The Big Isms

  WOODBURY: Between 1930-1933, anthropologist George Edward Woodbury, Curator of the State Historical Society of Colorado, was researching potential connections between Indigenous communities to study human variation and support early anthropological theories around the peopling of North America. To build this collection of hair samples, Woodbury reached out to other anthropologists and archaeologists, as well as administrators at a wide variety of U.S. Indian reservations, U.S. Indian boarding schools, and Canadian hospitals as well as missionaries worldwide. He collected approximately 1,500 samples from Asia, Central America, North America, Oceania, and South America. The Colorado State Museum published a short paper by Woodbury and his wife, Edna Woodbury, about this work in 1932. In 1935, Woodbury came to Harvard University to serve as a lecturer and research fellow in anthropology. Woodbury brought the collection with him. In 1938, Woodbury left Harvard and the discip

  This is a crisis. As the Prindle Post (a publication examining ethical issues) reports , Throughout the summer, armed Idaho citizens showed up at library board meetings at a small library in Bonners Ferry to demand that a list of 400 books be taken off of the shelves. The books in question were not, in fact, books that this particular library carried. In response to the ongoing threats against the library, its insurance company declined to continue to cover them, citing increased risk of violence or harm that might take place in the building. The director of the library, Kimber Glidden , resigned her position in response to the situation, citing personal threats and angry armed protestors showing up at her private home demanding that she remove the “pornography” from the shelves of her library. This behavior is far from limited to the state of Idaho . In Oklahoma, Summer Boismier , an English teacher at Norman High School was put on leave because she told her students

How Saidiya Hartman Changed the Study of Black Life Elias Rodriques interviews Saidiya Hartman, November 3, 2022, The Nation Saidiya Hartman has shaped studies of Black life for over two decades. Her first book, 1997’s  Scenes of Subjection , argued that slavery was foundational to the American project and its notions of liberty. Her follow-up, 2006’s  Lose Your Mother , combines elements of historiography and memoir in exploring the experience and legacy of enslavement. Here she first used a speculative method of writing history given the silences of the archive. And her most recent book, 2019’s  Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments , examines the revolution of everyday life enacted in the practices of young Black women and queer people that created and sustained expansive notions of freedom. After 25 years, Hartman’s influence is everywhere. Her coining of the phrase “the afterlife of slavery” changed the ways that historians consider the long ramifications of the cha

  GLC 24th Annual Conference: Teaching Race & Slavery in the American Classroom (video recordings)  Video from the GLC's 24th Annunal  conference on Teaching Race & Slavery in the American Classroom are available on the GLC's YouTube channel .

  The Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, Dynamic Harlem Pastor, Dies at 73 Sam Roberts, October 28, 2022, The New York Times The Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, the Harlem preacher whose talent for oratory and political savvy was a force for social and racial justice, and who raised $1 billion to remake America’s most storied and influential Black neighborhoods, died on Friday at his Harlem home. He was 73. His son Calvin O. Butts IV said the cause was pancreatic cancer. In Mr. Butts’s three decades as pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, his work reflected the dramatic changes in how Americans confronted the nation’s history of racism. In New York, he challenged the white power structure and turned promises into action, creating educational, commercial and homeownership opportunities for Harlem residents. He took inspiration from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s and by the dawn of the 21st century was a partner of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in attempting to creat

  US Fails Children by Not Acting on Child Labor Posted on October 31, 2022 Migrant minor working in agricultural activities in the United States. | Photo: Twitter/ @AwdehRaghid The U.S. Government Accountability Office suggested that 100,000 child farmworkers are injured on the job every year. The probe into the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl found her working at a manufacturing plant in Alabama, a shocking incident that revealed the secret child labor in the United States, the only country unwilling to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. WAY TOO YOUNG The 13-year-old daughter of Pedro Tzi, an immigrant from Guatemala, was found by the police in Georgia, where the teenager and a 21-year-old Guatemalan migrant were looking for a job. Worse still, Tzi’s daughter and her two underage brothers did not go to school earlier this year, but worked at SMART Alabama in Luverne, an automotive parts manufacturer su

  The World’s Newest Republic How one nation’s sovereignty movement is setting off a chain reaction among former British colonies in the Caribbean By Hannah Giorgis Getty; The Atlantic October 27, 2022 B arbados, the easternmost stretch of land in the Caribbean Sea, is a pear-shaped island surrounded by a dense network of bright coral. As you crisscross the island, gently sloped hills give way to mazes of sugarcane fields. The plantations that once controlled the sugar crop were some of the first outposts of British colonial control in all of the Americas. That history, dating back to when an English ship arrived in 1625, is not as distant as it may seem. Though Barbados gained its independence as a constitutional monarchy in 1966, only last year did the nation formally sever ties with Britain—removing Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state and electing the nation’s first president in the process. As in any postcolonial place, the complexities of the past occupation are o