Historians intervene, or write interventions, when they actively and explicitly create a connection between present and the past. Interventions are essays, generally, where today meets “back in the day.” The following examples cover higher education, schooling, civil rights, and the labor movement. Each is political, implicitly or otherwise, according to the tastes of the intervener. They are more and less polemical, but effective on either end of that continuum. —————————————— In The Baffler (no. 23), Thomas Frank uses his positive powers of polemics and persuasion, in a piece titled “Academy Fight Song,” to reintroduce the reader to the ills of Read more