The Big Isms

  On the first day of the United Nations General Assembly, Colombian President Gustavo Petro made his first address to the body. The speech sharply deviated from those of his conservative predecessors. Petro did not shy away from calling out global North countries for their role in the destruction of the environment and in the perpetuation of the War on Drugs, as a symptom of their capitalist greed. He accused “You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing the jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison [the rainforest] is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.” This is Petro’s first trip to the United States since he was inaugurated in August. He was received on Sunday night September 18 by hundreds of supporters in Queens, NY who manifested their supp

  A more complete archive of the American South Casey Gerald, September 14, 2022, The Atlantic One of the first photographs I fell in love with was Robert Frank’s Fourth of July, Coney Island (1958). Night has fallen on Coney Island. The sky, which stretches across the top third of Frank’s photograph, looks to be painted solid black. In the foreground, far from the crowds in the distance, lies a beautiful young Black man, his back to debris left in the sand. He lies alone, asleep, curled up in a fetal position, prayer hands tucked between his knees. He’s barefoot, in long pants and long sleeves. Something, I now realize, was missing from Frank’s photograph, though perhaps it could be said that something was faulty, confused, in me. I can no longer feel the same romance I felt for that boy lying alone on Coney Island. Or rather, what I thought was romance had in fact been heartbreak. I wanted so desperately, years ago, to have enough cash to purchase a print of Frank’s

  Is this the weirdest American book-banning yet? By  Jonny Diamond September 26, 2022 Why the hell has Pennsylvania’s Central York School District banned four books in the Girls Who Code series, which provides models to young women and girls who might not otherwise see themselves as computer programmers? Yes, the nationwide Republican movement to ban books is repugnant and cruel and deeply hypocritical, but I can generally see how it coheres with a politics of fear and bigotry. So… coding? What’s wrong with that? The only thing I can think of is that Christofascist ideologies contain within them the patriarchal need to keep women at home and dependent on men? Cool. According to this report at The Register : Girls Who Code’s founder, Reshma Saujani, has pinned the ban on a group called “Moms for Liberty,” which advocates for parental rights in schools and oversight of educational material. Saujani detailed her reactio

  https://www.cbsnews.com/video/the-national-archives-mission-to-recover-stolen-history/ The National Archives’ mission to recover stolen history Over the past month, Americans have been hearing a lot about the National Archives. A CBS News review has found a series of other cases in which people were prosecuted for stealing - and sometimes ... www.cbsnews.com

  Tackling the Myth of the American West Stephanie Syjuco’s exhibition Double Vision points to the role that museums play in perpetuating narratives about the people, places, and events of the American West.  READ   Editor Note: The truth is always BEST

  Conference on slave rebellions offers in-depth way to teach history some don’t want in schools Curtis Bunn, September 12, 2022, NBC News CHARLESTON, S.C. — As the campaign to quash the teachings of America’s brutal history of slavery intensifies, Joseph McGill Jr. has waged a counterattack by way of a poignant three-day conference in this antebellum port town that was once responsible for the most sales and transports of enslaved Africans to major cities in the U.S. A contained glee emanated from McGill, a historian and the founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, which kicked off its seventh annual conference last week with a focus on the 1739 Stono Rebellion, an uprising of enslaved people who killed plantation owners and their families in South Carolina to free themselves.  “We’re at a place right now of rebellion and resistance in America, just as enslaved Africans were,” McGill said of the Stono revolt, which has been referred to as the largest slave rebellion in

  Stephen Shames had just turned 20 when he visited the headquarters of the Black Panther party in Oakland, California, and showed some of his recent photographs to Bobby Seale, co-founder and main spokesman for the organisation. Though Shames was still finding his way as a photographer, Seale liked what he saw and decided to use some of the pictures in the Black Panther newspaper. So it was that a young white guy from Cambridge, Massachusetts became the  official chronicler  of the Black Panthers from 1967 to 1973, documenting their community programmes, protests, rallies, arrests and funerals at close hand. “The Panthers were never a black nationalist organisation,” says Shames, now 74. “They formed alliances with many black writers and activists and their whole legal team was white. They were not out to get white people, as the American government insisted. They were a revolutionary organisation who worked with anybody they felt was sincerely trying to change the syst

Daring to Speak Up About Race in a Divided School District Daniel Bergner, September 6, 2022,  The New York Times Magazine The Leelanau Peninsula looks, on a map of Michigan, like a thick pinky with a gnarled tip. In the northern reaches of the state, it lies between Lake Michigan and Grand Traverse Bay. It’s a place of cherry and plum orchards, long stretches of road bordered by forests and fields and monumental, surreal sand dunes. Demographically, the peninsula and adjacent mainland could hardly be more homogeneous; the population is over 90 percent white. But politically, the area is starkly divided. Conservatives worry that their territory is turning “as blue as Ann Arbor,” as one centrist Republican put it, and liberals see Trump 2024 banners draped over the fronts of neighbors’ houses and, on a few houses and trucks, Confederate flags. The peninsula — whose economy spans agriculture, tourism and, lately, an influx of people with the luxury of remote work, and wh

STOLEN RELATIONS: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas Welcome to Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas. This community based project, housed at Brown University, is a collaborative effort to build a database of enslaved and unfree indigenous people throughout time all across the Americas in order to promote greater understanding of the historical circumstances and ongoing trauma of settler colonialism .  Please note that this site is under construction, and the database does not yet have a public portal. We are actively working on this project, however, and and are looking for volunteers and scholars to contribute materials. We invite you to visit our About page to learn more about the project and how to contribute.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, historian renowned for research into Louisiana slavery, dies at 93 John Pope, August 31, 2022, NOLA.com Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a New Orleans-born historian who revolutionized teaching about slavery in Louisiana by applying computer technology to information she unearthed in musty archives and courthouse records throughout the state, died Monday at her home in Guanajuato, Mexico. She was 93. Hall burrowed into paper records to research her 1992 book “Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” said Molly Mitchell, director of the University of New Orleans’ Ethel & Herman L. Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies, which Hall’s mother established and named for Hall’s parents. The book is “indispensable,” retired Tulane University history professor Lawrence Powell said, because it shows not only the African ethnic groups from which the enslaved people came but also the ways in which they adjus

  Uncovering Their History: African, African American, and Native  American Burials in Hartford’s Ancient Burying Ground 1640-1815   New Haven Museum Wednesday, September 14, 2022 • 6:00 pm EDT Online event | register here New Haven Museum will commemorate Freedom Trail Month with a virtual presentation, “Uncovering Their History: African, African American, and Native American Burials in Hartford’s Ancient Burying Ground, 1640-1815,” by historian, educator, author, and publisher of Connecticut Explored magazine, Dr. Katherine A. Hermes.

  The Sunday Debate: Prosecute Trump Intelligence Squared With David Blight, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, and Rich Lowry, Editor-in-chief of National Review, to debate the issue. The host for this discussion is journalist, academic and former White House correspondent for the BBC, Philippa Thomas. continue   Counties with more slaves in 1860 have higher gun ownership rates today, study finds Matthew Rozsa, August 25, 2022, Salon Though the Civil War was over 150 years ago, the social fabric of the United States still suffers from the country's former divisions. Cultural and political values are split between the so-called free counties and the former slave counties, which existed in 15 states (only 11 of which seceded during the Civil War). Now, a new study has shown one of the most peculiar, yet perhaps unsurprising, divisions between former slaveholding and free parts of the U.S.: the prevalence of slavery in a given county cor

Jason R. Mancini, Ph.D., Executive Director of CT Humanities, presents the program “Preserved on the Mighty Waters: Indians, Maritime Labor, and Communities of Color in Southern New England.” This program is hosted by Otis Library in partnership with the Norwich Historical Society.