History Archives - Page 9 of 13

Corporations

Enjoy Your Pandemic Waterpark

A corporation deigns to let taxpayers into a previously private park they paid for

September 2, 2020 • by Pat Garofalo

Back in 2017, Nashville, Tennessee, provided real estate investment trust Ryman Hospitality with about $13.8 million in tax breaks to build a waterpark at its Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. However, taxpayers weren’t able to access the park unless they stayed overnight at the four-star facility. The hotel limited waterpark access ...

Education

Good History Makes the Familiar Strange to Us

Why The 1619 curriculum belongs in our schools

August 26, 2020 • by Daniel Osborn

It is almost a foregone conclusion that when new circumstances, and new evidence, force us to evaluate a consensus view of the American past, new and public conflicts erupt. As a history educator, I have seen this all before. As the culture wars ramped up after 1992, the attempt to craft ...

History

Why We Shouldn’t Try to Erase America’s Racist Past

Twitter’s misguided attempts at censorship

August 25, 2020 • by Karyn Lacy

Some Denny’s restaurants once bore the name “Sambo’s.” Sambo is a character featured in the children’s story Little Black Sambo, set in India, written by Helen Bannerman, a Scottish author, and first published in England in 1898. After it appeared in America a year later, the book inspired an outpouring of ...

Why We Shouldn’t Try to Erase America’s Racist Past

History

Let’s Build a Monument to Anastácia

An enslaved woman’s image that has traveled around the hemisphere can help us rethink slavery and memorialization

July 30, 2020 • by Marc Hertzman and Giovana Xavier

In May 2020, as the social movement to remove racist monuments grew and the COVID-19 pandemic spiraled out of control, two white women protesting against social distancing and masks were photographed with a sign. It read: “Muzzles are for dogs and slaves. I am a free human being.” It featured ...

History

The Case of the Hijacked Statue of the Great Abolitionist

What the fate of the monument to Edward Coles in Edwardsville, Illinois, can tell us about the ironies of hoping that statues might tell a new American story

July 29, 2020 • by Jeffrey Manuel

Recently, renewed efforts have been made to diversify the kinds of Americans commemorated by public monuments. A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an op-ed by David Blight, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer of Frederick Douglass; as the title of the piece put it, “There’s a Chance to Tell a ...

The Case of the Hijacked Statue of the Great Abolitionist

Activism

Trojan Horse

Misusing Greek mythology on a college campus sneaks white supremacy in the back door

July 23, 2020 • by Amelia Jones and Tania Modleski

These cultural forms act as “Trojan horses,” sneaking offensive, even racist and sexist ideas into the fabric of the university where they lie in wait to do harm. In our case, one has to begin, of course, with the hyper-masculine bronze statue of Tommy Trojan (erected in 1930) at the center ...

History

Time Is Out of Joint

Simultaneity in the epoch of the near and far

July 16, 2020 • by Sergio Infante

For those who are either unemployed or overworked, those whose habits and routines have fallen apart, those experiencing psychological or bodily distress, the days may seem to drag on endlessly. For others -- perhaps those who find themselves on the pandemic’s frontlines or those who have discovered a sense of ...

History

A Monument to Dis-Union

The West Virginia Coal Miner statue ignores race, class, and history

July 16, 2020 • by Steven Stoll

During our present twilight of the statues, when citizens across the country force the removal of effigies that represent racism and colonialism, Jackson is an obvious target for removal. Yet I’ve been thinking of another statue just a few yards away from Jackson: The West Virginia Coal Miner, a monument ...

Climate & Ecology

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 ...