published author in one of the most-read news outlets in the country.

For the second year running, UVA, through its “Governing America in a Global Era” program, partnered with the Washington Post for an intensive course taught over a two-week stretch in January. The course covered how to write, edit and pitch historically themed opinion pieces, with the chance of them appearing under the Made By History section of the Post’s website. One of the program’s goals is to prepare students for careers in public service through a wide array of teaching and experiences.

This year’s course, taught by Made By History editors Carly Goodman and Katie Brownell, produced op-eds published to the Post’s site from four of the nine UVA students enrolled.

Goodman, a historian and author who recently was an assistant professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia, called the UVA students “remarkable” to work with.

“They brought incredible energy,” she said. “I hope that they found it as invigorating as we did on the teaching side. It’s really cool to see institutions putting money where their mouth is and making investments in these kinds of experiences to really help their graduate students navigate what is a difficult job market.”

The digital-only Made By History section was established in 2017 as a dedicated space for bringing historical analysis of current events to a broad audience. Experienced scholars are typically the guest authors but, Goodman said, “we are also very interested in publishing work by emerging scholars because they sometimes have the most interesting insights.”

Bell took the news hook of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ move to ban Advanced Placement courses on African American studies from the state’s high schools and placed it in historical context by highlighting a pattern that began with the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the late 19th century. The UDC, a neo-Confederate organization that endorsed the Ku Klux Klan, “made it its mission to instill a white supremacist version of history in generations of American children,” Bell wrote in her Washington Post article, “Florida’s rejection of an AP course is the latest salvo in a very old war.”

Original source can be found here