In this opinion piece in The Hill, historian Barry Strauss, contends that Trump's appointment of his son-in-law as a senior advisor has plenty of precedent.
"History is full of examples of close family members advising the boss," writes Strauss, the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies in the history department. "Moreover, family businesses are still one of the most common forms of commercial or industrial enterprise.
"The real question is why Americans have such a fetish against employing family members as advisors. Congress passed a so-called anti-nepotism law in 1967 that prevents a member of the executive branch from appointing relatives to a position in an agency that he or she controls."
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In "Child of Light," an experimental historical fiction set in 1890s Utica, Jesi Bender-Buell '07 tells the story of a young girl as she tries to understand her world through the interests of her parents: Spiritualism for Mama, electrical engineering for Papa.
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
