The
Epidemics America Got Wrong
Jim Downs, March 22, 2020,
The AtlanticBy late March 1863, hundreds had died in Alexandria, Virginia. The
mortality rate had almost doubled in just one night, and even quadrupled
in other parts of the country. Three thousand people were dead in less
than a month in North and South Carolina. The
numbers in Louisiana, Georgia, and parts of Mississippi were equally as
high. As a smallpox epidemic tore through the country, more than 49,000
people died from June 1865 to December 1867, the years an official
count was kept.
Smallpox exploded at this time not because of a lack of protocols or
knowledge—a vaccine even existed—but because political leaders simply
didn’t care about the group that was getting sick. Government inaction
or delay—due to racial discrimination, homophobia,
stigma, and apathy—have shaped the course of many epidemics in our
country. In the 1980s, for example, HIV spread as the government barely
acknowledged its existence.
No…
In the News
The
history of slavery remains with us today
Ariela Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente, March 9, 2020,
The Washington PostNow that the Democratic primary race has narrowed to two older white
male candidates, political analysts have begun to focus on the
allegiances of African American voters, who are the core of the
Democratic Party base. Some have suggested that African American
support of Joe Biden rests less on their trust in him, than on their
distrust of white voters’ willingness to vote for a woman, a person of
color or a progressive.
This reasoning suggests that African American voters make pragmatic
political choices based on an understanding of the persistence of
anti-black racism in our society, sometimes settling for a white
candidate who they think will be least objectionable to white
voters while causing African Americans the least harm.
To understand where we are today, we need to understand the deep roots of anti-black racism in the history of the Am…
The
latest battle over the Confederate flag isn’t happening where you’d expect
Megan Kate Nelson, March 6, 2020,
The Washington PostLast month, the debate over the public display of Confederate
flags and monuments boiled over in Tucson, when city council member Lane
Santa Cruz pushed the town to ban the Confederate flag, which had been
carried by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, from the
city’s annual Rodeo Parade. Mayor Regina Romero agreed, issuing a
statement asserting that “the flag has no place in the rodeo parade or
elsewhere in our community.”
To most Americans, Arizona seems as far from the battlefields of the American Civil War as one can get.
But it was in the first year of the Civil War that what we think of as
Arizona came into being — as a Confederate territory. In fact,
Confederate actions in the Far Western theater of the war reveal the
extent to which the Confederate flag became a symbol of
white supremacy and conquest.
continueNew
Stories for an Old Confli…
In the News
TAKE
YOUR FREEDOM: A Play About Slavery Pushes Boundaries in a New York Prison
Alice Speri, February 22 2020,
The InterceptA group of families and New York state officials gathered on a workday
morning last month for a theatrical performance of a historical drama
about slavery and human freedom. But it was an unusual setting for a
play, especially for one pondering the question
of liberation, because the stage was deep inside a maximum-security
prison, and the actors were a group of incarcerated men, many of whom
still face decades behind bars.
At the end of the play, the two-dozen cast members lined up at the
front of the stage as one actor after the other removed their costumes:
a simple, white T-shirt with the word “slave” or the character’s slave
name written across the chest. Below the stage,
in the first row, a group of suited senior corrections officials looked
on uncomfortably.
Then the audience, officials included, broke into a standing ovation.
The cas…
Eugene V. Debs: Trade Unionist, Socialist, Revolutionary is very much an educational film, stuffed with information about its subject and overflowing with an impassioned perspective, though a little on the dry side. Even then, it clearly expresses what drew Sanders to the words and vision of Debs. It doesn’t just focus on Debs’s struggle, but also emphasizes the positivity and hopefulness of his worldview. For both Debs and Sanders, their vision of a better world is as much defined by good feeling — “beauty, joy, and cooperation” in a quote from Debs — as material necessity.
READ MORE
African
Americans Forged Free Lives in Civil War Refugee Camps
Lawrence Goodman-Brandeis, February 19, 2020,
FuturityGoodman-Brandeis on Brandeis University assistant professor Abigail Cooper’s scholarship on Civil War refugee campsMARY ARMSTRONG’S STORY
In 1863, newly freed from bondage and living in St. Louis, 17-year-old
Mary Armstrong did the unthinkable—she journeyed to the slave-holding
South.
Armstrong, one of more than 2,000 former slaves who told their stories
to the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project in the late 1930s, had been
separated from her parents as a child when they were sold to other
owners.
Mary Armstrong in 1937. (Credit: Library of Congress)Armstrong learned through the grapevine that her kin might be in Texas
so, as she says in her interview, “away I goin’ to find my mamma.”
With the Civil War raging, she set out with two baskets full of food and
clothing and a small amount of money, traveling more than 1,000 miles
by boat and then stagecoach to Texas.
…
For
hundreds of years, enslaved people were bought and sold in America. Today most of the sites of this trade are forgotten.
Anne C. Bailey. Photographs by Dannielle Bowman, February, 12, 2020,
The New York TimesSARAH ELIZABETH ADAMS was around 5 when her mother was sold to a slave
dealer in Lynchburg, Va. The auction took place in the mid-1840s, in the
town of Marion, Va. Sallie, as she was called, was herself sold that
day, but not with her mother: A man named Thomas
Thurman purchased Sallie to take care of his sick wife. She would never
see her mother again. For the remainder of her childhood, whenever she
could, Sallie would slip away and find solace under a tall white-oak
tree. All alone, she would wrap her arms around
the tree’s wide trunk and cry. The tree became the place where she
would recall the names and faces of her family members sold away; a
place where she could grieve, but also a place where she could
find shade and respite from her sorrow.
This story was …
Removed from Amazon’s Bookstore
Breaking News
tags:
Hitler,
books,
Amazon,
World War 2
Amazon is quietly canceling its Nazis.
Over the past 18 months, the retailer has removed two books by David
Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as several titles by
George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Amazon
has also prohibited volumes like “The Ruling Elite: The Zionist Seizure
of World Power” (photo at right) and “A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of
Mankind.”
While few may lament the disappearance of these hate-filled books,
the increasing number of banished titles has set off concern among some
of the third-party booksellers who stock Amazon’s vast virtual shelves.
Amazon, they said, seems to operate under vague or nonexistent rules.
“Amazon reserves the right to determine whether content provides an
acceptable experience,” said one recent removal notic…
Born
a slave, John Hunter lived to be 112. Then a NC historian found his family.
Josh Shaffer, February 5. 2020,
The News & ObserverAn 1870 census report showing John Hunter, age 101, as a blacksmith. In 1876, a writer for the
Raleigh Sentinel sat down to
interview an old, old man — a Raleigh native so aged he recalled
clearing the forest to build Fayetteville Street, frightening deer and
dodging bears.
He said he’d seen British troops in Raleigh before the city had a name.
He’d seen burning buildings in the War of 1812. And after a century,
he’d seen a lifetime of slavery abruptly end, offering him a short taste
of freedom.
John Hunter lived to be 112 by history’s best guess, and until a few
months ago, his name had almost totally vanished from Raleigh’s memory.
With luck and the internet, City of Raleigh Museum Director Ernest
Dollar rescued him from wills buried in the state archive, articles
printed in newspapers that no longer exist and a single line from the
1870 …
think
absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption
