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When I teach Butler’s novels to my students, we use them to interpret our present moment as well as to historicize it in relationship to the long history of racism and sexism.

To illustrate and historicize her points, Rankine also includes actual remarks from public figures, from Martha Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump.

It is a question he does not answer as much as historicize:

Keret said his father fought to humanize and historicize the Holocaust, to see it as more than a story of unmitigated oppression.

In trying to “historicize” all that “ambient emotion in the 1950s” — in other words, to meaningfully gauge how anxious, skeptical or indifferent Americans were at a particular moment in time — Ms. McEnaney mined government archives, news clippings and other sources that indicated federal officials were trying to figure out the same thing back then, coming at it like social scientists, military strategists and Madison Avenue admen all at once; even they couldn’t be sure.