History Archives - Page 10 of 13

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta

A webinar view, featuring author Debjani Bhattacharyya and commenter Kasia Paprocki

July 15, 2020 • by Claire Potter

The event was hosted and moderated by Claire Potter, co-executive editor at Public Seminar & professor of history at The New School for Social Research. Save the date: our next Public Seminar book talk is on Wednesday, July 22, featuring Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to ...

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta

Activism

Saying Goodbye to Aunt Jemima Is Not Enough

What we really need to do to address the economic impact of systemic racism in the United States

July 9, 2020 • by Elwood Watson

When Dinah Washington recorded “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” in 1959, the blues diva managed to imbue the Tin Pan Alley lyrics with a kind of haunted hopefulness, the same kind of soulful yearning that would reappear a few years later in Sam Cooke’s monumental ode to the civil ...

Saying Goodbye to Aunt Jemima Is Not Enough

Activism

Toppling Andrew Jackson From His Pedestal

A racist who championed ethnic cleansing

July 2, 2020 • by Mark R. Cheathem

In today’s moment of Black Lives Matter and peaceful protests over racial injustice, more Americans than ever are tearing down statues across the country: Confederate heroes, dismantled; icons of Jim Crow, removed. Now, even former presidents aren’t immune. Consider Andrew Jackson -- one of President Trump’s personal models, who is also ...

Toppling Andrew Jackson From His Pedestal

History

According to Nathaniel Hawthorne, We Should All Be Wearing Face Masks

July 1, 2020 • by Russ Castronovo

According to the nineteenth-century novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, we should all be wearing face masks. In the current moment where politics meets pandemic, the decision about whether or not to wear a face mask is a lightning rod for debates over governmental overreach and freedom of expression—and according to some, a smug ...

According to Nathaniel Hawthorne, We Should All Be Wearing Face Masks

Activism

A Tale of Three Protests — in Brooklyn

A photo-essay

June 29, 2020 • by Jo Freeman

On Saturday, May 30, I heard that a crowd was at Bedford and Tilden in Flatbush near the Sears parking lot where Covid-19 testing has been conducted for several weeks. When I got there at about 5:30 p.m, I saw two to three hundred people milling in the street. They had ...

History

Public Seminar Presents: Becoming Free, Becoming Black

On July 1, Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross join your host, Claire Potter, to discuss their new book about race, law, and citizenship

June 28, 2020 • by Alejandro de la Fuente, Ariela Gross and Claire Potter

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020) tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. ...

Public Seminar Presents: Becoming Free, Becoming Black

Activism

Protestors Aren’t Destroying History, They Are Recasting It

When monuments to racism, slavery, and empire come down, new possibilities rise up

June 25, 2020 • by Durba Ghosh and Kelly King-O’Brien

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police, the movement to remove Confederate monuments has accelerated rapidly as part of a new wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Protestors argue these monuments represent institutional racism and should be removed immediately. Many governors and local politicians readily ...

History

Jesus Loves Drag

How New York City got its Drag March

June 19, 2020 • by Brian Griffin and Claire Potter

The Stonewall riots that took place in New York in June 1969 are widely credited with catalyzing the modern LGBT+ movement. In “Kicking and Screaming: Stonewall at 50,” the Exiles on 12th Street podcast celebrated the anniversary with our guest Brian Griffin (aka Harmonie Moore Must Die). Griffin co-founded the ...

History

The New School’s Leading Man

How Alvin Johnson reimagined higher education

June 16, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

Alvin Johnson is the leading man in the history of The New School. He saved it from financial failure again and again and again; he attracted intellectuals to its faculty, most auspiciously those fleeing fascist Europe in the 1930 and 40s and he persuaded artists such as Thomas Hart Benton ...

History

Taking Children

An excerpt from Taking Children: A History of American Terror by Laura Briggs

June 8, 2020 • by Laura Briggs

The past stalks the present, the ghost in the machine of memory. This is why history writing matters; it gives us ways to understand the specters already among us and to assemble tools to transform our situation. Things change; the epidemic of child taking in the context of mass incarceration ...

History

Culling the Herd

A modest proposal

May 18, 2020 • by Eli Zaretsky

The large-scale slaughter now unfolding in America was not set in motion overnight. The herd had to be prepared. One place to start is with the response to the uprisings of the 1960s. Any herd has to have its rebellious instincts curbed. Most urgent was suppressing the African-American population since ...

History

The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Longer View

Decades of bad policies brought us to this point: we need to reckon with that as a nation

May 7, 2020 • by John Ehrenreich

The highest priority is to get through the current crisis. But then we must think about what went wrong and how to forestall future crises like this. The ideas include reversing President Trump‘s decision to dismantle the federal pandemic response team, supersizing our public health corps, improving our capacity to ...