News Bureau

A Minute With™... Peter Fritzsche, a historian of modern Germany

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - About half of Latinos check "white" in response to the question about race on the U.S. Census. About half check "other race."

Washington, D.C., journalists are clustering not in one “Beltway bubble” but in a collection of “microbubbles,” based on a recent study of their Twitter postings. It means they “may be even more insular than previously thought,” say Illinois journalism professors Nikki Usher and Yee Man Margaret Ng.

Sexy ads stick in the memory more but don’t sell the brand or product, according to research that analyzed nearly 80 advertising studies published over three decades.

In many societies, teenagers are repeatedly told – by adults, peers and popular media – that teens are more likely than younger children to take risks, ignore their parents, skip schoolwork and succumb to bad influences. But stereotypes are not destiny, a new study of Chinese middle school students suggests.

A Minute With...™ Peter Fritzsche, expert on Nazi Germany

A Minute With™... Sandra Kopels, a lawyer and social worker

News coverage of the Vietnam War did not have the effect on popular support that many believe, says a University of Illinois researcher.

With world leaders gathering Sept. 1 to mark the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II in Europe, U. of I. history professor Peter Fritzsche describes how Germans came to embrace Nazi rule, especially in Hitler’s first 100 days.

Just say the name "Selma," and anyone who knows the history of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s will know what you mean. It was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in that Alabama city almost 50 years ago (March 7, 1965) that peaceful marchers were beaten back with billy clubs wielded by state and local lawmen. Captured on network television news, it would become known as "Bloody Sunday." The movie "Selma," which opened nationwide last Friday (Jan. 9), tells the story of that day and events before and after, which would prompt passage of the Voting Rights Act that summer. Sundiata Cha-Jua, a professor of history and of African-American studies at Illinois, teaches courses on both the civil rights movement and African-Americans in film. He talked about the film and the history with News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain.

With a population between 10,000 and 30,000 in its heyday (A.D. 1050-1200) and a sprawling assortment of homes, storage buildings, temples, cemeteries, mounds and other monuments in and around what is now St. Louis and East St. Louis, Illinois, the ancient Native American city known as Greater Cahokia was the first experiment in urban living in North America.

A new book, “Revealing Greater Cahokia, North America’s First Native City,” offers the most complete picture yet of a decade of archaeological research on a little-known part of the larger city and its precincts in East St. Louis.

While sexual racism abounds on dating apps, Black men who are sexual minorities reported differing forms of it on the popular apps Jack’d and Grindr, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found.

Parents who talk to their children about nonviolent conflict resolution reduce children’s likelihood of abusing their dating partners – even if parents give contradictory messages advocating violence in some situations.

A Minute With™... Sandra Kopels, a lawyer and social worker

A U. of I. professor who specializes in the history of sports says it’s not realistic to see sporting events as free of politics or protest

A new study shows a diminished but “robust” link between the decline of unions and the rise in wage inequality.

Young children’s development of the higher-level cognitive skills called executive function may be adversely affected by household chaos and poor nutrition, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scholars found.

Two Illinois professors tell the story of a secret Hollywood studio at the heart of the Cold War and the early nuclear age.

Nine U. of I. researchers have been named to the 2022 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list. The list recognizes research scientists and social scientists who have demonstrated exceptional influence – reflected through their publication of multiple papers frequently cited by their peers during the last decade. This year’s list includes 6,938 individuals from around the world whose papers rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in the Web of Science.

A Minute With™... Jason Chambers, a professor of advertising

A Minute With™... John Murphy, a professor of communication

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Seventy-five years after the Nazis rose to power, historians still struggle to explain how the Nazis could take such effective hold of Germany and bring it to such murderous extremes in war and in the Holocaust.

Corn cultivation spread from Mesoamerica to what is now the American Southwest by about 4000 B.C., but how and when the crop made it to other parts of North America is still a subject of debate. In a new study, scientists report that corn was not grown in the ancient metropolis of Cahokia until sometime between A.D. 900 and 1000, a relatively late date that corresponds to the start of the city’s rapid expansion.

A Minute With...™ Alecia Swasy, professor of business journalism

Researchers combed through thousands of historical documents for first-person accounts of fires occurring between 1673 and 1905 in the Midwestern tallgrass prairie. Their study is the first systematic analysis of the timing, causes and consequences of prairie fires in this part of the world.

An Illinois professor looks at presidential speechmaking through one of its more-eloquent practitioners, John F. Kennedy.

Some people's sex lives sizzled, while others' fizzled, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. New research by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scholar Liza Berdychevsky may explain why.

An analysis of nearly 200 independent studies involving more than 230,000 adult participants finds that having been sexually assaulted is associated with significantly increased risk of anxiety, depression, suicidality, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, obsessive-compulsive disorder and bipolar disorder.

The brains of healthy adults recovered faster from a mild vascular challenge and performed better on complex tests if the participants consumed cocoa flavanols beforehand, researchers report.

Cultivating a love of math – and inspiring the next generation of numbers-oriented professionals – may start with activities that promote enjoyable parent-child experiences, say U. of I. researchers.

Today’s college students are slightly less narcissistic than their counterparts were in the 1990s, researchers report in a new study – not significantly more, as some have proposed. The study, reported in the journal Psychological Science, analyzed data from 1,166 students at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1990s, and from tens of thousands of students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Davis in the 2000s and 2010s. All of the students completed the Narcissism Personal Inventory, the oldest and most widely used measure of narcissism.

New research out of the University of Illinois suggests that some mothers’ and fathers’ psychological well-being may suffer when their work and family identities – and the amount of financial support they provide – conflict with conventional gender roles.

The Illinois Neurodiversity Initiative at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is accepting applications from neurodiverse students who will be incoming freshmen in the 2023 fall semester.

Pandemics of the past are getting new attention, among them the plague of the 14th century. Known as the Black Death, it was medieval, European, bubonic and spread by rats – at least that’s what most of us think. Much of that needs adjustment, however, in large part due to discoveries of the past decade, says Carol Symes, a professor of medieval history at Illinois.

A U. of I. professor discusses drones and the implications of their use in terrorism and warfare.

In early 2014, months before the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and shortly after the Black Lives Matter movement got its start, Michael Schlosser, the director of the Police Training Institute at the University of Illinois, began offering police recruits classes that challenged their views about race and racism, introduced them to critical race theory and instructed them in methods to de-escalate potentially volatile encounters with members of minority groups.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Despite the increased popularity of geek culture - movies based on comic books, video games, virtual worlds - and the ubiquity of computers, the geek's close cousin, the nerd, still suffers from a negative stereotype in popular culture. This may help explain why women and minorities are increasingly shying away from careers in information technology, says Lori Kendall, a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A new analysis examines why India has had limited success at bringing the unbanked into the formal economy despite numerous policy initiatives.

Black gay men were largely missing in both black and gay history, so Kevin Mumford, who specializes in both, set out to tell their story. “I wanted to reclaim a history that had been washed over, that had been overlooked,” said Mumford, a University of Illinois history professor. He wanted to show how “black gay lives matter.”

Many youths lack financial literacy and money-management skills, indicating an urgent need for educational programs that will help them enter adulthood better equipped to handle their financial affairs, a new study found.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A number of studies have suggested that religion plays a critical role in black Americans' mental health and life satisfaction, aiding their ability to cope with personal and societal stressors. However, a new study indicates that spirituality, rather than religiosity, may be the element that is essential to black women's psychological well-being.

A Minute With...™ Mattias Polborn, professor of economics and political science

A Minute With™... Illinois history professor Kevin Mumford

A Minute With...™ Richard Tempest, professor of Slavic languages and literatures

A study reported in the journal Science offers an enhanced view of the origins and ultimate fate of the first dogs in the Americas. The dogs were not domesticated North American wolves, as some have speculated, but likely followed their human counterparts over a land bridge that once connected North Asia and the Americas, the study found.

The Super Bowl will feature car ads, beer ads, food ads – but probably none for carrots. Most food ads, game time or anytime, are pitching less-healthy fare. Kids are often the target. Do they understand what an ad is? Who made it and why? Advertising professor Michelle Nelson worked with an Illinois school district to develop an advertising literacy curriculum that also promotes healthy eating.

People who are the most optimistic tend to be better sleepers, University of Illinois social work professor Rosalba Hernandez found in a new study of 3,500 young and middle-aged adults.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Commercial broadcasters are doing the "bare minimum and not much more" for children's educational programming, according to University of Illinois communication professor Barbara Wilson, one of two lead researchers on a study released today (Nov. 12) by the organization Children Now.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Poor social and communication skills and psychosocial problems such as depression, low self-esteem and anger - all of which are often associated with disabilities - serve as risk factors for peer rejection and as predictors for bullying and victimization, according to a new study that was conducted at the University of Illinois.

A historian looks at the Vietnam War herbicide Agent Orange and how it changed ideas about war wounds and the cause of birth defects.