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444655e27dad4e43920f62d196aee178 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174464?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hnn%2Fzxkz+%28HNN+Breaking+News%29 | This Historian Draws Lessons About Family Separation at U.S.-Mexico Border from Kindertransport Artifacts | This Historian Draws Lessons About Family Separation at U.S.-Mexico Border from Kindertransport Artifacts
Seven years ago, Jennifer Craig-Norton uncovered a cache of original correspondence about a group of Kindertransport children from Poland.A Ph.D. candidate in England at the time, she had no idea that voices of child refugees from the past would end up shining a light on the global child refugee situation of today.
But that’s exactly what happened when the stories of World War II’s “kinder children” became the inspiration for “The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory,” published last summer.
The Holocaust historian’s first book challenges the long-accepted and celebrated narrative of these children as lucky youngsters who went on to live normal lives in the kind embrace of strangers in England.
Instead, what the former Sacramento State University graduate student discovered was that no matter the type of care these children received, “they were deeply unhappy, psychologically broken, couldn’t adjust to the loss of their family, couldn’t rebond with their family if they were reunited, and that they were proselytized by foster families.”
Her conclusion: “Family separation is disastrous.”
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90324b933be99a72f02254bb85be5987 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174469 | Bellevue College President, Vice President Out after Mural on Japanese American Incarceration was Altered | Bellevue College President, Vice President Out after Mural on Japanese American Incarceration was Altered
BELLEVUE — The president of Bellevue College and one of the college’s vice presidents will be leaving their jobs, the school announced Monday, in response to the vice president’s decision to alter a campus mural of two Japanese American children in a World War II incarceration camp by removing a reference to anti-Japanese agitation by Eastside businessmen.
The college said it has “begun to separate” from President Jerry Weber and Gayle Colston Barge, vice president of institutional advancement. Provost Kristen Jones will serve as acting president, board of trustees Chair Rich Fukutaki announced at a Monday news conference.
“We need to do something to make this better, so an apology, as heartfelt as it has been, is not really enough,” Fukutaki said. “…with that in mind, the board has determined a change in leadership is necessary.”
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34d23787bfbc56de52909e656e5f01f4 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174498 | A Founder of American Religious Nationalism | A Founder of American Religious Nationalism
Right around the time the House began its impeachment inquiry, the homepage of the U.S. Department of State featured a talk by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo titled “Being a Christian Leader.” Only a few weeks had passed since Attorney General William Barr told students at Notre Dame Law School that “secularists” are to blame for “moral chaos” and “immense suffering, wreckage, and misery,” and that “Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct.” Then, at a January campaign rally at a Miami megachurch, President Donald Trump told the largely evangelical crowd that God is “on our side.”
Most of us have a sense that this kind of religious-nationalist rhetoric and behavior got its start with the revolution that Reagan brought to power. A decisive moment was in August 1980, at the Reunion Arena in Dallas, Texas, when Reagan addressed 15,000 thousand pastors and religious activists. “I know that you can’t endorse me,” but “I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing,” he said, to wild applause.
Reagan’s speech at the Reunion Arena marked a sea change in the role of conservative religion in American politics. But some of those who had helped organize the event were concerned that the one individual who deserved the most credit for the transformation of the interface of politics and religion was not on the podium. “We agreed that it was unfortunate that Rousas Rushdoony was not speaking,” radical theologian Gary North later observed, recalling an exchange with Robert Billings, a Reagan campaign staffer who had previously served as executive director of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority organization. Billings responded, “If it weren’t for his books none of us would be here.” “Nobody in the audience understands that,” North countered. “True, but we do,” Billings reportedly replied.
Howard Phillips, a former Nixon administration aide who was also present at the Reunion Arena, called Rushdoony the “most influential man of the 21st century.” As he confided to author and religious studies professor Julie Ingersoll in 2007, “The whole Christian conservative political movement had its genesis in Rush.”
Rousas John Rushdoony was born in 1916 to Armenian immigrants who had narrowly escaped the genocide, in which as many as 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Rushdoony’s father, who founded the Armenian Martyrs Presbyterian Church in Kingsburg, California, ministered to a community of fellow Armenian refugees, who agonized and grieved as letters from relatives back home came to a standstill. “In Armenia, there was no neutral ground between Islam and Christianity,” Rushdoony wrote in 1997. “And I came to realize there is no neutral ground anywhere.”
Rushdoony left his family home and made his way to college at the University of California, Berkeley. He did not fit in. Advised to read the classics, Rushdoony later called this “the ugliest experience of my life.” He pronounced the works of Shakespeare, Homer and the rest of the canon “classics of degenerate cultures. What they offer at their best is evil.”
Rushdoony emerged from Berkeley with all the distinctive features of his intellectual persona in place: a resolutely binary form of thought that classified all things into one of two absolutes; a craving for order; and a loathing of the secular world.
Rushdoony began to advocate for a return to “biblical law” in America. The Bible, Rushdoony said, commands Christians to exercise dominion over the earth and all its inhabitants. Women are destined by God to be subordinate to men; men are destined to be ruled by a spiritual aristocracy of right-thinking Christian leaders, and public education is a threat to civilization for it promotes a “secular world-view.” In over thirty books and publications, including The Messianic Character of American Education and The Institutes of Biblical Law – often hailed as his magnum opus and recommended as one of the Choice Evangelical Books of 1973 by evangelical flagship journal Christianity Today -- Rushdoony laid it all out in a program he called Christian Reconstruction.
There is little mystery about the historical sources from which Rushdoony drew his own inspiration. He laid out all the details in his works. Setting aside the hardline Dutch Reformed theologians who supplied the backbone of his thought, Rushdoony drew on two traditions that would prove essential in understanding the genesis of today’s Christian nationalist movement. The first was the proslavery theology of America’s antebellum preachers. The second was the economic libertarianism that took root in reaction to the New Deal.
Among apologists for Christian nationalism today, the favored myth is that the movement represents an extension of the abolitionism of the nineteenth century and perhaps of the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, too. Many antiabortion activists self-consciously refer to themselves as the new abolitionists. Mainstream conservatives who lament that the evangelicals who form Trump’s most fervent supporters have “lost their way” suggest that they have betrayed their roots in the movements that fought for the abolition of slavery and the end of discrimination. But the truth is that today’s Christian nationalism did not emerge out of the movement that opposed such rigid hierarchies. It came from the one that endorsed them.
Rushdoony understood this well. Not long after escaping the horror of Berkeley, he took an interest in the work of Robert Lewis Dabney, a defender of slavery before the Civil War and who also supported patriarchy and the American form of apartheid after the war.
Rushdoony reprinted and disseminated some of Dabney’s works through his Vallecito, California-based Chalcedon Foundation, as well as through his publishing company, Ross House Books. He found himself agreeing with Dabney that the Union victory was a defeat for Christian orthodoxy. In Rushdoony’s mind, Dabney’s great adversaries, the abolitionists, were the archetypes of the anti-Christian rebels – liberals, communists, secularists, and advocates of women’s rights – who continued to wreak havoc on the modern world. As Rushdoony’s fellow Reconstructionist C. Gregg Singer put it, proslavery theologians including Dabney, Thornwell and their contemporaries “properly read abolitionism as a revolt against the biblical conception of society and a revolt against divine sovereignty in human affairs.” Rushdoony himself concluded, “Abolitionist leaders showed more hate than love on the whole.” The defeat of the orthodox side in the Civil War, Rushdoony asserted, paved the way for the rise of an unorthodox Social Gospel.
Rushdoony’s admiration for southern religious orthodoxy was such that he adopted a forgiving attitude toward certain forms of slavery. In books such as Politics of Guilt and Pity and The Institutes of Biblical Law, which is essentially an 890-page disquisition on “the heresy of democracy” and the first of a three-volume series under the same title, he makes the case that “the move from Africa to America was a vast increase of freedom for the Negro, materially and spiritually as well as personally.”
“Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so,” Rushdoony muses, and the law requires that a slave “recognize his position and accept it with grace.”
One of Dabney’s pet peeves was the provision of public education to Black children, whom he referred to as “the brats of black paupers,” which required unjust (in his view) taxation of “oppressed” “white bretheren.” Rushdoony sympathized with Dabney’s point of view on public education, and here began to fuse his views with a small-government ideology. “State supported and controlled education is theft,” he wrote, and called the claim of ownership to the lives of citizens by a “humanist state” slavery, too.
Rushdoony did not agitate for the literal enslavement of Black Americans in his time. But his fascination with proslavery theology was no passing fancy. The idea that the United States is a Redeemer Nation, chosen by God; that it is tasked with becoming an orthodox Christian republic in which women are subordinate to men, education is in the hands of conservative Christians, and no one pays taxes to support Black people; that at some point in the past the nation deviated horribly from its mission and fell under the control of atheist, communist, and/or liberal elites—the stuff of proslavery theology was the life of Rushdoony’s political thought.
Rushdoony soon found an even greater source of inspiration in the libertarian economic thinkers who emerged to beat back the New Deal. He was very much taken with figures like James W. Fifield as well as members of the Austrian school of economics, and began to churn out works arguing that the modern welfare state was “organized larceny” and “capitalism is supremely a product of Christianity.”
In this Christian-libertarian vision, Rushdoony saw the foundation for a thoroughly religious – or better, theocratic – understanding of the American republic. In Rushdoony’s telling, it was not the intention of America’s founders to establish a nonsectarian representative democracy. The First Amendment, he argues, aimed to establish freedom “not from religion but for religion.” “The Constitution was designed to perpetuate a Christian order,” he wrote.
The idea that the United States is a “Christian nation” – not just in the sense that its population was originally mostly Christian but that it was intended to serve as part of a Christian world order – was Rushdoony’s central contribution to the religious right.
Rushdoony had many prominent admirers, among them evangelical leader D. James Kennedy, whose ministry received millions of dollars in donations from the DeVos family. Kennedy popularized Rushdoony’s ideas through multiple sermons and publications, exhorting attendees at a 2005 conference organized by his ministry to “exercise godly dominion” over “every aspect and institution of human society.” The ultraconservative Catholic leader Richard John Neuhaus, who worked to broker a conservative evangelical and conservative Catholic alliance, pointed out that Rushdoony’s “theonomy,” or the idea of a social and political order rooted in “biblical law,” has “insinuated itself in circles where people would be not at all comfortable to think of themselves as theonomists.” He also attested, in 1990, to “increasing encounters with ideas clearly derived from Christian Reconstructionistm even among conservatives in the mainline/oldline churches.”
Today, the ideas of Rushdoony and his fellow Reconstructionists have penetrated into evangelical and conservative Catholic circles that are, quite often, unaware of their original sources. “Though we hide their books under the bed, we read them just the same,” as one observer put it to Michael J. McVicar, author of Christian Reconstruction: R.J. Rushdoony and the American Religious Conservatism.
To be clear, the Christian right is large and diverse in its specific theologies. Many of its representatives know very little about R.J. Rushdoony and others take pains to distance themselves from him. Some of his extreme positions, such as the idea that homosexuals, blasphemers and adulterers are all worthy of the death penalty, have been loudly repudiated by conservative leaders. Yet it is difficult to understand the ideological origins and structure of Christian nationalism in America today without taking into account Rushdoony’s ideas.
Rushdoony’s work is touted today by some of the leading personalities and policy groups on the Christian right. Perhaps the most telling example comes from David Barton, whose efforts to reframe our constitutional republic as a Christian nationalist enterprise are at the center of so many of the movement’s cultural and legislative initiatives. Though perhaps not in a formal sense a Reconstructionist, Barton dances around many of Rushdoony’s defining ideas, even on the question of slavery.
In a paper titled “The Bible, Slavery, and America’s Founders,” posted on the WallBuilders website, Barton cites Rushdoony extensively, and argues that “in light of the Scriptures, we cannot say that slavery, in a broad and general sense, is sin. But this brief look at the Biblical slave laws does reveal how fallen man’s example of slavery has violated God’s laws.”
Where Barton strikes out on his own, it is to take a swipe at modern, liberal government as a form of slavery, a gesture that Rushdoony surely would have endorsed. “Since sinful man tends to live in bondage, different forms of slavery have replaced the more obvious system of past centuries,” Barton explains. “The state has assumed the role of master for many, providing aid and assistance, and with it more and more control, to those unable to protect themselves.” In a 2018 blog post, Watchmen on the Wall, the Family Research Council’s alliance of an estimated 25,000 pastors, praised Rushdoony as a “powerful advocate for the Christian and homeschool movements across America” who “challenged Christian leaders of his day to stand on biblical truth in the public square.” Rushdoony is a foundational thinker whose ideas continue to speak, long after he has been silenced.
For a long time now, critics have viewed America’s religious right as a social or cultural movement. They assume that it represents a reaction to modern, secular culture, and that it speaks for a large mass of disaffected conservative evangelicals and others who are preoccupied with issues of concern to the family. But that simplistic interpretation is plausible only for those who do not actually listen to what its leaders have to say or trace its ideas to their primary sources. Christian nationalism today is a political movement, and its primary goal is power. Its ultimate aim is not just to win elections but to replace our modern constitutional Republic with a “biblical” order that derives its legitimacy not from the people but from God and the Bible – or, at least, the God and the Bible that men like Rushdoony claimed to know.
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a52f3257a7289beca40117e20442c0aa | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174630 | We Need Social Solidarity, Not Just Social Distancing | We Need Social Solidarity, Not Just Social Distancing
Social distancing — canceling large gatherings, closing schools and offices, quarantining individuals and even sequestering entire cities or neighborhoods — seems to be the best way to slow the spread of the coronavirus. But it’s a crude and costly public health strategy. Shuttering shared spaces and institutions means families lose child care, wages and social support. What’s more, it’s insufficient to protect the older, sick, homeless and isolated people who are most vulnerable to the virus. They need extra care and attention to survive, not society’s back.
I learned this firsthand while studying another recent health crisis, the great Chicago heat wave of 1995. In that event, as in so many other American disasters, social isolation was a leading risk factor and social connections made the difference between life and death.
In Chicago, social isolation among older people in poor, segregated and abandoned neighborhoods made the heat wave far more lethal than it should have been. Some 739 people died during one deadly week in July, even though saving them required little more than a cold bath or exposure to air-conditioning. There was plenty of water and artificial cooling available in the city that week. For the truly disadvantaged, however, social contact was in short supply.
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02367078219dad787890b420e891ca51 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174989 | Bernie Sanders’s Campaign is Over, But His Populist Ideas Will Survive | Bernie Sanders’s Campaign is Over, But His Populist Ideas Will Survive
On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) suspended his campaign for president, clearing the way for former vice president Joe Biden to be the Democratic nominee and likely deeply dividing Sanders’s devoted supporters and even his advisers.
Some advisers and supporters will probably cheer the move, seeing it as a way to avoid a debilitating party feud that could hurt Biden in the fall campaign against President Trump. Others, however, wanted to see Sanders take his fight to the Democratic convention to give his supporters a chance to “vote for that alternative vision,” in the words of top Sanders ally Larry Cohen.
By making this choice, Sanders spotlighted the dilemma that often faces populist insurgent movements: Do they make peace with the political establishment, seeing it as the most likely path to bring their ideas into mainstream American politics, or do they hold out, focusing on building their movement’s strength? The populist People’s Party faced just this quandary in the summer of 1896 as delegates met in St. Louis for the party convention.
Four years earlier, the People’s Party had reached unimaginable heights. Meeting in Omaha over the July 4 weekend in 1892, it unfurled a party platform calling for government ownership of the railroads, a graduated income tax and an inflationary approach to monetary policy to lift the burden of debt and bankruptcy crushing many farmers and ranchers.
The Omaha Platform advanced the populist belief that “the powers of government” should be fully deployed to eradicate the “oppression, injustice and poverty” that flourished across the country. As its presidential candidate, the party nominated James B. Weaver of Iowa, a veteran of third-party politics who had served three terms in the House of Representatives.
The establishment press reacted with scorn. The Democratic St. Paul Globe mocked the Omaha Platform’s “perfervid rhetoric,” while the New York Times called it a “strange document” whose “proposed remedies for the alleged evils are as crazy as the statement of the evils.” The party would carry no state “whose population is not made up of ‘cranks,’” the Times predicted, but Weaver proved otherwise. Taking the then-unusual step of campaigning across the country, Weaver led the People’s Party to victories in Kansas, Colorado, Nevada and Idaho. It was the first time a third party had earned votes in the electoral college since 1860.
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287d4bc6faa3bbfc200747c377716fb4 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174990 | Our Fear of Government Power Has Left Us Fighting COVID-19 with Volunteerism | Our Fear of Government Power Has Left Us Fighting COVID-19 with Volunteerism
As the covid-19 pandemic spreads and unemployment spikes, volunteers are revving up their sewing machines to produce homemade masks. There are calls for fabric stores to donate supplies. Others gather donations of personal protective equipment to match to hospitals in need. Mayors and governors partner with philanthropists, urging citizens to support funds to sustain nonprofit organizations and create new loan programs for small businesses.
Amid the crisis, these responses are celebrated as evidence of civic virtue and generosity. The outpouring of individual contributions produces feel-good stories of everyday altruism and the large-scale efforts are described in the business-friendly language of public-private partnerships. But we are also witnessing the revival of a form of collaboration that embodies a long and conflicted history of attitudes toward government. Crises produce calls for volunteers because voluntarism is a key component of the limited government that Americans have built over the past two centuries.
After gaining independence from the British Empire, the challenge was to build a state without the centralized bureaucracy or standing armies that threatened political liberty as it was understood by the Founding Fathers. The result was an “expansible state” that depended on the mobilization of private efforts. This arrangement was advocated by defenders of states’ rights who preferred local militias and private slave patrols to a large national army.
Some supporters of the Union cause in the Civil War came to the same conclusion for very different reasons. They saw military hierarchy as despotic and, therefore, a threat to the civic virtue of soldiers. Voluntarism, they argued, would enable a “free people” to “conduct a long war” by containing the power of a centralized military. One of these voluntary groups, the U.S. Sanitary Commission, was credited with making “the armies of the world the armies of the people and not of kings.” As floods and fire followed war, and the Civil War was succeeded by world wars, the formula was generalized: The people will care for the people.
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9d22d012fbb60a63ebf6861c1f3f4a7e | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174994 | The Debate Over a Post Office Bailout, Explained | The Debate Over a Post Office Bailout, Explained
...
The Postal Service’s long-term problem
The Postal Service has been organized in several different ways across American history, but its modern paradigm, dating from the 1970s, dictates that the USPS is supposed to be a self-funded, independently operating public sector entity.
And at the core of that entity is a two-sided bargain. On the one hand, the Postal Service gets a monopoly on the provision of daily mail services. On the other hand, the Postal Service undertakes a series of public service obligations that a private company would not provide — most notably, daily mail delivery and flat postage rates regardless of where you live.
But the volume of first-class mail — the source of the lion’s share of USPS revenue and the cornerstone of both its monopoly and its universal service obligations — peaked in 2001 at 104 billion pieces of mail. Decline has been fairly steady since then, falling to just 55 billion pieces in 2019. The cost of meeting USPS’s basic service obligations, by contrast, has essentially remained steady, creating an obvious financial problem.
There’s little reason to think the decline of paper mail will reverse in the future, so one possible response would be to cut costs by closing post offices, canceling Saturday delivery, and laying off workers. Congress has generally opposed that, pushing the postal service to instead find new sources of revenue such as its parcel delivery business in which it competes with UPS, Federal Express, and other private companies.
A few other solutions have been floated, but none have taken hold. For instance, many people on the left would like to see laws changed to allow USPS to begin offering banking services to both increase revenue and create a public option that would compete with private banks. On the right, the general preference is to privatize postal services (which is what’s largely happened in Europe) and end the mix of special monopolies and special service obligations that currently governs postage.
Back in 2006, a lame-duck Republican Congress turned up the pressure on privatization by forcing the Postal Service to prefund decades of pension and retiree health costs through investments in low-yield government bonds. That onerous obligation made USPS technically insolvent before the coronavirus hit. But rather than achieving its apparent intended result of spurring privatization, in practice it mostly served to give privatization opponents something to complain about rather than addressing the underlying decline in USPS’s business model. Along the way, however, USPS did find a promising new line of business as a contractor delivering Amazon packages.
...
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698e8eed34dbf5b6282537c3353eef6b | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174997 | A Review of Andrew J. Bacevich's "American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition" | A Review of Andrew J. Bacevich's "American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition"
AMERICAN CONSERVATISM Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition
Edited by Andrew J. Bacevich
When assembling an anthology of writings representative of a political persuasion, the challenge is to acknowledge the persuasion’s varieties without producing a concoction akin to sauerkraut ice cream, a jumble of incompatible ingredients. In “American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition,” Andrew J. Bacevich, a scholarly soldier and writer, compiles a rich menu. So rich, however, that “conservatism” comes close to being a classification that no longer classifies.
The volume’s focus is confined to the 20th century, with its earliest selection from 1907, “The Education of Henry Adams,” wherein Adams recalled visiting “the great hall of dynamos” at a 1900 exposition of modern technologies. There he felt “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of force totally new.” This illustrates Bacevich’s theory that “modern” American conservatism “emerged in reaction to modernity,” by which he means “machines, speed and radical change — taboos lifted, bonds loosened and, according to Max Weber, ‘the disenchantment of the world.’”
But American conservatism has always been bifurcated about modernity. Today it is especially so, because of capitalism and religion.
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7417dc6d81047b02c4e870f5a516440a | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175014 | The Second-Most-Dangerous Contagion in America: Conservative Irrationality | The Second-Most-Dangerous Contagion in America: Conservative Irrationality
The most dangerous contagion we now confront is the coronavirus, which has killed more than 20,000 Americans and thrown more than 16 million out of work. The second-most-dangerous contagion is the conspiracy-mongering, hostility to science and outright irrationality promulgated by President Trump and his loudmouth media enablers. It will take intensive contact tracing to follow the spread of crackpot ideas: Is Trump infecting the cable news hosts, or are they infecting him? Suffice it to say, the president and his media fans are both afflicted with perilous misconceptions that are making the threat from the coronavirus far more acute.
At first, both Trump and his media toadies dismissed the threat from the coronavirus, claiming it was no worse than the flu and that it would miraculously disappear by April. Any suggestion that Trump was mishandling the threat was dismissed as a “hoax.” Then on March 13, Trump finally declared a national emergency, and the tone among the Fox News propagandists instantly changed — from deriding concern about the coronavirus among liberal bed-wetters to lauding Trump’s heroic wartime leadership.
The new resolve did not last long: Within days, the drum beat on the right evolved into “the cure cannot be worse than the disease.” Conservative talking heads argued that the economy had to be reopened even if it meant sacrificing the lives of the aged and infirm who are most vulnerable to covid-19. Trump was listening: On March 24, he announced that he would “love” to restart the economy by Easter.
Thank goodness Trump did not follow his instincts: Can you imagine how much devastation would have ensued if the economy were being reopened just as the United States was overtaking Italy for the most confirmed coronavirus deaths on the planet? Mercifully, after being shown models predicting that millions of Americans could die from a premature reopening, Trump agreed on March 29 to extend his social distancing guidelines until the end of April.
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b9ef6650af43bd4f4b675fdadd8d0320 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175027 | What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy | What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy
The question of isolation and democracy has long haunted political writers. It was posed, most poignantly, by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America—not in the relatively chipper first volume, which was published in 1835, after Tocqueville’s return from the United States, but in the dystopian second volume, which came out in 1840, long after his gaze had settled back on France. In the first volume, Tocqueville could scarcely contain his enthusiasm for the civic mindedness of American democracy, where citizens rushed to build a bridge or take care of some other item of public business. In the second volume, as he contemplated the passage of aristocratic society from the European scene, his view grew darker. Because people in aristocratic societies are linked in time to their ancestral families and homes, he wrote, they “are almost always closely involved with something outside themselves.” Democracy breaks that chain of inheritance. It destroys the familial “woof of time,” leaving “each man… forever thrown back on himself alone.” That isolation, which threatens to “shut up” the self “in the solitude of his own heart,” makes democracy ripe for despotism.
Tyrants, the tradition of political theory teaches us, thrive on the separation of citizens from one another. So isolated are people under despotism, wrote Tacitus, that even the courts conduct their affairs “almost in solitude.” Maximizing space between people clears the public square of all potential opposition and resistance. It is what allows the despot to swing his sword with such abandon. It thus required Tocqueville no great leap of the imagination to think that a nightmarish era of democratic despotism lay ahead. Everything he’d read seemed to compel that conclusion.
Yet the literature of democracy is less settled on this question of isolation than we might think. Some writers have described societies in which citizens are kept apart, or at least away from public life, as not posing any problem for democracy at all. Aristotle, for example, identifies four kinds of democracy. In only one of those democracies do those who are eligible to participate in politics actually take part. Tellingly, it’s the one in which revenues are sufficiently high and widely distributed as to fund the life and leisure of the poor. In that kind of democracy—let’s allow the anachronism of calling it social democracy—the citizens are able to gather and decide their common fate.
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a5238daf87a84bdf966823fba7ebbec1 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175036 | Prudence in a Storm | Prudence in a Storm
The intense and sudden catastrophe that much of the world is living through now is unavoidably disorienting for all of us. It’s hard to know what course our society should take through it, and so how to judge the paths our elected officials are choosing. But one thing that shouldn’t be very difficult to see is that this is in fact an intense and sudden catastrophe: a real emergency that requires us to suspend some of the usual categories of our thinking about policy and politics.
But this has turned out to be harder for us to accept than it should be, despite the severity of the circumstances we face. We find it enormously difficult to avoid two related temptations in this moment. We incline, on the one hand, to want to treat this as a normal time and so to recoil from some of the dramatic steps being taken to respond to the pandemic because they strike us as extreme and therefore inherently reckless or unwise. And on the other hand, we incline to think of this moment as the proper test of our usual political attitudes and dispositions, so that we find in it proof that, say, America should have long ago enacted a higher minimum wage or pursued much more deregulation.
These two temptations have a common root. Both amount to something like a failure of prudence, or practical wisdom. Yet, ironically, both often take the form of calls to prudence. The first is advanced in the name of keeping our head and not panicking in the face of pressure or danger, and the second in the name of learning lessons from hard practical experience. And yet, both involve missing the crucial distinction between the normal situation and the extreme exigency — a distinction at the very heart of prudence.
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a07a0583876347fb06edbe8d191c8dd2 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175038 | Presidential Approval Rating | Presidential Approval Rating
In the Early Republic, a man’s reputation determined every social, political, and economic opportunity and interaction. It opened doors for trade partnerships, decided who could obtain credit, and served as political currency. Reputations were so important that men engaged in a highly regulated system of written warfare, which sometimes culminated in duels to defend slights to their honor. In order to carve out a successful career in public service, gentlemen had to establish a reputation as virtuous republicans. They were supposed to be talented and exceptional. They were expected to carry these principles into their federal positions—to bring honor and prestige to the office, but not aristocracy. Yet the meaning of these generalities differed from one person to another. What appeared republican to a New Yorker might seem downright aristocratic to a North Carolinian.
Furthermore, no existing governing customs or legal precedents existed to guide Washington and the first generation of officeholders. The lack of guidelines filled each new scenario with additional pressure, but also left officials without a rubric to assess their actions. With no other benchmark, officials turned to public opinion to measure their successes and failures—a highly contested process.
All Early Republic officials shared a constant dread that their fellow citizens might condemn their actions. Washington in particular wanted feedback “not so much of what may be thought the commendable parts, if any, of my conduct, as of those which are conceived to be blemishes.” Finding that careful balance between strength and virtue proved challenging. David Stuart, who had married Washington’s stepdaughter-in-law in 1783, regularly funneled reports to Washington from Virginia. A few months after Washington’s inauguration, Stuart shared criticism that he had heard in Virginia about Vice President John Adams appearing too monarchical. Washington offered a half-hearted defense of Adams. He replied that although Adams sometimes adopted a high tone, he only used a carriage with two horses. Washington expected Stuart to understand that Adams’ use of a relatively modest form of transportation conveyed his republican character. While this distinction might seem silly in the twenty-first century, it demonstrates how Washington, Adams, and others in the Early Republic carefully crafted and dissected each action for hidden republican and aristocratic meaning.
Before the advent of sophisticated polling measures and widespread suffrage, public opinion was hard to gauge. Politicians relied on a few methods to deduce the thoughts of their fellow citizens. First, a network of private correspondents passed along the opinions of their friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. These networks expanded far beyond their local communities and allowed politicians to keep tabs on developments across the United States and around the world. Politicians also collected pamphlets, which articulated specific arguments. They were usually signed by the author, which conveyed a great deal of seriousness because the author was willing to stake his name and reputation on the argument contained in the pamphlet. Because they were expensive to produce, pamphlets afforded the wealthy and connected a venue to share their ideas. Pamphlets were printed in relatively small numbers for a limited audience with very specific circulation. Broadsides, large printed sheets similar to posters, and newspaper editorials offered a more informal approach. They were cheaper to create, often anonymous, and recirculated through numerous newspapers. As a result, they were generally considered “beneath the notice of elite politicians.” That is not to say elite politicians did not notice them, but they considered the medium too undignified to merit a response.
The combination of letters, pamphlets, broadsides, and newspapers offered politicians a fairly thorough report on the opinions of white, literate males. Although politicians often exchanged letters with female family members or friends, these types of published and private communications rarely conveyed the emotions of working-class women, illiterate men, Native Americans, or freed or enslaved African Americans. These were not the constituencies politicians worked to represent.
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1cd5c902cc5c57dec22bff47fc3397d7 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175051 | The Ditherer-in-Chief | The Ditherer-in-Chief
Virtually every historian or political scientist who considers such matters ranks Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and George Washington as America’s greatest presidents. They do so for good reason. Each of them faced existential crises, drew on expertise to formulate decisive responses, and ably followed through with dogged resolve.
Lincoln faced the seccession of Southern states and, rather than temporizing like his predecessor James Buchanan, he assembled a team of rivals to mobilize the nation’s resources and saved the Union.
Roosevelt confronted the worst economic depression in the modern history, and unlike the dispiriting half measures adopted by his predecessor Herbert Hoover, he revived the national spirit with the New Deal. For all of its legal setbacks and the ongoing historical debate over its economic effects, Roosevelt’s decisiveness and manifest leadership may have saved the United States from the political turmoil so many other countries experienced in the 1930s.
Responding to worsening economic and political tumult under the Articles of Confederation following the American Revolution, Washington drew on a wide array of advisors including Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to devise a bold new constitution and to decisively implement it. While antifederalists dithered, Washington led and the people rallied around him.
Each of these presidents had private doubts and limited ability, but by listening, deciding, and acting, they prevailed. Penny, dime, or quarter, they all ended up on a coin.
What can one make of President Trump so far in the early stages of the coronavirus crisis? While it’s too soon for a final judgement, his dithering betrays his indecision.
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40da72ea4025b3fc2114fc9963bcb71a | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175057 | Might the Coronavirus Be a Peacemaker? | Might the Coronavirus Be a Peacemaker?
Let me quote a Trumpian figure from long ago, Henry Ford. That’s right, the bigot who created the Ford Motor Company (and once even ran for president). Back in 1916, in an interview with a Chicago Tribune reporter, he offered this bit of wisdom on the subject of history:
"Say, what do I care about Napoleon? What do we care about what they did 500 or 1,000 years ago? I don't know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across and I don't care. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today."
As it happened, Napoleon Bonaparte died only 42 years before Henry Ford was born and I’m not sure he tried to cross anything except a significant part of Russia (unsuccessfully). My suspicion: Ford may have been thinking, in the associative fashion we’ve become used to in the age of Trump, of Julius Caesar’s famed crossing of the Rubicon almost 2,000 years earlier. But really, who knows or cares in a world in which “bunk” has become the definition of history -- a world in which Donald Trump, in news conference after news conference, is the only person worth a tinker’s dam (or damn)?
In fact, call Ford a prophet (as well as a profiteer) because so many years after he died in 1947 -- I was three then, but you already knew I was mighty old, right? -- we find ourselves in a moment that couldn’t be bunkier. We now have a president who undoubtedly doesn’t know Nero -- the infamous fiddling Roman emperor (although he was probably playing a cithara) -- from Spiro -- that’s Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's vice president who lived god knows how long ago. In fact, Agnew was the crook who fell even before his president was shown the door. But why linger on ancient history? After all, even yesterday’s history is water through the gate, if not under the bridge, and in these glory days of Donald Trump, who cares? Not him, that’s for sure.
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5a535057b6237134e6b0ec503bd04d35 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175061 | How Americans Have Voted Through History: From Voices to Screens | How Americans Have Voted Through History: From Voices to Screens
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Voice Voting
For the first 50 years of American elections, most voting wasn’t done in private and voters didn’t even make their choice on a paper ballot. Instead, those with the right to vote (only white men at the time) went to the local courthouse and publicly cast their vote out loud.
Known as “viva voce” or voice voting, this conspicuous form of public voting was the law in most states through the early 19th century and Kentucky kept it up as late as 1891. As voters arrived at the courthouse, a judge would have them swear on a Bible that they were who they said they were and that they hadn’t already voted. Once sworn in, the voter would call out his name to the clerk and announce his chosen candidates in each race.
Campaigning and carousing were allowed at the polling place, and a drunken carnival atmosphere often accompanied early American elections, which might explain why elections in the voice-voting era commanded turnout rates as high as 85 percent.
The First Paper Ballots
The first paper ballots began appearing in the early 19th century, but they weren’t standardized or even printed by government elections officials. In the beginning, paper ballots were nothing more than scraps of paper upon which the voter scrawled his candidates' names and dropped into the ballot box. Newspapers began to print out blank ballots with the titles of each office up for vote which readers could tear out and fill in with their chosen candidates.
Then the political parties got savvy. By the mid-19th century, state Republican or Democratic party officials would distribute pre-printed fliers to voters listing only their party’s candidates for office. They were called Republican and Democratic “tickets” because the small rectangles of paper resembled 19th-century train tickets. Party faithful could legally use the pre-printed ticket as their actual ballot making it easier than ever to vote straight down the party line.
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3f047b7e1faa888d0633570bbc70bb67 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175091 | Trump Talks Like President Roosevelt But Acts Like President Hoover | Trump Talks Like President Roosevelt But Acts Like President Hoover
When the Great Depression threatened the well-being of millions of Americans, President Franklin D. Roosevelt acted swiftly. In his administration’s first “hundred days” new initiatives restored public confidence and set the nation on a road to recovery. In contrast, President Donald Trump has reacted slowly and inadequately to the mounting threat from COVID-19. Trump invoked language that resembled Roosevelt’s, saying he would deal with the pandemic as a “wartime president.” President Trump claimed bold leadership in a “medical war,” but he has not backed words with strong action. Like Herbert Hoover, the troubled president who preceded Roosevelt, Trump has been reluctant to exercise federal power in a crisis.
At first glance the two situations seem distinct. Roosevelt faced a huge economic challenge, and Trump is dealing with a threat to public health. Yet both crises involve economics. If Trump does not respond effectively to COVID-19, business shutdowns may produce a depression. Economists worry that U.S. unemployment could reach 30% or more later this year if the epidemic’s growth is not checked soon.
During the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover supported some initiatives by the federal government, but he opposed extensive federal intervention. Hoover favored voluntarism and individual efforts. When markets crashed, he asked corporate leaders to maintain production and employment. Later, Hoover supported incremental measures, but those programs failed to arrest the deepening crisis. Hoover’s reputation was in tatters in the last days of his administration.
When FDR took the oath of office on March 4, 1933, unemployment approached 25% and the financial system of the United States was near collapse. Roosevelt’s inaugural address excited hope with a message that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Roosevelt explained how he intended to combat the depression. He asked Congress for “broad executive power to wage war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” During the next hundred days, the New Deal initiated thirteen major legislative programs.
Roosevelt and the Congress rescued troubled banks, provided jobs for millions of unemployed Americans, raised depressed farm prices, and created the TVA, which stimulated the southern economy. Broad-based recovery took years, but the New Deal’s actions quickly lifted public confidence. Days after Roosevelt’s inauguration, citizens that had hoarded cash returned money to the banks. The stock market surged with its largest one-day increase in history. In the 1936 presidential election, voters gave Roosevelt a second presidential term by a 523-8 electoral count.
Mimicking Roosevelt's language, Trump announced he was commanding of a “big war” against the coronavirus. Trump congratulated his administration for mobilizing resources. In televised news conferences he described enormous progress securing test kits, masks and gowns for health care workers. When journalists cited reports about huge shortages, Trump offered vague or dismissive responses.
Like Herbert Hoover, Trump has been relying considerably on voluntary efforts. He praised the CEOs of major corporations for promising aid in the emergency. Trump prefers a free market approach. He opposes strong federal intervention in business affairs, including efforts to invoke the Defense Production Act so that Washington can direct manufacturers to produce test kits, clothing for doctors and nurses, and ventilators for patients.
Critics disagree. They point out that temporary federal coordination does not represent an assault on free enterprise. It is an emergency measure. State governments are presently competing against each other in desperate efforts to obtain supplies. If officials in Washington provide direction, they can prevent price-gouging and facilitate the purchase of vital equipment.
Ever since the covid-19 threat became evident, President Trump has been hesitant about dealing forcefully with the dangers. Rather than create a robust central command in Washington to coordinate the medical response, Trump has practiced a version of laissez-faire. He left action in the crisis largely to state governments, and local hospitals. Then, in the manner of Herbert Hoover, Trump slowly changed course. After infections and deaths soared, he agreed to put new federal measures in place, including recommendations that most citizens stay at home. Nevertheless, Trump refused to use his presidential authority broadly to get ahead of a crisis, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did.
President Trump received numerous alerts about the pandemic, but he was slow to react. U.S. intelligence agents warned in January and February 2020 that the coronavirus could devastate American society. Trump and members of his administration saw their reports. Senior officials urged President Trump to act immediately, but as one of them noted, “they just couldn’t get [the president] to do anything about it.” In February Trump played down the seriousness of the threat. On February 10 he predicted the virus would disappear in the April heat, and on February 24 he claimed the problem was “very much under control in the USA.”
The threat that worried intelligence officials became abundantly evident by mid-March, and still the president hesitated. Doctors and nurses complained about huge shortages of protective gear. Trump referred the matter to state governors, saying, “we’re not a shipping clerk.” In the manner of Herbert Hoover, he resisted calls for aggressive leadership from Washington.
Absent direction from the White House, the medical response lacked organization and guidance. There were huge differences in the way states, communities and businesses dealt with the pandemic. In March health officials warned emphatically that cruise travel was dangerous, yet ships filled with thousands of passengers, including many vulnerable senior citizens, were still at sea. San Francisco, New York, and other cities locked down while thousands of young people celebrated Spring Break on Florida’s beaches.
Lack of central direction also undermined work by medical researchers and drug companies to develop effective treatments for covid-19, including a vaccine. The Washington Post reported on April 15 that the “massive effort is disorganized and scattershot,” damaging prospects for success. Because there was no centralized national strategy, research efforts often overlapped. Investigators were not clear about how to collect or share data. “It’s a cacophony – it’s not an orchestra,” complained Dr. Derek Angus of the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine. “There is no conductor.” Biomedical research is paramount for combating the pandemic and rescuing the economy. Yet Washington has not appointed a principal coordinator in the manner that J. Robert Oppenheimer directed research on atomic weaponry in World War II.
When scientists, including Albert Einstein, warned Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 that German researchers might be developing nuclear weapons, the president acted. He told the individual who presented the information, “what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” An advisory committee quickly brought together top scientists to begin planning. After the United States entered the war in December 1941, President Roosevelt found enough money to shift the program into high gear. With $2 billion and 120,000 workers, the secret Manhattan Project made an extraordinary technological breakthrough. J. Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant theoretical physicist, headed the weapons laboratory that succeeded in the producing atomic bombs.
Research on the coronavirus needs a program that resembles the Manhattan Project. Medical scientists in the U.S. and abroad can benefit from a well-funded and well-managed program that is coordinated by a talented professional like Oppenheimer. Unfortunately, like so many current efforts to deal with the crisis, work has been fragmented. As Dr. Angus noted, it is difficult to make fine music when there is no conductor.
In one notable respect, however, President Trump has attempted to command from Washington. When governors from several East coast and West coast states announced plans to coordinate decision-making about reopening their economies, Trump objected. He declared, “When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total.” Scholars, business leaders, and members of Congress challenged that interpretation. They pointed out that separation of powers in the federal system allows governors responsibility in these matters. Some critics pointed to a glaring contradiction in Trump’s position. For months, the president had insisted that businesses, hospitals, and local officials were primarily responsible for dealing with the pandemic. But when governors tried to protect citizens from the White House’s attempts to end social distancing before broad-based testing was in place, Trump wanted to assert executive power.
The contrast is striking between President Trump’s clumsy, haphazard and hesitant response to the health crisis and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s all-hands-on-deck approach to the Great Depression. FDR’s New Deal cooperated with state and local governments when administering programs, but leadership and planning came largely from Washington. President Roosevelt understood that the federal government needed to assume primary responsibility for directing responses in a time of extraordinary difficulties. FDR did not simply talk about waging “war against the emergency.” He mobilized the nation for combat.
Programs initiated in Washington during FDR’s first hundred days did not solve all problems of the Great Depression. Nor can immediate and well-planned mobilization by the current administration stop covid-19 in its tracks. But Roosevelt’s example of broad-based action shows that strong presidential leadership can improve conditions quickly and lift the spirits of an anxious people. Presently, Americans need a true “wartime president.”
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c0f7bac91c3d9cfc8c8514f890cf084e | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175102 | We’re Living in Phyllis Schlafly’s America | We’re Living in Phyllis Schlafly’s America
If, as per Baudelaire, the greatest trick the devil played was convincing the world that he didn’t exist, the irony of Phyllis Schlafly’s legacy is that she undermined women so efficiently that her pernicious influence on American politics hasn’t gotten the credit it deserves. During the 1970s, Schlafly was camera-ready pith in pearls and a pie-frill collar, a troll long before the term existed, who’d begin public speeches by thanking her husband for letting her attend, because she knew how much it riled her feminist detractors. Armed only with a newsletter and a seeming immunity to shame, Schlafly took a popular bipartisan piece of legislation—the Equal Rights Amendment, which affirms men and women as equal citizens under the law—and whipped it up into a culture war as deftly as if she were making dessert.
For all her efforts, she actually won very little—she was too toxic for a plum Cabinet post, and too early for a prime-time cable-news show. After her heyday, only glimmers of Schlafly lingered in mainstream culture. The character of Serena Joy in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, who once worked full-time lecturing women on the sanctity of staying home, was partly inspired by her. By the time a hagiographic biography of Schlafly was published in 2005, reviewers deduced that although her impact on the ugliness of American politics had been profound, her manipulation of grassroots resentment (not to mention her isolationism and hostility toward immigrants) had rendered her fogyish and obsolete in the George W. Bush era.
The other great irony of Schlafly is that she died in September 2016, two months before Donald Trump, a leader anointed in her image, beat the first female candidate for president of the United States. Like it or loathe it, the new Hulu series Mrs. America makes clear, we are living in a moment that Schlafly begot. From dirty tricks to media manipulation, brazen lies about crowd sizes to the weaponization of privilege, her ghost is everywhere, and it may never be banished.
Mrs. America is maybe the first great television series of 2020, a project that manages to capture the complicated essence of real characters while telling a story at both micro and macro levels. Perhaps predictably, the show divided people before it debuted: One of Schlafly’s daughters disavowed its portrayal of her mother, while some critics argued that it was too flattering a portrait. On its face, the nine-part show from Dahvi Waller (Mad Men) is about the years-long fight over the passage of the ERA, a window into second-wave feminism that sweeps activists such as Gloria Steinem (played by Rose Byrne), Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman), Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), and Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale) into Schlafly’s orbit. Most characters are based on real women, although some are composites or fictional creations. But it’s Schlafly, played as an elegant coil of wound ambition by Cate Blanchett, who turns Mrs. America from a starry historical miniseries into a stunning explainer on the poisoning of national politics. “The person that everybody’s paying attention to always wins,” Schlafly explains in one scene, as neat a distillation of the Trump era as might be imaginable.
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3c02ffd2f3a94d9cd68b306f942e9941 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175107 | What the Anti-Stay-At-Home Protests Are Really About | What the Anti-Stay-At-Home Protests Are Really About
Anti-social distancing and anti-stay-at-home order rallies are cropping up across the country, reminiscent of the early days of the Tea Party, when well-funded right-leaning groups lit a fire under an already outraged Republican base and helped ignite a political movement.
In fact, Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a right-leaning advocacy group that helped support the Tea Party movement back in 2009, said in an interview that “this has the same DNA [as] the Tea Party movement.”
The events — some, like in Michigan, featuring thousands of attendees — are organized largely by conservative groups calling state-based measures too draconian. Some of the groups have posted links and images on Facebook that downplay the seriousness of the virus. And other leaders have advocated against following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, like a ban on big gatherings and the recommendation to wearing face masks in certain public settings (because wearing them would be “counterproductive”). Some of the protests have taken on the feel of 2016 Trump campaign rallies, with participants wearing Make America Great Again hats and waving flags emblazoned with the president’s face.
And Fox News is helping to get the word out about the protests, even promoting the protests on air. President Donald Trump spent part of Friday tweeting about them, just minutes after a protest segment aired on Fox News’s America’s Newsroom.
The displays are tapping into Trump’s main message on the coronavirus pandemic: Governors are to blame for the crisis, not him. As the president ratchets up his reelection efforts, his argument is an effort to simultaneously put the brunt of responsibility for the coronavirus catastrophe on the shoulders of his political opponents while maintaining that he holds “total authority” over the pandemic and the states facing it.
It’s an argument that resonates best in rural, redder parts of the country, which have not yet been hit as hard by the pandemic as blue, urban areas. Trump himself has said, “We’ll be opening some states much sooner than others,” despite pushback from legislators and business leaders alike about the current lack of mass testing.
And it’s a message of division, designed to pit Republican-voting areas of states against their Democratic-voting neighbors, even rural Republicans against urban Republicans. All this is to activate white rural voters who supported Trump in 2016 and who he’ll need again in 2020.
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d865b830469f3653c5c90a80253004a3 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175133 | How the Coronavirus Might Upend the November Election | How the Coronavirus Might Upend the November Election
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Sean Illing
You called the GOP’s 2010 gerrymandering plan “the most audacious political heist of modern times.” Did the Democrats ever really recover from it?
David Daley
No. The GOP’s gerrymandering plan (called REDMAP) has shaped our politics for the last decade.
There are 59 million Americans right now that live in a state in which one or both chambers of the state legislature are controlled by the party that won fewer votes in 2018. Fifty-nine million of those people live in a state where Democrats won more votes and Republicans won more seats.
That’s the end result of this redistricting cycle, and these maps have held that strong in all of these state legislatures. So there’s no question that Democrats haven’t recovered from this, and it’s hard to appreciate how much this distorted our politics.
Sean Illing
There’s a ton to say about this, but I want to pivot to what’s happening right now. We’re having this conversation just days after the Supreme Court handed a major defeat to Democrats in Wisconsin who tried to make it easier for people to vote during the coronavirus pandemic. The Republican gambit failed in the end, but is this a sign of what’s to come in November?
David Daley
Wisconsin was a dress rehearsal for what we’re going to see in November. I think it’s entirely likely that in many states, in many cities, it’s going to be absolutely impossible to conduct the kind of traditional in-person voting that this country has gotten used to. We’re going to need to expand the vote-by-mail options for more people.
What happened in Wisconsin is that 1.2 million people applied for absentee ballots. It overwhelmed these underfunded election boards in the state, and they weren’t able to handle it effectively.
The post office this week still had ballots in envelopes stacked up in many places across Wisconsin. And what you saw was that the governor, a Democratic governor in this case, stepped up and said, rightly, that it’s not safe to ask people to vote [in person] in the middle of this [coronavirus] crisis. And Republicans forced the matter into the courts.
Can you imagine a similar situation in November? I can, and it’s horrifying. This is how a public health crisis turns into a constitutional crisis.
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ca3d6b5309bfe3ca01b8bd3e1b223999 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175139 | Did Gender Keep Democratic Women From Winning The Presidential Primary? | Did Gender Keep Democratic Women From Winning The Presidential Primary?
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The "hostile sexism" factor
Here's one more thing we know: that higher levels of sexism were associated with a greater likelihood of supporting Biden and Sanders, as well as a lower likelihood of supporting Warren.
Political scientist Brian Schaffner attempted to measure sexism by having pollsters ask Democrats if they agreed with phrases including "women are too easily offended" and "most women fail to appreciate fully all that men do for them." In a separate interview, pollsters asked those same people whom they preferred in the primary.
"There is a very strong relationship between how people responded to the questions that are meant to measure sexism and whether they were likely to vote for Elizabeth Warren," Schaffner said. "And it was the least-sexist Democratic voters who supported her the most. But her support dropped off very quickly among those who registered higher levels of sexism."
Schaffner found something similar in the 2016 general election – that there was an association between sexism, as he defined it, as well as racism – and voting for Trump. But he says that these associations mean something different in a Democratic primary.
"In a primary election, you take party out of the equation," he said. "You have a bunch of candidates who have very similar positions who are running against each other. And people tend to rely on what they can, that differentiates these candidates who otherwise look fairly similar to them. And gender is definitely one of those things."
Furthermore, while Schaffner found this correlation – and, to be clear, attempted to control for a range of factors, like ideology – his study doesn't mean that a bunch of voters walked into the voting booth with straightforwardly sexist ideas driving their votes. He recognizes that the relationship is subtler.
"I think a lot of this plays at a subconscious level for voters," he said. "They may not be really aware that the things that they think grate on them about Warren are actually things that wouldn't bother them if it was a man doing the same things."
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3e5cc5647a876791fd05f1f97ced4fdb | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175152 | Republican-Led Senate Panel Confirms That Russia Backed Trump in 2016 | Republican-Led Senate Panel Confirms That Russia Backed Trump in 2016
In January 2017, after Donald Trump eked out his electoral college victory but before he took office, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report outlining what the CIA, NSA, and FBI knew—and could say publicly—about Russian attacks on the 2016 election. The report concluded that the Russian government orchestrated the assault at the direction of Vladimir Putin and that one Moscow aim was to bolster Trump’s campaign.
Trump has consistently denied or discounted the findings in the years since as a “deep state” plot to undermine him. But a new report released Tuesday from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee gave the report an overall blue ribbon seal of approval. The committee, after years of investigations, interviews with relevant officials, and an exhaustive review of the intelligence that underpinned the report’s conclusions found that it was professionally produced free of political pressure and that its assessments were an accurate representation of what the government knew.
“The Committee found the [report] presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” according to the Senate investigators. “The Committee concludes that all [redacted] analytic lines are supported with all-source intelligence, although with varying substantiation. The Committee did not discover any significant analytic tradecraft issues in the preparation or final presentation.”
The committee’s findings refute Trump, specifically affirming the conclusion that Putin “approved and directed aspects” of the Russian attacks on the election, that the Russian operation was designed to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances in the election, and “that Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump.”
The report is the fourth volume generated by the Senate committee’s investigation of the Russian attacks on the 2016 elections. Previous reports have documented Russian attacks on US election infrastructure, Russian use of social media, and the US government’s response to Russian activities. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
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53042bf7fe273e4d8bad11f07a14717e | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175184 | Tiger King: Lurid Netflix Smash Can Illuminate Southern Queer Cultures (If You Look Closer) | Tiger King: Lurid Netflix Smash Can Illuminate Southern Queer Cultures (If You Look Closer)
Cats of Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park, 2013. Photo Fight4animalrights. CC BY-SA 3.0
Joe Exotic, Santa Rose (FL) County Jail, 2018, Public Domain
With nifty alliteration, hit docuseries Tiger King delivers on its promise of murder, mayhem and madness. With triple entendre, The Guardian suggests hunting, meth and big cats set Joe apart from the “anodyne” metrosexual throwbacks of Will & Grace. Doubtless, something should be learned from an out-and-proud male trouple [a romantic triad--ed.] in Oklahoma. However, my quarter-century of scholarship in Southern LGBT history suggests the analytic triads most germane to the topic might be poverty, disability, and discrimination, as they intersect with race, religion, and rural space. Less sexy, to be sure. But potentially more enlightening. Watch again, as Netflix urges, and you’ll figure out the unique challenges of queer life in the countryside.
With staggering reach—dubbed into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish (both Castilian and “Latin American”), Turkish, and more—Joe Exotic regularly appears among the top five Wikipedia searches. So, can Tiger King complicate traditional notions of queerness in the Bible Belt? Maybe. But armed gays should come as no surprise in the context of American gun culture, stoked by weapons manufacturers and the NRA. Around the world LGBTI people face greatly increased risks of bullying, intimidation, assault and murder, necessitating self-defence. Down South and out West, gun ownership is a widely accepted method, if a highly flawed one, as demonstrated in the series’ harrowing fifth instalment.
Below the Mason-Dixon line, is Joe’s loud-and-proud bravado unusual? Without question. Whereas Joe financially can afford to fly the rainbow flag, most LGBTI Southerners are more discreet for fear of job discrimination: loss of livelihood, if not loss of life. They pursue the path of quiet accommodation, as John Marszalek’s bold new study confirms. So-called right-to-work laws in the South are in fact union-busting, right-to-fire-without-cause laws. By no means a model employer, Joe exploits this dynamic, recruiting desperate ex-cons and a trans veteran of color to his deadly dangerous workplace.
Over seven episodes, how many on-the-job accidents can you count? By contrast, how often do we hear the phrase “workers compensation”? Why don’t we learn more about double amputee John’s elliptical zip-line accident? Why is war vet Saff encouraged to self-blame after another horrific mishap at work? Why at series’s end does he still lack a prosthesis? National healthcare, anyone? Occupational safety?
Into his polyamorous home life, Joe invites young men who have sex with men (MSM) but do not identify as gay. The series gives us rare glimpses into the lives of two such men—who unfortunately are caricatured as toothless tattooed John (Baby Doll meets Deliverance) and wayward pothead Travis (Midnight Cowboy meets Ridgemont High). Instead, their difficult decision-making processes should be understood in light of pernicious Southern poverty rates, which reach unconscionable levels in rural Oklahoma. Suffice to say, when an aspiring Presidential-cum-gubernatorial candidate is both your husband and your boss, things get complicated.
Precisely because antigay job bias is rampant—in hiring, training, promoting, and firing—down-low (DL) cultures are widespread in the South. Queer activists identified the problem long ago, with giant Southern chains like Cracker Barrel flip-flopping on commitments to end discrimination over the years. Principled civil rights leaders like Rep. John Lewis of Georgia have recognized the issue since at least the mid-seventies. But in a grim annual ritual, Congress repeatedly rejects ENDA—the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, even though a majority of Americans support it, as do a slight majority of Southerners. (Of greater significance to producers is the Big Cat Safety Act, which—the final titles note—“has not passed.”)
Until 2003, consensual homosexual relations were criminalized across the South, giving legal sanction to other forms of anti-LGBTI discrimination, from which we’ve yet to recover. Bias persists in public accommodations and particularly housing, for both young and old. Really, who would choose to live in one of Joe’s trailers? Given his iniquitous pay scale, wouldn’t you too rummage through expired packaged meats?
Since working-class queer Southerners like Joe’s team seem trapped—with long shifts, few options, and limited mobility—solutions might be found not in a major metropolis, but rather just up the road. As Michael Bibler shows in his insightful analysis of podcast S-Town, small Southern towns can be “deceptively portray[ed] as excessively rural and remote[,] perpetuating a longstanding stereotype of the whole South as generally disconnected from the modern world, culturally and geographically.” Just as Woodstock, Alabama, is within quick reach of thriving queer communities in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, so too is Wynnewood an easy drive from Norman and Oklahoma City, which hosts LGBT 12-step meetings three times a day.
If Joe Exotic has overtaken John B. McLemore as “the most recognized queer person from the South in our time,” let’s look beyond his dubious example to better forms of queer kinship and affiliation. Where Southern queer cultures remain gay-male dominated, useful historical antecedents can be found among the lesbian literary cultures, bookstore habitués, and political figures so well assessed by Jaime Harker in The Lesbian South. Where Southern LGBTI communities remain white dominated, the strategies of resourceful African American forerunners can be compared across E. Patrick Johnson’s powerful volumes Sweet Tea andHoneypot. When queer histories get stuck in big cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston, broader terrain can be explored in Colin R. Johnson’s brilliant Just Queer Folks. When lengthy series such as S-Town and Tiger King somehow fail to grasp the continuing importance of Protestant Christianity in the lives of most LGBTI Southerners, the worship rituals and queer customs of The Joneses might be consulted.
Given capitalist fast economies from fashion to streaming, much cultural energy currently is expended upon casting a potential adaptation: Rob Lowe as Joe? Matthew McConaughey as zoo manager John? Billy Bob Thornton as reality director Rick? Instead, I would urge producers to reflect carefully upon Joe Exotic’s destructive legacy and to envision future changes they could facilitate.
Mindful of the hardships Joe’s employees endured, any new series should seek to forge alliances with union locals and churches, disability campaigners and trans activists, communities of color and economic empowerment initiatives, especially among Chickasaws and Choctaws. Not only should national associations such as GLAAD and PETA be consulted, but also regional LGBTI organizers in south Oklahoma and north Texas, along with Joe’s current husband Dillon.
As for us languid lockdown spectators of these latest Southern grotesques, we might best join forces with any of these agencies to become better-informed advocates for economic justice across the queer South and beyond.
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7b0f1a0e91b50a81cae70011d8078669 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175205 | There’s a Question My Confederate Ancestors Taught Me To Ask | There’s a Question My Confederate Ancestors Taught Me To Ask
Many readers may not know this, but today is a significant day in Civil War history. On April 26, 1865—17 days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox—Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee at Greensboro, North Carolina. The last major Confederate combatant command stacked its arms.
I think of this day not merely because of its national historical significance but also because of its personal family importance. My ancestors fought for the Army of Tennessee. In fact, my ancestors marched across the very ground where my house sits and fought for their lives in the very town—Franklin, Tennessee—where I now live. Other ancestors fought for the Army of Mississippi. I’ve walked their battlefields at Shiloh and Vicksburg.
And I must confess, the older I get, the more I’m haunted by their legacy.
I don’t mean that in a guilty way, as if I’m somehow responsible for the actions of men who took up arms for an unjust cause more than a century before I was born. Instead, I mean that I’ve often asked myself, “What would I have done?”
Slavery was a monstrous evil. Yet generations of Americans grew up in communities that accepted it, defended it, and even celebrated it. How many abolitionist arguments did a child of the antebellum South ever hear? If they heard abolitionist arguments, did they hear them portrayed fairly, accurately, and sympathetically?
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005cd8c3618abcf50ddd32a22f38a9e9 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175250 | National Park Service Awards More than $3.1 Million in Grants to Preserve and Interpret World War II Japanese American Confinement Sites | National Park Service Awards More than $3.1 Million in Grants to Preserve and Interpret World War II Japanese American Confinement Sites
WASHINGTON – The National Park Service is pleased to announce more than $3.1 million in Japanese American Confinement Sites grants that will fund preservation, restoration and education projects throughout the country. The 22 projects funded will help tell the stories of the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor by the nation of Japan in 1941.
“These grants help to preserve an important piece of our nation’s history, educating generations of visitors about the injustice of the World War II confinement of Japanese Americans,” said U.S. Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt.
“The National Park Service is dedicated to the preservation and protection of natural, cultural, and historical resources across the United States,” said David Vela, National Park Service Deputy Director. “Through these projects, we have the honor of educating our visitors about the strength and perseverance of the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.”
“The Historical Museum at Fort Missoula does an incredible job of telling the story of our nation and Montana’s history,” said Montana Senator Steve Daines. “I’m glad to have supported this project and look forward to seeing it complete.”
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c9b7963b8321ac23e87cfa5cfdc70257 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175319 | The ‘Public’ in Public College Could Be Endangered | The ‘Public’ in Public College Could Be Endangered
Public colleges and universities are in trouble. Campuses may not reopen this fall, potentially gutting tuition and dormitory revenues. Endowments have been hit by the falling stock market, and alumni donations may dry up. Institutions without a financial cushion will struggle to survive.
Looming ahead is an even bigger problem, one that will last for years after the pandemic itself is over. The severe economic contraction is pummeling state tax revenues. Moody’s Analytics projects a 20 percent decline in state receipts next fiscal year.
If historical patterns repeat, public college and university budgets will be slashed, sending tuition and student loan debt skyward. Some institutions will be so starved of funding that they will effectively cease to be “public” at all. Others will have a greatly diminished ability to help students learn.
Many colleges never fully recovered from the Great Recession. In 2008, commitment to higher learning already varied widely among the states, with spending per student ranging from less than $7,000 in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Colorado to over $10,000 in North Carolina, Massachusetts and New York.
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c0502a7427122ba8bc7e076b94d30a07 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175358 | How Martin Luther King Jr.'s Groundless Traffic Ticket Changed History's Course | How Martin Luther King Jr.'s Groundless Traffic Ticket Changed History's Course
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The AP reported on Oct. 25, 1960, that over 300 people crowded into the Decatur courtroom to watch Judge J. Oscar Mitchell sentence King to four months, even though King’s Alabama license was valid until 1962.
“I watched in horror as Martin was immediately taken from the courtroom, his hands in metal cuffs behind his back,” Mrs. King recalled in her autobiography. “Martin later told me that the terrors of southern justice, wherein scores of black men were plucked from their cells and never seen again, ran through his mind.”
King urged his wife to be strong in a letter from a Georgia prison. Three years before “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he wrote: “this is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people.”
With days left in the race, the campaigns of Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy sought to downplay civil rights issues for fear of losing southern white votes.
African Americans had mostly voted Republican, since Abraham Lincoln. Nixon had just been endorsed by Martin Luther King Sr., the leader of Ebenezer Baptist Church. But Nixon ignored their pleas for help, while Kennedy called Mrs. King to express his sympathy.
Historians Taylor Branch and David Garrow wrote that Robert F. Kennedy threw a fit, telling aides who fed Mrs. King’s number to his brother that they cost him the presidency. But Robert Kennedy called Mitchell, who reversed his denial of bond, immediately freeing King.
King’s father switched his endorsement, saying Kennedy had “the moral courage to stand up for what’s right.” That quote, and others, appeared in a blue-papered pamphlet titled “No Comment Nixon Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy.” Unnoticed by the national media, Kennedy aides and King supporters distributed the pamphlet in black churches around the nation the Sunday before Election Day.
Black people had voted 60-40 Republican just four years earlier; this time they voted 70-30 for the Democrat, providing more than enough for Kennedy to win the electoral college and the popular vote by a narrow 113,000 margin nationwide, according to Theodore H. White in “The Making of the Presidency 1960.”
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8343e8a074b20b5f05adef5176504e6e | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175389 | “The Last Dance” is the ‘Presidential Historian’ of Documentaries | “The Last Dance” is the ‘Presidential Historian’ of Documentaries
"The Spirit" statue of Michael Jordan outside the United Center Arena, Chicago, in front of the remaining
portions of the demolished Chicago Stadium, 1995. Photo Danielmustain, CC BY-SA 4.0
There’s a scene in episode 1 of “The Last Dance” that reveals far more than it initially appears.
Near the end of the episode, a veteran Michael Jordan is among the most famous people in the world. Before a game in 1997, a wide-eyed reporter approaches him in the hallway for a short interview, to which Jordan acquiesces. The camera trails the reporter after his quick brush with fame. He is gushing, his face flustered, his eyes in disbelief that he shook Jordan’s hand. ‘Wow,’ his face seems to say. ‘I can’t believe I just interviewed Michael Jordan.’
The sentiment sums up “The Last Dance” rather neatly. The 10-episode film is the “Presidential Historian” of documentaries. A film that purports to reveal an ‘untold story’ is, in truth, a recitation of familiar plot points, packaged in tropes of presidential hagiography: palace intrigue, proximity to power, paying homage to greatness, and, in the end, being thankful for the existence of dominant alpha-males (and it is always males), whose superior character and talent lifts a population.
For the non-sports fans among us, “The Last Dance” is ESPN’s new documentary on Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls. Divided into ten episodes, it has debuted during the covid-19 pandemic.
The structure of “The Last Dance” unfolds like a Presidential biography. It opens with a carefully-framed, back-shot of Jordan in his palatial home, evoking a President in the Oval Office: silhouetted, pensive, the weight of the world on his shoulders.
We hear Jordan confirm the fulfilment of his own prophecy, an oration fit for a Commander-in-Chief. “If you remember in 1984 when they drafted Michael Jordan,” Jordan says of himself, “I said then when I got here that we’d be champions… Well, we’re a five-time champion going for six.”
From there the film cascades into a wave of nostalgia, narrated by an all-male cast of sports aficionados: columnist Michael Wilbon, reporter J.A. Adande, broadcaster Bob Costas, reporter David Aldridge, sportswriter Rick Telander, and author Mark Vancil. We get confirmation of the Bulls’ celebrity status through their appearances on Oprah, Arsenio Hall, and the David Letterman show. Wilbon states that Jordan was the ultimate sports “alpha-male,” and we see female fans and small children shrieking each time Jordan is near, ooh-ing and aah-ing like John F. Kennedy fans during the 1960 Presidential campaign.
President Barack Obama even makes an appearance. Obama offers no insight into Jordan’s career; rather his presence is meant to impress us with how powerful a cast the film’s director, Jason Hehir, was able to assemble. Obama states that while living in Chicago he could not afford a ticket to Bulls’ games but that Jordan was someone everyone could “rally around.” President Bill Clinton makes a similar appearance in episode two, revealing equally little about Bulls forward Scottie Pippen, Jordan’s sidekick, who, like Clinton, happened to be from Arkansas—though Pippen grew up in poverty and attended Central Arkansas and Clinton went to Catholic school and attended Georgetown, Oxford and Yale.
We’re reminded throughout the series that Jordan, like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, was a man of exceptional character as well as talent. He worked harder than anyone else. He didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. He gambled, but always within his means. He kept his apartment neat. He wrote letters to his mother. Had he chopped down a cherry tree, he would have surely confessed to it. His destiny as savior of Chicago and the NBA was foretold by his work ethic—and not that he was fortunate enough to grow eight inches in high school. The genetic good fortune to be 6’6” enabled Jordan to earn a spot on the high school basketball team after he was cut the previous year for being only 5’10.” Had he never grown he may have worked at General Electric with his father.
The major plot points revolve around millionaires feeling disrespected. One millionaire, Scottie Pippen was upset that he was underpaid. Jordan, another millionaire, was upset that the general manager wanted to rebuild the team. Dennis Rodman, the eccentric millionaire, was at war with his own insecurities. The millionaire general manager felt slighted because he did not get enough credit. The palace intrigue feels lifted from any number of popular histories of presidents-in-crisis: aggrieved Senators angered at being disrespected by the President, disputes among rival Cabinet Secretaries, battered egos and personal grudges among Senior Advisors. All the while the media and the public circled outside, eager to participate in the unfolding drama. It’s essentially how broadcast media has covered the Trump Presidency.
What makes the film possible is the fact that a camera crew followed the Bulls during the 1997-1998 season. Why they did so is never explained. Who made that decision? For what purpose? The source of the footage is never discussed. Yet this documentary could not exist without it, evidence of how the stories we tell today are dictated by preservation choices made in the past.
Also never discussed are the social and economic implications of major corporate entities run by white Americans exploiting the talent of young black athletes to spawn a global empire worth billions of dollars. The consequences of the NBA’s and Jordan’s ascendancy to worldwide influence are always assumed to be positive. Are they? Was the Jordan-led NBA complicit in ushering in the mass corporatization of sports? What were the consequences of poor children around the world enriching Nike each year by buying $200 sneakers? The documentary goes nowhere near these questions, choosing to stay within the comforts of palace intrigue and platitudinous dichotomies between “the business side of sports” and the “integrity of the game.”
On the matter of sources, for a global superstar in a city as diverse as Chicago, it is overwhelmingly men of a certain vintage that are invited to reflect on Jordan and the Bulls. There are no women interviewed in the first two episodes, with sportscasters Andrea Kremer and Hannah Storm making cameos in episodes 3 and 4. Carmen Electra is interviewed briefly as Dennis Rodman’s sex partner and claims to be oblivious to the larger dynamics. No one who is Hispanic-American nor Asian-Asian is shown on camera, nor is anyone from other countries or other major sports. Much like our Presidential cabinets of yore, this is an all-boys-club of media and basketball insiders making the case to each other how consequential their actions were in bending history. Arthur Schlesinger himself could not have scripted it any better.
Presidential historians earn their prestige through access: access to Presidents, access to sources, access to power. To be able to eloquently chronicle the inner workings of the highest levels of government affords the writer his gravitas. Such is the case with this film: like the reporter in the hallway, the director clearly enjoys his access to sports royalty and the privileges associated with it. The unspoken pact is that powerful figures will grant access in exchange for the right to tell their version of events. Critical analysis is not part of the bargain.
Perhaps “The Last Dance” is harmless since it is ‘just’ about sports. Yet the structure of the film reinforces a way of seeing and thinking about leadership that is distorting and limiting. The hype surrounding the film evinces how such “great man” theories of history (and it is always a man) still retain much potency in American culture. Embedded within these tomes are parables about male leadership, American fortitude, gumption, and grit. Rivalries and bruised egos make for entertaining plot points along the way. The conclusion is always the same, however, as it is in “The Last Dance”: Thank goodness we have alpha-males. Come, let us celebrate them.
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19fc19d594560ad2a343223e8f219303 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175416 | An Unlikely Bohemia: Athens, Georgia, in Reagan's America | An Unlikely Bohemia: Athens, Georgia, in Reagan's America
In Athens, Georgia, in the 1980s, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Magic sparkled like sweat on the skin of dancers at a party or a club. Promise winked underfoot like the bits of broken glass embedded in the downtown sidewalks. A new world seemed to be emerging out of our creativity, our music and art, and our politics, but also the way we understood ourselves and related to each other.
In my memory, the weight of the air on summer nights made possibility seem like a substance I could hold in my hand. Always, local bands played and people listened—at practice spaces and house parties and venues like the 40 Watt. People went to hear their roommate or boyfriend or coworker play one night and urged everyone to come and see their group the next. Easy to make and easy to hear, live music was everywhere. We used it to reinvent and express ourselves and connect with each other. We used it to live.
After the clubs let out, the scene kept moving until dawn. Small groups climbed the fences at apartment complexes—no one would admit to living in one—and went skinny-dipping. Sometimes people walked to a big Victorian house on Hill Street and danced to mixtapes in the hall between the rolled-back pocket doors until their clothes dripped with sweat and their heads spun. Occasionally, at midnight, a small drama troupe would perform an original play up and down the aisles of the twenty-four-hour Kroger. Film buffs too young to see movies like Sleeper, Raging Bull, and Paper Moon when they came out watched them for free in the air-conditioned quiet of the seventh floor of the University of Georgia's library. Often, people paired up, going home with the person they were seeing or an acquaintance or someone they had just met. One perfect July night, I lay naked with a friend on the cool cement floor of a screen porch as the wet heat thinned and the crickets rasped and we talked about music until dawn. Possibility proved more addictive than the beer everyone drank and the drugs many people took.
We were unlikely people in an unlikely place. No one expected us to do these creative things. No one who mattered thought that we could make a new kind of American bohemia. Yet Athens kids built the first important small-town American music scene and the key early site of what would become alternative or indie culture.
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fbad8d9be29f88bb9a986c0dba3d7022 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175434 | Two Studies in Folly a Century Apart | Two Studies in Folly a Century Apart
In her The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984), Barbara Tuchman wrote of the folly of leaders and nations at various points in history. In mid-2016, I wrote “The Main Problem with Donald Trump: He’s a Fool.” Although dealing with the Trojan and Vietnam wars and mentioning that “throughout history cases of military folly have been innumerable,” Tuchman’s concern with historical folly also dealt with leaders in non-military situations. And so the present essay will also deal with both military folly (that of General Haig) and non-military folly (that of President Trump during our coronavirus crisis).
What made me thing of the World-War-I General Haig amidst our present coronavirus pandemic was an article in the Los Angeles Times (LAT) entitled “Trump calls Americans ‘warriors’ in fight to open the economy.” It mentioned that Trump had called himself a “wartime president” and recently described citizens as “warriors” who might have to die in the coronavirus battle because “we have to get our country open, and we have to get it open soon.”
The article quoted a public health expert who said that Trump seems to think of people as “collateral damage to salvage the economy,” but “good generals do not send their soldiers into battle without knowing that there will be a net gain,” and “here we know reopening too soon will be a net loss, both in lives and the long-term stability of the economy.” Another medical expert added, that Trump has “not given the American people the tools they need to fight this virus,” and given his failures it’s not valorous to sacrifice people’s lives in the present pandemic battle.
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All of this empty Trumpian talk about war, warriors, courage, and sacrificing lives is all too familiar. How many past generals and national leaders have spewed such puffed-up words as they have ordered countless young men to their needless deaths?
One of the most infamous of these was General Douglas Haig, who in December 1915, became commander of British troops on the Western Front and remained in that position until the end of World War I (WWI). Haig was Scottish–Trump’s mother, born just a few years before the beginning of WWI, was also Scottish–and like Trump, he came from a rich family, attended boarding school, and enjoyed golfing. His character also bore a striking similarity to that of Trump. Paul Fussell, in his widely-praised The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), wrote that Haig “was stubborn, self-righteous, inflexible, intolerant . . . and quite humorless.” He was also “provincial,” “bullheaded,” and lacked “imagination,” “artistic culture,” “wit and invention.”
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04574086a39bcd6b45522c16d4b4bf2a | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175506 | A Mathematical Duel in 16th Century Venice (Excerpt) | A Mathematical Duel in 16th Century Venice (Excerpt)
The Secret Formula is the story of two Renaissance mathematicians whose jealousies, intrigues, and contentious debates led to the discovery of a formula for the solution of the cubic equation.
Niccolò Tartaglia was an ambitious teacher who possessed a secret formula – the key to unlocking a seemingly unsolvable, two-thousand-year-old mathematical problem. He wrote it down in the form of a poem to prevent other mathematicians from stealing it. Gerolamo Cardano was a physician, gifted scholar, and notorious gambler who would not hesitate to use flattery and even trickery to learn Tartaglia’s secret. In this era when mathematicians challenged each other in intellectual duels held outdoors before enthusiastic crowds, their contentious relationship would change the history of mathematics forever.
Sixteenth-century mathematical duels had a long history, rigid procedures, and a lasting impact on the duelists’ standing in their communities. They also played a hugely influential role in the development of the history of mathematics.
When a duel was to take place, a mathematician or scholar would send another a list of problems to be solved in a given amount of time—the “challenge gauntlet”—after which the recipient would propose a further set of problems to his rival. Tradition required that in case of disagreement a public debate should be held in which the contenders would discuss the disputed problems and solutions in front of judges, notaries, government officials, and a large crowd of spectators. It was not unusual in those duels for tempers to flare, and personal abuse take the place of scientific argument. Admittedly, the stakes could be very high: the winner of a public mathematical duel—whoever had solved the largest number of problems— gained not only glory and prestige but possibly also a monetary prize, new fee-paying disciples, appointment (or confirmation) to a chair, a salary increase, and, often, well-paid professional commissions. The defeated contender’s future career, on the other hand, risked being seriously compromised.
At the beginning of 1535, Antonio Maria Fior began a dispute with Niccolo Tartaglia, challenging him to a mathematical duel to be conducted according to the rules of the time. He proposed thirty problems to Tartaglia, who in response sent the challenger thirty other questions. As was customary, the winner would be whoever answered the most questions in a given period of time. On February 22, 1535, Fior and Tartaglia entrusted their respective lists of questions to Iacomo Zambelli,a notary public in Venice, agreeing to hand over the solutions forty or fifty days later. The stakes of the contest? First of all, honor and reputation, and then a lavish dinner at the tavern for each unsolved problem, with the bill to be footed by the unfortunate contestant who capitulated before his rival’s question.
In the ensuing months, echoes of the Venetian challenge spread well beyond the city, carrying the news of its resounding outcome: Tartaglia had literally humiliated Fior by solving in a couple of hours all thirty problems posed by his opponent, while the latter had not been able to answer a single one of Niccolo’s questions (the victor, the story goes, magnanimously gave up his right to the dinners). In fact, far more astonishing was the topic on which Fior had challenged Tartaglia. Such details about the contest slowly trickled out of Venice and eventually reached Tartaglia’s birthplace, Brescia, causing many friends to reach out to him and confirm the details of the duel. One such acquaintance, the imperishable Messer Zuanne de Tonini da Coi, wrote:
I heard many days ago that you had entered into a challenge with Maestro Antonio Maria Fior, and that finally you had agreed on this: that he would propose to you thirty really different problems written under seal and in the custody of Maestro Iacomo di Zambelli, notary; and that, similarly, you would propose to him thirty other, truly different ones. And so you did, and each of you was given forty or fifty days to solve the said problems; and you established that, at the end of this period, whoever had solved the largest number of problems would receive the honors, in addition to whatever small sum you had waged for each problem. And it has been reported and confirmed to me in Brescia that you solved all his thirty problems in two hours, which is something I find hard to believe.
“Everything you have been told is true,” replied Tartaglia, who right away explained how and why he had been able to perform a feat that was to be the peak of his scientific career and a decisive turning point in the history of algebra.
According to this account, Niccolo Tartaglia discovered the formula for the solution of third-degree equations of the type x3 + bx = c on February 12, 1535, a formula that a few years later would prove crucial for solving any cubic equation. It was an epoch-making, extraordinary result: the first true algebraic discovery since the time of the Babylonians, one that would open up new and boundless horizons for algebra and that posterity would remember as the most significant mathematical result of the sixteenth century.
A word of caution, however: Renaissance mathematical duels obeyed a gentlemen’s agreement: a contender could not propose to his opponent problems he did not know how to solve himself. Therefore, if Fior felt confident in challenging Tartaglia with problems involving cubic equations of the type mentioned earlier, then the Venetian abbaco master must have discovered the fateful formula before his Brescian rival—unless Fior had not played fair and sought to intimidate Tartaglia with problems beyond his own ability to solve, just as Tonino da Coi had done five years earlier. On the other hand, if we rule out this possibility, how could a teacher known only for being a good expert in accounting calculations—and, what is more, not particularly cultivated or at ease with algebraic abstractions—been capable of such an extraordinary undertaking?
Tartaglia’s opinion of Fior’s intellectual capabilities—he did not possess the science but only great experience—is consistent with that of Matthäus Schwarz, the German accountant who had taken lessons from Fior. Once established that Fior lacked the education and fertile mind required to find the formula on his own, and assuming that he already knew it when he threw down the gauntlet to challenge Tartaglia, under what circumstances did he acquire this knowledge? And, especially, who was the “great mathematician” who had revealed to him the secret thirty years earlier, and who therefore should have been credited with the exceptional discovery? How was it possible for such a breakthrough to remain secret through all this time? Was Fior the only one to benefit from the confidences of the mysterious personage? And why, after his initial hesitation, had Tartaglia taken Fior’s surprising revelation seriously, causing him to put off his “studies, care, and work” to find—or find again—the crucial formula?
Tartaglia was therefore not willing to reveal the solution process he had used to answer Fior’s questions for fear that Messer Zuanne would infer from it the solution formula for third-degree equations of the form x3 + bx = c, which for the moment Niccolo had no intention to give away. As mentioned before, in those days it was the custom among mathematicians to refrain from announcing their results; keeping them secret could help attract students as well as serve as a weapon in public contests. Tartaglia followed the custom, as obviously did the unknown “great mathematician” mentioned by Fior, if he existed at all.
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25ed89b4477febc2f3124e6a9000a4f1 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175514 | Morning or Mourning in America? Political Advertising and the Politics of Emotion | Morning or Mourning in America? Political Advertising and the Politics of Emotion
The promise of American greatness knew no bounds in “Morning in America,” the iconic ad created by the group of political consultants and advertising gurus (the “Tuesday Team”) who worked for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign. In the ad, Americans were working, getting married, and buying homes – confident that the country they lived in was “prouder and stronger and better” under President Reagan’s leadership than four short years before.
Advertising typically sells us life as we want it to be, not life as it truly is. Maybe that’s why the anti-Trump, conservative super PAC known as the Lincoln Project’s new ad “Mourning in America” is such a gut punch. As misery and despair unfold in scene after scene of job loss and death, there’s no escaping the dystopian nightmare America is now mired in as the country battles the coronavirus. After seeing the ad, President Donald Trump started rage tweeting at the ad’s creators – attorney George Conway, Republican strategists Steve Schmidt and John Weaver, and media consultant Rick Wilson – at nearly 1 a.m. on May 5.
The history of political advertising offers a glimpse into why ads like this one can come to define a politician’s candidacy for better or worse. Ads that effectively tap into the collective cultural zeitgeist can become harbingers of a candidate’s fate in a way that political polling will never be able to do. Numbers can’t effectively capture the moment when advertising causes perceptions to harden into actual beliefs that govern voter decisions come election time.
We’ve seen such moments before. The 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad turned Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam vet, into an unpatriotic, East Coast elitist. Compare the 2008 wil.i.am “Yes We Can” video in support of Barack Obama to the 2007 viral video “Vote Different,” which superimposed Hillary Clinton’s face in the place of Big Brother in a make-over of the 1984 Apple computer ad. Putting Obama’s speeches to music communicated hope and love. Depicting Clinton as an authoritarian evoked all the negative feelings against her.
It’s worth a trip down memory lane to recall exactly how much advertising has influenced presidential campaigns and their outcomes. Historians credit Eisenhower’s decision to accept advertising with changing the course of how modern presidential campaigns would be conducted going forward, according to the former Museum of Television & Radio’s (now the Paley Center for Media) 2004 exhibit, “Madison Avenue Goes to Washington: The History of Presidential Campaign Advertising.” Whistle-stop tours ended and the era of slick ads designed to enhance a presidential candidate’s image began.
Eisenhower hired veteran ad man Rosser Reeves in 1952 to create what would become the first presidential campaign spots to air on TV. Republican Presidential candidate Thomas Dewey had rejected Reeves’s advances four years earlier because he considered mixing puffery with politics undignified.
Reeves, later known for the famous M&M candy campaign “Melts in your mouth,” crafted Eisenhower’s image by removing his glasses and filming him answering questions from Americans about taxes and Korea. The strategy behind the $60,000 campaign, called “Eisenhower Answers America,” allowed Reeves to present the candidate as fatherly, decent, responsible and trustworthy. Democrats complained that Eisenhower was selling the highest office in the land like advertisers sold soap or laundry detergent.
John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign featured the first-time political ads were shot on location. One positive ad showed Kennedy talking directly about his Catholic religion, a controversial issue at the time. The Kennedy campaign also produced a damaging attack ad that undermined the carefully honed image Republican opponent Richard Nixon had earlier created during his famous Checkers speech. When Nixon ran against Kennedy, Eisenhower was asked at a press conference to name something his vice president had done. Eisenhower answered, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.” The Kennedy campaign used the remarks in TV and radio ads that questioned Nixon’s experience and capability.
Stoking fear about Republican Barry Goldwater became the key Democratic advertising strategy used to keep Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House in the 1964 presidential race. The Democrats hired the ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (today DDB Worldwide) to produce a series of hard-hitting ads. One TV spot featured a saw slowly cutting off the eastern section of a model of the U.S. Just before the piece fell off and floated away, the announcer told viewers that Goldwater thought the nation would be better off without the Eastern Seaboard.
Perhaps the most controversial and memorable presidential campaign ad of all time, the “Daisy Girl” spot, played off of the very real fear Americans had of nuclear annihilation, as historian Robert Mann recounted in his book Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds: LBJ, Barry Goldwater and the Ad That Changed American Politics. The countdown to a nuclear missile launch is told through the eyes of a young girl pulling petals from a daisy flower as the mushroom cloud appears in her eye. The spot aired just once, on Labor Day, during NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies, but the subsequent media interest brought it fame as an attack ad.
The 1968 three-way race between Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace saw the birth of the media specialist in presidential campaigns, which became a major contributor to cost, even as attack ads grew in prominence. One Humphrey spot featured a man’s voice laughing uproariously as the words “Agnew for Vice President?” appeared on a TV screen.
When Nixon’s media advisors created their own in-house agency called “The November Group” in 1972, they “saved the 15 percent of the amount of television and radio air costs an agency holds back as the fee for placing an ad,” wrote Kathleen Hall Jamieson in Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising. Advertising teams would appear again in Reagan’s Tuesday Team – named after election day held on the first Tuesday in November – and in 2000 for George W. Bush’s “Park Avenue Posse,” headed by the ad agency Young & Rubicam’s Jim Ferguson.
At the time, the 1988 race between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis was considered the most negative historical contest since the 1964 Daisy Girl spot. Two ads painted a devasting picture of Dukakis as weak on crime. Jamieson described “Revolving Door” in her book this way: “A procession of convicts circles through a revolving gate and marches toward the nation’s living rooms.” Jamieson said the ad made a false inference “that 268 first-degree murderers were furloughed by Dukakis to rape and kidnap,” since the facts revealed that only William Horton, a first-degree murderer whose saga the Bush campaign chronicled in the “Willie Horton” ad, escaped his furlough in Massachusetts and committed a violent crime.
As journalists stepped up their scrutiny of advertising claims made in the 1992 race, Bill Clinton’s ad team used real news footage in attack ads and played on a positive association by including a photo of a young Clinton shaking JFK’s hand.
The people who produce advertising understand how emotions can drive decision making, and voting choices are no different from product purchasing decisions. One’s instincts, often translated into “which candidate would you would rather have a drink with,” influence the ballot box, as the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson knows only too well.
Speaking of his homage to the original Morning in America spot, Wilson wrote in his May 6 column in The Daily Beast, “That brilliant, evocative minute caught a moment of uplift in the minds and hearts of American voters in that rarest of political spots; it was true in the audience’s gut.”
The darker Mourning in America video, where America is presented as “weaker and sicker and poorer,” might well be the 60-seconds that decide Trump’s fate in November.
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77a8fc5c360d8c783e09a595086ec0ea | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175532 | Faculty Cuts Begin, With Warnings of More to Come | Faculty Cuts Begin, With Warnings of More to Come
The top brass’s message was clear: When talking about the instructors who won’t be reappointed, at least for now, department chairs at the University of Massachusetts at Boston should stick to the script.
“Never slip and call this a layoff,” reads a Monday talking-points memo from the provost’s office, obtained by The Chronicle. Similarly, “do not speak of this notice as a kind of ‘pink slip.’”
This week, letters were sent to an unknown number of instructors, telling them that they won’t be reappointed for the fall, with the caveat that things could change over the summer. “I am very sorry for the consternation I know this will cause you,” Emily A. McDermott, the interim provost, says in the form letter.
When the Covid-19 pandemic threatened to deplete projected budgets, college leaders, like those at UMass-Boston, looked to minimize expenses and make difficult choices about priorities. While decisions were still up in the air, faculty members, especially those off the tenure track, feared that their ranks would be thinned. Now, those cuts are starting to be made across academe. (The Chronicle is tracking them here.)
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699fd4cc6b6fa7a0776647cb21539b1a | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175586 | Montgomery Freedom Rides Museum To Celebrate Anniversary on Facebook, 5/20-21 | Montgomery Freedom Rides Museum To Celebrate Anniversary on Facebook, 5/20-21
In 1961, young volunteers called Freedom Riders faced danger with nonviolent protest as they challenged segregated travel through the South.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the 59th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, "Travelin' Down Freedom's Mainline" brings together stories from Freedom Riders, witnesses, historians and more for a virtual journey.
“These narratives emphasize the sanctity of place and the history that has occurred there," said Lisa D. Jones, executive director of the Alabama Historical Commission.
Because of coronavirus restrictions, downtown Montgomery's Freedom Rides Museum is currently closed to the public. The museum, located in Montgomery's former Greyhound Bus station, will host this week's two-day event on their Facebook page.
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075fbef2127729f3d515ffd710bc3f1c | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175597 | College Calendars in the Pandemic: No Fall Break and Home by Thanksgiving | College Calendars in the Pandemic: No Fall Break and Home by Thanksgiving
SACRAMENTO — As colleges make plans to bring students back to campus, alongside discussions of mask requirements and half-empty classrooms, one common strategy is emerging: Forgoing fall break and getting students home before Thanksgiving.
The University of South Carolina, Notre Dame, Rice and Creighton are among the schools that have said they will find ways to shorten the fall semester, in an attempt to avoid a “second wave” of coronavirus infections expected to emerge in late fall.
Built into their calculations, university officials say, are epidemiological assumptions that reducing travel will help students avoid contracting and spreading the virus, and that any easing of the pandemic this summer will end with the return of flu season.
“We don’t know if the second wave will be weaker or stronger, but there’s a significant risk that this will resurge in the winter,” said Rice University’s president, David W. Leebron.
Rice, a private university in Houston, was among the first schools to adopt the strategy of a streamlined semester. It notified 7,000 students this month that the fall semester would not have the usual breaks, ending at Thanksgiving instead of around Christmas.
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d253a4e59c0fe68a6dc3db655827778a | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175681 | We’re Reopening Notre Dame. It’s Worth the Risk. | We’re Reopening Notre Dame. It’s Worth the Risk.
We have availed ourselves of the best medical advice and scientific information available and are assiduously planning a reopening that will make the campus community as safe as possible. We believe the good of educating students and continuing vital research is very much worth the remaining risk.
In our classical, humanistic educations, both Dr. Fauci and I came across the texts of Aristotle, who defined courage not as simple fearlessness, but as the mean between a rashness that is heedless of danger and a timidity that is paralyzed by it. To possess the virtue of courage is to be able to choose the proper mean between these extremes — to know what risks are worth taking, and why.
Perhaps what we most need now, alongside science, is that kind of courage and the practical wisdom it requires. Notre Dame’s recent announcement about reopening is the attempt to find the courageous mean as we face the threat of the virus and seek to continue our mission of education and inquiry.
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32f59514be50079773cc9db11dd4fa38 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175826 | "I Imagine Everything Happened on Beale Street": Remembering Memphis in "Brother Robert" | "I Imagine Everything Happened on Beale Street": Remembering Memphis in "Brother Robert"
Palace Theater, Beale Street, 1939. photo Farm Security Administration
Cover image courtesy of Hachette Books, all rights reserved.
Excerpted from BROTHER ROBERT: Growing Up with Robert Johnson by Annye Anderson and Preston Lauterbach. Copyright © 2020. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
In BROTHER ROBERT: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, nonagenarian Annye Anderson sheds new light on a real-life figure largely obscured by his own legend: her kind and incredibly talented stepbrother, Robert Johnson. This book chronicles Johnson's unconventional path to stardom-from the harrowing story behind his illegitimate birth, to his first strum of the guitar on Mrs. Anderson's father's knee, to the genre-defining recordings that would one day secure his legacy.
Along the way, readers are gifted not only with Mrs. Anderson's personal anecdotes, but with colorful recollections passed down to her by members of their family-the people who knew Johnson best. Readers also learn about the contours of his working life in Memphis, never-before-disclosed details about his romantic history, and all of Johnson's favorite things, from foods and entertainers to brands of tobacco and pomade. Together, these stories don't just bring the mythologized Robert Johnson back down to earth—they preserve both his memory and his integrity.
For decades, Mrs. Anderson and her family have ignored the tall tales of Johnson "selling his soul to the devil" and the speculative to fictionalized accounts of his life that passed for biography. Johnson’s family is here to set the record straight.
In this excerpt, Annye Anderson recalls time spent with Robert and their older half-sister Carrie in Memphis, and the trends in music, movies and black politics that surrounded them.
I turned ten years old in April of 1936. After that my little world began to grow. My mother hadn’t allowed me to hang around Beale Street. Prostitutes were everywhere during that time. Close by in some of the private homes, I have seen whites come out and pick up black women. I imagine everything happened on Beale Street. That’s why my parents didn’t want me down there. I was told never to go to Handy Park, they had everything over there, gambling, the bluesmen were over there. Brother Robert went over there when he got ready. That was a proving ground.
Little by little, I ventured farther from home and got to know the way to Beale. My old territory between Third and Fifth, Calhoun and the railroad, was only about two or three blocks each way. Beale Street was almost a mile from the house, but easy to reach, straight up Hernando Street.
My ticket out came from Sister Carrie, through Brother Robert. She got her buttons, thimbles, tape, and thread from Schwab’s, a big general store on Beale. Sister Carrie stayed behind that sewing machine day and night and sometimes she needed supplies. She tried sending Brother Robert out, but he’d never come back. I had to go and find him. When I got to Beale, I knew he was playing his guitar, I could hear it coming up the street. I knew his riffs. Nobody else was playing like Brother Robert.
I have learned that he was contemporary while the others played classic blues. Wasn’t any Duke Ellingtons out on the street. Everybody was exposed to blues. The jug bands paraded through our neighborhood, and the children would follow just like the pied piper. They marched with their jugs and all that. Children danced to the music. Brother Robert took no interest. He wanted modern. Brother Robert didn’t sound like the jug bands or the Tampa Red I heard coming out of Ms. Lola Myers’s house. He worked to distinguish himself.
When Brother Robert went to Beale Street, he ended up playing in Handy Park. He and Son teamed up and played there as a duo, as well. He was well known at the One Minute Café, next door to the Palace on Beale, and played there, thanks to my family’s friendship with Mr. Pete, part-owner.
A block east of Handy Park was Church’s Park, named after Robert Church, the South’s first black millionaire and real founder of Beale Street. While Handy Park could be a little rough, Church’s Park appealed to the entire community. Teachers often held educational programs there and rehearsed and staged school plays in the auditorium.
Children could go and get some athletic instruction. One professor taught boys to box, including Sister Carrie’s son Lewis, who became a professional welterweight. The park had a public pool for black kids, though no lifeguards. The atmosphere there would be upbeat and wholesome. Brother Robert met up with his buddies. They read the paper and learned about the politics of the day. Robert Church Jr. was one of the leading black politicians of the time, and he had a strong presence. Brother Robert would learn about the news from Ethiopia and hear about people like Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Of course everyone idolized Joe Louis and saw his victories as something bigger than boxing, and you could speak safely about such topics at Church’s Park. Brother Robert had a girlfriend in that area named Pearl. She was dark brown with a gold crown on her front teeth, slender and about five-foot-six.
Once I got to go to Beale Street, I’d tag along with Brother Robert, Brother Son, and Sister Carrie to the movies at the Palace Theatre. They liked to see Mae West and Bette Davis, and I was a nuisance, always running to the bathroom and wanting popcorn.
Most of the movies we saw at the Palace were Westerns. Buck Jones and Tom Mix were Brother Robert’s favorite cowboys. He wore that big Stetson, like them. All of the young men in our family wore Stetson—that was on the go. My father and Uncle Will wore Dobbs.
At the Palace, Son and Brother Robert saw Gene Autry in Tumbling Tumbleweeds. Gene and another guitar player did a song called “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine.”
That piece became a part of Son and Brother Robert’s repertoire whenever they entertained.
All the top bands, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway, and Jimmie Lunceford played at the Palace. We could see big entertainment for a small price. These acts also played the Orpheum, the grand opera theater on Main Street at Beale, one of the few integrated venues in the city, though blacks sat in the balcony.
It’s my understanding that Brother Robert would hang out at the Palace while waiting on his next gig. Mr. Barrasso, the owner, let you stay all day on one ticket price. Brother Robert would sleep while the movie played over and over, and the Looney Tunes, shorts, and newsreels ran. He’d sit with the guitar across his chest, watching the old-time cowboy movies. He’d cool off in there on a hot day or warm up on a cold day until the time to meet up with his friends or return to Sister Carrie’s.
....
Brother Robert spoke at times of Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia. He knew about the NAACP and kept up with the Scottsboro Boys case—the people involved had been hoboing to Memphis, just like Brother Robert often did. He followed Paul Robeson’s activism and enjoyed Robeson’s movie Show Boat. He was no dummy, he read the paper. You can hear his awareness of racism in his music. He doesn’t want sundown to catch him where he isn’t supposed to be. He’s telling you something. He knows if you get wrong in the white folks’ neighborhood, they’ll harm you. White folks are afraid. We were riding out to pick cotton and went up in the wrong yard. We looked up and saw a man with his shotgun pointed right at us, and we backed right out.
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e1b054e3c7e507586c8400694a0ee388 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175943 | The Black Women Who Paved the Way for This Moment | The Black Women Who Paved the Way for This Moment
In the 20th-century U.S., black-nationalist women—individuals who advocated for black liberation, economic self-sufficiency, racial pride, unity, and political self-determination—emerged as key political leaders on the local, national, and even international levels. When most black women in the U.S. did not have access to the vote, these women boldly confronted the hypocrisy of white America, often drawing upon their knowledge of history. And they did so in public spaces—in mass community meetings, at local parks, and on sidewalks. These women harnessed the power of their voices, passion, and the raw authenticity of their political message to rally black people across the nation and the globe.
In the early 1920s, Amy Ashwood Garvey, a co-founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, advocated for the rights and freedom of black people while standing on crowded street corners in Harlem. Using these public spaces as platforms to advance her political agenda, Ashwood held nothing back, imploring black people to resist white supremacy in all of its forms. On several occasions, the activist publicly recited poetry, including Paul Laurence Dunbar’s famous work “We Wear the Mask,” which emphasized the strategies black people employed to survive segregation, oppression, and daily degradation.
In one speech, Ashwood reminded Harlemites that the struggles of black people in the U.S. could not be divorced from the challenges facing people of African descent around the globe. “The Negro question is no longer a local one,” Ashwood argued, “but of the Negroes of the world, joining hands and fighting for one common cause.” She went on to tell her listeners that they could not “attain Democracy unless they win it for themselves.”
During the 1930s, the Chicago-based activist Mittie Maude Lena Gordon promoted this message under the auspices of her organization, the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, the largest black-nationalist organization established by a woman in the country. Founded in 1932, the PME drew an estimated 300,000 supporters—primarily members of the black working class—in more than a dozen cities across the nation. The organization’s rapid growth during the 1930s and ’40s, as well as its wide reach, was directly tied to Gordon’s skills as a public speaker. Gordon, like Garvey, used city parks and street corners as platforms to disseminate her political ideas and build momentum for the movement.
Described by her contemporaries as a “very forceful and effective speaker,” Gordon commanded attention when she addressed audiences. She had an uncanny ability to stir the emotions of her listeners in an effort to compel them to act. So powerful were Gordon’s speeches that many who encountered the activist on local street corners joined her movement—sometimes without full knowledge of her political vision. During the early 1930s, Sam Hawthorne, a black Mississippian from Attala County, crossed paths with Gordon in Chicago. After hearing her deliver a moving speech “in public, on the streets,” Hawthorne quickly became a member of the PME and later established a chapter of the organization in his hometown.
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fa73ebaafc3bdad1f7c06833639fe4df | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175948 | What if Trump Refuses to Leave? | What if Trump Refuses to Leave?
General James Mattis put it best, observing he had never seen a president order troops to violate constitutional rights until Donald Trump gave the order to brutalize peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square.
But we have never had a fascist in the White House before, and so we need to do some very hard thinking. Donald Trump is a dangerous authoritarian who is testing how far he can go in the use of armed force for his own political ends.
And a show of force may determine the fate of our democracy a few months from now. If Trump loses the election, we should not expect a peaceful transition in accordance with American traditions. We know what we will get from Donald Trump: a tantrum, followed by defiance. He will call the election a “hoax” and then proceed to put the nation through a crisis that will make the past three years look mild by comparison.
He has talked already of delaying the election and dropped dark hints about how far his powers may extend in a “national emergency.”
He is not . . . normal.
So we should brace ourselves for much more than a delayed or contested election. We need to imagine an end-game without any precedent and figure out now what to do if this scenario becomes a reality next year.
Specifically:
What if Trump just refuses to vacate the White House if Biden legitimately wins? Who would have the power and authority to remove him using physical force? Have you ever thought about that? Has anyone?
It turns out that Joe Biden has been thinking about it, and he just announced that the military will “escort” the defeated incumbent from the White House if it proves to be necessary. Presumably, Biden himself would give the order.
The Constitution stipulates that votes from the Electoral College will be counted by the members of Congress in joint session with the “President of the Senate,” i.e., the vice president of the United States, presiding. Current custom is to have the vice president announce the result of the Electoral College vote.
When adminstrations change (and especially in cases where a president is not re-elected), there are laws on the books that control the transition — laws that have been crafted by successive Congresses. Contingency planning for a possible transition is occurring right now in key government agencies, pursuant to the law.
A Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCCIC) plans and conducts the Inauguration itself as the transition planning moves into high gear between Election Day and Inauguration Day.
Given what we know of Donald Trump, it is easy to imagine him freezing the process by executive order. A blizzard of tweets about the “hoax” would go out to his followers — ugly, defiant, and hallucinatory, for his mental state is quite tenuous, as mental health professionals have been warning since 2016.
There is no use pretending that any of this couldn’t happen. Remember the way he responded to that question back in 2016 — the question he was asked before Election Day — as to whether or not he would respect the results of the election. His answer was yes — if he won.
He didn’t seem to be joking.
So we need to prepare for this scenario, but in doing so we need to think about specifics: how would the scenario play out between November and January? And the answer is: chaotically, because Trump’s mental process is chaotic. From the outset, he has made things up at random as he goes along — pouncing on random opportunities for chaos, which he goes on to shape as he pleases as the basis for aggrandizing more power.
He may very well be pondering this overall scenario now, but if this crisis comes to pass, he will conduct himself as he always does: he will test to see how far he can go and how much he can get away with. And this means that the situation could become very dangerous as Inauguration Day approaches. Having given himself no line of retreat, he could have a melt-down that goes beyond anything we have seen: his mental state could plunge over the edge.
Remember how just a few weeks ago he proclaimed he had the “absolute” power to command the nation’s governors as well as the “absolute” power to adjourn both houses of Congress? Remember how he used the pretext of “national emergency” to send troops to the border and begin the construction of the border wall in defiance of Congress? And he got away with it.
And now he threatens to send troops to “dominate” the streets of our cities against the wishes of mayors and governors. Never mind that he quickly backed down, for in a corner he will never back down.
So what would happen if Trump becomes completely deranged and orders troops to seal off the White House if Biden wins the election? We can take quick comfort in the thought that whoever is serving as defense secretary would see that such orders are not carried out, but . . . who knows?
Even if things never get that far, Inauguration Day would present a very sorry spectacle. Trump would boycott the proceedings and proclaim that he is still president. Perhaps armed members of his “base” would come to town to create a bit of mayhem.
Joe Biden’s solution to the problem would be simple and direct, but another solution could be used if anything goes wrong.
Back in 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee had served some subpoenas on Richard Nixon — the first time in American history for that to happen. The subpoenas were delivered by U.S. Capitol Police to the building next to the White House known in those days as the “Old Executive Office Building,” and White House staffers received them.
One subpoena required the testimony of White House aides and Nixon flatly refused to comply, citing “executive privilege.” Senator Sam Ervin, the chair of the committee, threatened to send the Senate sergeant-at-arms to the White House, arrest the aides in question, bring them to the bar of the Senate for trial, and compel testimony.
Nixon complied.
So on Inauguration Day, after Biden takes the oath of office, an armed force of U.S. Capitol police could be sent up Pennsylvania Avenue. Backed by the authority of Congress — which has, in addition to the clear constitutional duty to announce the results of the Electoral College vote, the additional power under law to take charge of presidential transitions — these officers would be confronted by officers of the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service at the gates of the White House.
What would happen then: an armed stand-off? Probably not, since a new president would have taken the oath and most members of the Secret Service would in all probability keep their wits about them and be sensible — or so we can hope.
Regardless, by any means necessary, the Capitol police would gain entry the White House, apprehend Trump, and then remove him, with a modicum of digity if possible, in a straitjacket if necessary.
The point must be made yet again: in the case of Donald Trump, we are not dealing with a normal individual.
Mental health professionals warned about this before the 2016 election. After the election, as Trump’s bizarre behavior began to warp the operations of our government, people wondered for a while if the procedure laid down by the 25th amendment to the Constitution — which provides for the removal of a president who is incapacitated — might be used for the sake of our country. But of course that didn’t happen.
Then there came the attempt to remove him through impeachment. Thanks to Mitch McConnell, yet another opportunity to rid this country of the danger was thrown away.
Make no mistake: Donald Trump is very probably delusional. He may believe in every one of his lies. “Hoax” is what he calls every fact he doesn’t like, and we have seen this again and again. And way down deep he may believe it. Through an act of strange alchemy, a spell that he casts, he may talk himself into believing it.
This is dangerous. For the sake of our country, Republican leaders should have long since confronted a terrifying fact: a mentally unbalanced chief executive could start a nuclear war if he succumbs to dementia.
And these Republican leaders have consistently refused — with a smirk, they have refused.
If Trump is re-elected, we must brace ourselves to go right on thinking the unthinkable. We will live in dystopian America, where all bets are off for the duration and our normal way of life will be challenged as never before.
The reign of Nero will then begin in earnest.
What will happen if Trump gives some unconstitutional orders to the military, but this time with power to back them up? Who will stop him? Mitch McConnell? What will happen to commanders and troops who refuse to carry out unconstitutional orders? Court martial and imprisonment?
These are not idle fears, for Trump’s mental illness leads him straight to sociopathological behavior: he has the mind of a criminal. His contempt for the law has been all too clear, and his behavior will go beyond contempt.
What begins for Donald Trump as evasion of law becomes perversion of the law over time — he seeks to warp the very concept of law as he approaches the brink of megalomania — so that his every word becomes law.
At the moment he is busily purging inspectors-general, so the law cannot impinge upon his actions or those of his henchmen.
He is part of a movement — global, and launched years ago by Vladimir Putin — to exalt the full exercise of power by the powerful, to hammer home the principle that those in possession of power should do whatever they want, seize whatever they want, hurt whomever they want, and carry on in any way they want as a matter of right.
Trump cannot be convicted of crimes — not yet — he cannot be arrested — not yet — and his power may very well continue.
It is time to do worst-case thinking in this very dark year as we ponder the state of our democracy, while we have it.
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a6e95bfbeea48a479ad6b4a9677ed18a | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175965 | Respectability and Remembrance: The Continued Condemnation of Black Resistance | Respectability and Remembrance: The Continued Condemnation of Black Resistance
The killing of George Floyd spurred protests in cities across America that have been met with heavy police resistance, and there is no end in sight to the unrest. Amid continuing violence against African Americans at the hands of police and the devastating toll that covid-19 is taking on black communities, the protests have swelled.
In contrast to the relatively relaxed police response to the armed, largely white anti-lockdown protests just a few weeks ago, police reaction to these large, generally peaceful protests has been highly militarized, a dynamic that has led to confrontations and injuries and fueled further unrest, rage and destruction.
As this violence unfolds, many communities remain sympathetic with the protestors, contributing en masse to bail funds for those arrested, while others, including the president, have condemned the protestors as violent, and a third grouprecognizes the righteousness of the protestors' cause but rejects arson, looting and violence: this group sees the violence has distracting from the Black Lives Matter cause.
Condemnation of black violent resistance, and of black radicalism, is not a new phenomenon, nor is the dismissal of black people’s claim for justice if their uprisings or activism do not fit a particular script of nonviolence. This condemnation is further illustrated by popular memory of the civil rights and Black Power movements, which valorizes nonviolence while dismissing, and often simplifying the histories of, groups that supported armed resistance. This problem is rooted in popular narratives of the civil rights movement which dramatically oversimplify what took place. These popular narratives lionize the non-violent protests led by Martin Luther King Jr., while ignoring the limits and failures of this approach that left many demands of the movement for racial equality unaddressed — including police violence. When viewed more broadly, the current protests are a continuation of this struggle for racial justice.
And while King is remembered as the pre-eminent champion of non-violence, popular memory has forgotten that he recognized the limits of a nonviolent civil rights movement, saying that riots were the “language of the unheard,”illustrating the need for more radical resistance when peaceful protests do not suffice.
In fact, the civil rights movement included much debate among activists who grappled over tactics. Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, became frustrated with nonviolence when, despite securing legal rights, black people continued to face police violence, poverty, and incarceration. Nonviolent protest, which had helped achieve voting rights, legal access to public accommodations, and the end of Jim Crow, had proved unsuccessful in solving these problems.
That fueled the rise of Black Power activism, which appealed to African Americans who felt voiceless, especially the economically and politically disadvantaged. And yet, while often remembered, in the words of historian Peniel Joseph, as the civil rights movement’s evil and “ruthless twin,” Black Power did critical work to highlight white supremacy and anti-democratic practices against black people, while also bettering the condition of disadvantaged African Americans.
And yes, the Black Panthers, maybe the most famous Black Power organization, carried weapons, but they also organized free breakfast programs for poor, black children and carried out tests for sickle cell anemia, a blood disorder that almost exclusively affects black people in the United States. The Panthers saw such programs as crucial in serving oppressed communities and providing equal opportunity.
But these efforts have been forgotten because the images of the Panthers remaining in popular memory show them armed, reinforcing white fears of violence. But this ignores that such armed resistance was actually far more about self defense than aggression — something that has been forgotten because, while a number of large-scale episodes of police violence and vigilantism against protestors and activists — Birmingham, Selma, the murders of civil rights activists in Philadelphia, Miss. — are enduring, the day-to-day violence, including police violence, against African Americans, North and South, has been forgotten.
At times, armed self-defense was the only thing that prevented violence against African Americas. One of the most well-known radical activist groups, The Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed wing of the civil rights movement that existed from 1965 to 1969, openly carried weapons to deter white-on-black violence in Jonesboro, Louisiana. These efforts led to a massive decrease of white attacks on black homes and on civil rights workers. Armed resistance was not only necessary but successful, despite criticisms from whites and moderates. Furthermore, uprisings in Watts in 1965 and across the country in 1968 illustrated the need for more radical resistance. The events of 1965 in Los Angeles are commonly known as the “Watts riots,” consistent with the pattern of using language to contrast insurgent protest as antagonistic to nonviolent protest and therefore, illegitimate. Yet, a nationwide series of riots in 1968 arguably led to the passage of a second major civil rights law, the Fair Housing Act to address the failure of the 1964 legislation to ameliorate urban segregation.
Public memory has continued to deemphasize this radical tradition. While there are at least 40 statues of King across the United States there are fewer than five of Malcolm X, and none of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was shot and killed in his home by the FBI and Chicago police officers. In fact, Hampton’s home was removed from an Illinois African American heritage guide after being deemed too controversial by the Illinois Tourism Bureau.
Major African American history museums, including the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, portray the Black Power era as one of chaos. This section of the museum is disorganized, difficult to navigate, and accompanied by loud music, signifying a rupture with the preceding narrative. Simply put, Black Power is remembered for not falling in line with a history of respectable nonviolent protest.
Violence has long been a part of civil rights protest going back to the days of abolition because white supremacy is rooted in violence and perpetuated overwhelmingly by law enforcement and white vigilantes with tacit support of legal authorities. This is on display today in the excessive force that has been continuously used against black citizens by police and which resulted in George Floyd’s death. Countless videos of unarmed, peaceful protestors or journalists being pepper sprayed, shot with rubber bullets or, driven into by a police SUV have been shared on television and social media since the protests began.
But actually addressing the full depth of racism and white supremacy in America requires understanding the limits of the non-violent civil rights movements, and the necessity of armed self-defense for African Americans against the violence perpetrated or instigated by whites — including the police — throughout American history.
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3ef269bd8c19613cb6da560cbae7175b | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176033 | Peter Norman: Unsung Hero of the 1968 Olympic Protest | Peter Norman: Unsung Hero of the 1968 Olympic Protest
In the years that followed the 1968 Olympics, Norman was publicly ostracized and vilified for standing alongside Carlos and Smith in Mexico City, and he struggled to find a steady job because of it. He was given several chances to save his own reputation by condemning Carlos and Smith for their actions on the podium, but he never did. In a 2008 documentary titled Salute (directed and produced by Norman’s nephew), he spoke about that moment in 1968.
“I couldn’t see why a black man couldn’t drink the same water from a water fountain, take the same bus or go to the same school as a white man,” he said. “There was a social injustice that I couldn’t do anything for from where I was, but I certainly hated it. It has been said that sharing my silver medal with that incident on the victory dais detracted from my performance. On the contrary. I have to confess, I was rather proud to be part of it.”
It wasn’t until 2012 — six years after Norman passed away from a heart attack — when the Australian government formally apologized to the greatest sprinter in the country’s history, acknowledging the “bravery of Peter Norman in donning an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge on the podium in solidarity with African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos.”
Carlos, Smith and Norman remained friends for the rest of Norman’s life, and when he passed away, the two Americans were pallbearers at his funeral.
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bae26bddc6e9dcca98a71220ce1d3ecd | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176169 | Past Pandemics have Reshaped Society. Will Coronavirus do the Same? | Past Pandemics have Reshaped Society. Will Coronavirus do the Same?
Although the coronavirus pandemic presents unprecedented challenges for people living through it, humans have endured similar health ordeals in the past. Jeffrey Brown speaks to two historians, Frank Snowden of Yale University and Nancy Bristow of the University of Puget Sound, about how previous pandemics have shaped societies. It’s part of our ongoing arts and culture series, Canvas.
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adb2c33bb08583a0c16cd7b5101fd69d | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176180 | Ken Burns: Our Monuments are Representations of Myth, Not Fact | Ken Burns: Our Monuments are Representations of Myth, Not Fact
As we consider what role monuments play in our culture, I’d ask us to listen to the words of James Baldwin from the film I made on the Statue of Liberty. That film, which aired on PBS in 1985, set out to understand the history of why that monument was created, as well as the symbolism and myth that have come to surround it.
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d76dcc5a929ef0c22c083c79430155ac | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176200 | Before Stonewall, There Was a Bookstore | Before Stonewall, There Was a Bookstore
On July 4, 1965—four years before Stonewall—39 activists from D.C., New York, and Philadelphia marched on the place where the Declaration of Independence had been signed roughly two centuries earlier. They wanted to remind the nation that their rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” had been denied. Dressed in formal attire—the men in coats and ties, and many of the women in skirts and dresses—they carried signs that read equal treatment before the law and homosexual bill of rights.
For the next four years, the organizer of that protest, Craig Rodwell, along with his comrades, Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen, marched in Philadelphia. Their demonstrations became became known as “the Annual Reminders.” But in the summer of 1967, Rodwell also decided to do something that was, in its own quiet way, more radical than marching. He wanted to open a bookstore.
Rodwell was the vice president of the Mattachine Society, a gay male political group. “I was trying to get the Society to be out dealing with the people instead of sitting in an office,” Rodwell had explained to Lahusen for an interview in her book, The Gay Crusaders. “We even looked at a few store-fronts. I wanted the Society to set up a combination bookstore, counseling service, fund-raising headquarters, and office. The main thing was to be out on the street.” When the Mattachine Society rejected Rodwell’s plans to open a bookstore, he resigned from the group and decided to do it alone.
The Stonewall protests two years later would draw broad attention to the struggle for gay liberation, but that struggle did not start in 1969. There were protests, and thriving gay communities, before that night in New York City—and Stonewall’s success was rooted in those earlier efforts.
Activists like Rodwell understood the value of visibility; he was among the architects of New York’s gay-pride parade. But some were struggling not just for rights or liberation, but for something still more revolutionary. They were fighting for what they called “gay power,” the authority to define their own identity. Their efforts produced the intellectual revolution that lent the Stonewall protests their power, and which helped ensure that long after the protests were over, the changes they wrought would endure.
The victories of Stonewall, then, had the unlikeliest of birthplaces: the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop.
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556f1558cbf7051ec51597906123402e | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176297 | Suspect Science: Today’s Anglo-American Eugenics | Suspect Science: Today’s Anglo-American Eugenics
Each of the three meetings of the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) were secretive affairs. Organized by University College London lecturer Dr. James Thompson between 2015 and 2017, the conference was invitation-only. Despite efforts to conceal the event and subsequent “disputes that eugenics was a major theme of these conferences,” the London Conference on Intelligence was a lightning rod for modern day eugenic thought. The release of University College London’s internal report on the LCI in February 2020 reveals the depth of this connection and exposes how eugenic ideas of old drive modern ethnonationalism.
A team of university investigators compiled the 110 page report on the conference and cautioned readers that only conference participants could be “certain” of what occurred in its closed meetings. The swaths of material redacted from the report to protect “large amounts of personal information” do little to aid understanding of the event. Outside observers must rely on the internal report’s “verbal accounts” and an appendix containing “publications relating to the London Conference on Intelligence” to evaluate the conference. Taken together, Thompson’s commentary and supporting literature from Mankind Quarterly link the London Conference on Intelligence to a eugenic network where the Pioneer Fund reigns supreme.
Established in 1937 to finance the education of children “descended predominately from white persons” and to “study and research into the problems of heredity and eugenics,” the Pioneer Fund was a rallying point for ideological extremes. Its earliest projects included the distribution of a Nazi propaganda film titled Erbkrank under the English translation Applied Eugenics in Present Day Germany. [1] In later years, Pioneer Fund financed research provided “intellectual” cover for everything from 1960s era American segregationist movements to 1970s era British fascist movements.
Faced with hard-won civil rights gains in the U.S., the Pioneer Fund funded White Citizens’ Council initiatives including a radio broadcast titled the Citizens’ Council Forum as early as 1959. Founded in July 1954, the White Citizens’ Council was driven by its unashamed opposition to Brown v. Board’s integration decree. Given the breadth and clarity of its resistance, financial contributions to the White Citizens’ Council were financial contributions to segregation. The Pioneer Fund’s financial support for segregationists became collaborative in 1961 when Pioneer Fund grantee Carleton Putnam addressed Citizen Council members on “Race and Reason Day” in Jackson, Mississippi. Standing in the Olympic Room of the Heidelberg Hotel, Carleton Putnam outlined a series of pro-segregation theories for an audience of Citizens’ Council supporters on an October afternoon, including a diatribe against “intermarrying.” A perennial tool of segregationists, Pioneer Fund research reached a transnational audience with the formation of the National Front.
Later, 1970s era British fascist groups including the National Front utilized Pioneer Fund research to underwrite their own prejudice. The National Front formed in 1967 with an electoral platform that opposed immigration and efforts to “destroy” the British Empire. Eugenics was a frequent topic of debate in National Front publications. In particular its magazine Spearhead, cited numerous Pioneer Fund grantees in an attempt to bolster its claims about racial difference in intelligence. In 1976, Spearhead went so far as to describe Pioneer Fund grantee Arthur Jensen’s research as “the most important factor in the build-up of self confidence among ‘racists.’”[2] Time and time again, the Pioneer Fund subsidized research that advanced eugenic theories about racial difference to actively undermine racial equality.
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3b74f61d9ff26abb0460f3f020b777e3 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176306 | Will Capitalist Consumer Culture Absorb Another Generation of Protest? | Will Capitalist Consumer Culture Absorb Another Generation of Protest?
photo public domain, courtesy Wikipedia
I just read conservative columnist Ross Douthat’s article “The Second Defeat of Bernie Sanders,” and it made me sad. What Douthat thinks may be occurring as a result of all the protests stemming from the knee-on-neck killing of George Floyd is that Sanders “may be losing the battle for the future of the left.” Douthat sees the anti-racist protests “earning support from just about every major corporate and cultural institution,” and they are doing so because these protests do not threaten corporation-dominated capitalism the way Bernie Sanders’s campaign, for the last four years, has scared the profiteers of our existing capitalism. One that has produced the likes of Big Oil’s misleading propaganda regarding climate change and Purdue Pharma’s marketing of OxyContin, which put profits before lives and helped produce the opioid crisis.
Douthat admits that the “current wave of protests will have unpredictable consequences.” Moreover, any results that reduce racism will be a major positive step forward. And yet… Bernie has stood for a major challenge to capitalism in the age of Trump. This challenge should not be absorbed like the consumer capitalism of the 1970s swallowed up the aspirations of many of the 1960s protesters--like a large ocean predator gulping up smaller fishes.
In his Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000), conservative columnist David Brooks wrote: “We’re by now all familiar with modern-day executives who have moved from S.D.S. [a radical student organization that flourished in the 1960s] to C.E.O. . . . Indeed, sometimes you get the impression the Free Speech Movement [begun in 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley] produced more corporate executives than Harvard Business School.”
In his The Culture of Narcissim (1978) historian Christopher Lasch identified a new type of culture that had arisen. It stressed self-awareness. But, unlike the counterculture of the 1960s, it did not oppose the capitalist consumer culture of its day, but rather meshed with it, goading “the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.”
Many of the former youth protesters of the 1960s participated in this “mass consumption,” as the growing consumer culture sold mass entertainment in new formats (including for music, films, and books) to young adults.
Recent decades have brought little relief from our culture of consumption and narcissism. One of the period’s most notable changes has been the expansion of the Internet and social media. In These Truths: A History of the United States, historian Jill Lepore states that “blogging, posting, and tweeting, artifacts of a new culture of narcissism,” became commonplace. In 2016, we Americans chose for our president perhaps the most narcissistic and materialistic man to ever hold the office—Donald Trump.
In an email in late June 2020, Sanders urged his followers to keep seeking “an economic system based on the principles of justice, not greed”; to “make health care a human right and not a jobs benefit”; and to “create millions of good jobs by implementing a Green New Deal as we lead the world in combating climate change.” These are the type of goals that appealed to many of Bernie’s supporters. They saw him as a candidate who would combat some of the abuses of U. S. capitalism, abuses that have led a majority of Democrats, especially younger ones, to look more favorably on the type of democratic socialism that has appeared in Western Europe than on the capitalism dominating in Trumpian America.
Capitalist deficiencies have long been apparent. Almost a half century ago the British economist and environmentalist E. F. Schumacher, like Sanders a democratic socialist, presaged Bernie by writing that capitalism failed to adequately consider “the availability of basic resources and, alternatively or additionally, the capacity of the environment to cope with the degree of interference implied.” By advertising and marketing, it also encouraged a “frenzy of greed and . . . an orgy of envy,” and “the cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom.” Moreover, by ignoring wisdom, humans were in danger of building up “a monster economy, which destroys the world.”
But the capitalism observed by Schumacher had been the dominant economy in the USA throughout the twentieth century. From the 1890s forward, as historian William Leach has written:
American corporate business, in league with key institutions, began the transformation of American society into a society preoccupied with consumption, with comfort and bodily well-being, with luxury, spending, and acquisition, with more goods this year than last, more next year than this. American consumer capitalism produced a culture almost violently hostile to the past and to tradition, a future-oriented culture of desire that confused the good life with goods. It was a culture that first appeared as an alternative culture . . . and then unfolded to become the reigning culture in the United States.
Many Americans, including U. S. presidents, perceived that ever-increasing consumption was necessary for the nation’s prosperity, though few would state the case as bluntly as one marketing consultant of the mid-1950s, who declared: “Our enormously productive economy . . .demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. . . . We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate.”
A 2020 critique of our present capitalism comes from Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s recently published book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Its authors write “Capitalism does not have to work as it does in America today. It does not need to be abolished, but it should be redirected to work in the public interest.” They believe (as does Bernie) that the “healthcare industry . . . is a cancer at the heart of the economy, one that has widely metastasized, bringing down wages, destroying good jobs, and making it harder and harder for state and federal governments to afford what their constituents need. Public purpose and the wellbeing of ordinary people are being subordinated to the private gain of the already well-off. None of this would be possible without the acquiescence—and sometimes enthusiastic participation—of the politicians who are supposed to act in the interest of the public.”
The authors also criticize “the rising economic and political power of corporations,” which has allowed them “to gain at the expense of ordinary people, consumers, and particularly workers. At its worst, this power has allowed some pharmaceutical companies, protected by government licensing, to make billions of dollars from sales of addictive opioids that were falsely peddled as safe, profiting by destroying lives. More generally, the American healthcare system is a leading example of an institution that, under political protection, redistributes income upward to hospitals, physicians, device makers, and pharmaceutical companies while delivering among the worst health outcomes of any rich country.”
Other critics of modern-day U. S. capitalism include Pope Francis, who has criticized modern-day capitalism as “unjust at its root,” and Pulitzer Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. In his People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (2019) Stiglitz argues for a more “progressive capitalism,” one that would recognize a “moral or transcendental ethic” and seek not just profits, but also the common good.
In a 2016 talk Sanders raised the question, “How moral is our economy?” In his 2020 campaign he indicated that our present Trumpian economy, which favors the rich, furthers inequality, and despoils our environment, is immoral.
Douthat suggests that Bernie’s criticism of capitalism is “losing the battle for the future of the left” because modern-day U. S. capitalism is indifferent to the protesters’ “purge of Confederate monuments” and that corporations can respond to police brutality criticisms by condemning racism without adopting the type of “transcendental ethic” that Stiglitz, Pope Francis, and Sanders are urging.
In an early 2020 HNN op-ed Gary Dorrien wrote that “Sanders lines up with FDR, Martin Luther King Jr., and Catholic social teaching in believing that real freedom includes economic security.” And, indeed, Martin Luther King, among others, perceived the necessity, as Michelle Alexander has written, of “openly critiquing an economic system that will fund war and will reward greed, hand over fist, but will not pay workers a living wage,” and he ignored “all those who told him to just stay in his lane, just stick to talking about civil rights.” In one of his better speeches, at New York’s Riverside Church in 1967, he said, “we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Douthat may be right. Present-day protests may make corporations less racist without affecting their essential nature. They were able to digest, and even profit from, the hippies and protesters of the 1960s and early 1970s--after all, at some point young adult protesters had to earn money and where else were they going to do that except within the U. S. capitalist economy?
Nevertheless, protesters and leftists in 2020 will be mistaken if they forget and fail to heed Bernie’s criticism of today’s corporate capitalism. Like that of MLK, Stiglitz, and Pope Francis, it contains much wisdom.
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654eb468610abfb5b50a6f131012e7cc | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176437 | Veterans Go to Washington--So What? | Veterans Go to Washington--So What?
For much of our history, a stint in the military, preferably as an officer, was a useful, even necessary, starting point for a political career. Mitch McConnell, for instance, has acknowledged that he joined the Army Reserve early in his career because "it was smart politically." (He lasted five weeks before being discharged for an eye condition and possibly thanks to political pull.)
In the military, young men, and more recently young women, practiced leadership skills, engaged in public service, made common cause with people of different backgrounds, and burnished their patriotic résumés, all of which was assumed to prepare them well for political life. That’s changed in recent years as the number of veterans in Congress has fallen significantly, but a change back may be coming as increasing numbers of Americans who fought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan run for office, while the opinions of veterans more generally have taken a distinctly negative turn on America’s forever wars.
While voters don't elect veterans just because they're veterans, polls consistently find that the public has more confidence in the military than in any other American institution. Not everyone who’s been in that military thinks the same way, of course, and veteran status is but one determinant in a politician's point of view. But a military usually has a powerful influence on its members, shaping their political, social, and decision-making attitudes and their ideas about the use of force as a means of achieving foreign-policy goals. Or so argue political scientists Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi who, in their influential book Choosing Your Battles, examined the impact of military experience on this country’s use of force abroad between 1816 and 1992, finding that it made a difference, sometimes a profound one. They concluded that the greater the proportion of veterans in the federal legislative and executive branches -- what they termed "the policymaking elite” -- the less likely the United States was to initiate wars of aggression. This "veteran effect," however, was anything but straightforward. While civilian elites were more likely to go to war for ideological, imperial, or moral imperatives, military elites leaned more toward pragmatism and a clearer examination of the situation on the ground as reasons for sending the military into battle.
Both groups, however, were convinced that force works and that the United States goes to war only when provoked (never by being provocative). Moreover, the authors found that, once a war started, the more veterans in leadership roles, the bloodier and longer the use of force, while civilian elites were more willing to place constraints on how the military was used. No surprise there: no military likes civilians telling it how to fight "its" wars, a tension that has appeared in the conflicts launched or supported by every recent administration.
Bear with me now because the research only gets more intriguing. An international study demonstrated that, as the number of women in a national legislature increases, countries are more likely to intervene militarily for humanitarian reasons, but not for other ones. Research also has confirmed that American presidents raised in the South have been twice as likely as other presidents to use force in international conflicts, were less likely to back down militarily, and were more likely to win.
These days, the American public apparently doesn't care much about veterans in the White House. Not counting George W. Bush's questionable turn in the Texas National Guard, the last executive who did active military service was Vice President Al Gore. The last two presidential candidates who were veterans -- John Kerry and John McCain -- lost to civilians and, of the four veterans who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination this year, only Pete Buttigieg got any traction through referring to his military experience (often). For the record, Joe Biden, whose two sons enlisted, avoided the draft via student deferments and asthma, while Donald Trump, who appointed more recent active-duty military officers to senior policy positions than at any time since World War II -- before he fired most of them -- side-stepped military service with the world's most famous bone spurs.
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718096959e4a75a6fa1086015b3d559b | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176542 | Back to School | Back to School
A savage irony inflects the debate over university campuses reopening this fall. All those campuses with their exquisite landscaping, their mausoleums to titans of private equity, their swanky LEED-certified buildings, and their recreation centers with climbing walls, all constructed at extraordinary expense to draw students and raise the ante in the college ranking game—all of them are potentially off-limits due to COVID-19.
Keep campuses closed through the fall, and administrators may plunge universities into insolvency. Open them up, and they risk fanning the flames of a pandemic.
Most universities are planning to open.
Some plan to bring some tuition-paying students back to their dorms, yet have most classes online. That seems backwards, since keeping students away from campuses—which have been compared to cruise ships and nursing homes as sites of rampant contagion—might seem like the highest public-health priority. Recently, an outbreak that infected at least 136 students at the University of Washington was traced back to fraternity housing, while Berkeley, which had enjoyed a relatively low incidence of the virus, traced 47 cases in one week to fraternity parties.
One must pity the administrators making these decisions—but not too much. The dilemmas they confront result from two generations of perverse transformation in higher education, for which they have been very well compensated. The great bubble that has funded university education in this period, characterized by ever-rising tuition, growing real estate footprints, and administrative bloat—paid for by an orgy of federally subsidized student loans and growing cohorts of foreign students paying full freight—is about to pop. An extinction event for a broad swath of American higher education looms on the horizon.
As it has in so many other areas of U.S. life, the COVID-19 pandemic is casting a harsh light on the dysfunction of American higher education and its move to a market paradigm. It’s not that university leaders necessarily want to open their campuses with new outbreaks looming in the fall. It’s that their business model leaves them no alternative.
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2c1bcbf3669f79584e1d3d7b88cf2b97 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176558 | Large DNA Study Traces Violent History of American Slavery | Large DNA Study Traces Violent History of American Slavery
More than one and a half centuries after the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended, a new study shows how the brutal treatment of enslaved people has shaped the DNA of their descendants.
The report, which included more than 50,000 people, 30,000 of them with African ancestry, agrees with the historical record about where people were taken from in Africa, and where they were enslaved in the Americas. But it also found some surprises.
For example, the DNA of participants from the United States showed a significant amount of Nigerian ancestry — far more than expected based on the historical records of ships carrying enslaved people directly to the United States from Nigeria.
At first, historians working with the researchers “couldn’t believe the amount of Nigerian ancestry in the U.S.,” said Steven Micheletti, a population geneticist at 23andMe who led the study.
After consulting another historian, the researchers learned that enslaved people were sent from Nigeria to the British Caribbean, and then were further traded into the United States, which could explain the genetic findings, he said.
The study illuminates one of the darkest chapters of world history, in which 12.5 million people were forcibly taken from their homelands in tens of thousands of European ships. It also shows that the historical and genetic records together tell a more layered and intimate story than either could alone.
The study, which was published on Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics, represents “real progress in how we think that genetics contributes to telling a story about the past,” said Alondra Nelson, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who was not involved in the study.
Although the work is commendable for making use of both historical and genetic data, Dr. Nelson said, it was also “a missed opportunity to take the full step and really collaborate with historians.” The history of the different ethnic groups in Africa, for example, and how they related to modern and historical geographic boundaries, could have been explored in greater depth, she said.
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c8d22ee4b8cbb6cb5651c573be49e65b | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176774 | Let Us Drink in Public | Let Us Drink in Public
...
Racial disparity in the application of drinking laws tracks across the rest of the country, as does outsized enforcement in poor and working-class communities. These disparities helped motivate New Orleans lawmakers to finally shuffle off the coil of public drinking laws in 2001. As Henry Grabar writes, “the New Orleans City Council repealed the city’s open container law, which had been enforced with an 80-20 racial bias, after a black man carrying a beer was shot and killed by police.”
Many modern open container laws derive from previous “public drunkenness” and “vagrancy” ordinances that criminalized not just alcoholism, but also poverty and homelessness. In 1953, Chicago established such a law against “drinking in the public way” as a means of expelling what were called “bottle gangs” — groups of men who were, in reality, often doing nothing more than congregating on city streets.
In the 1960s, as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, the racially motivated enforcement of these laws was contested in court, and many were ruled unconstitutional. As a result, rather than outlawing “drunkenness,” in subsequent years, many cities and municipalities moved to instead simply ban the act of public drinking itself.
These new laws fit into a broader pattern of “broken windows” policing that took hold of much of American policing in the 1980s and beyond, viewing petty violations like open alcohol consumption as a pathway to criminality. In effect, they offer law enforcement new opportunities to ticket and detain large numbers of people for doing nothing wrong or socially harmful while hanging out in public.
As Grabar points out, the language of New York’s bill banning open containers was hardly subtle: “When New York City banned open containers from its streets in 1979, lawmakers were quite explicit about the law’s intent: ‘We do not recklessly expect the police to give a summons to a Con Ed worker having a beer with his lunch,’ a sponsor of the bill told the Times. ‘This is for those young hoodlums with wine bottles who harass our women and intimidate our senior citizens.’”
This motive continues to inform the law’s enforcement. Since January, 91 percent of public drinking tickets handed out by the NYPD went to Black and Latinx New Yorkers, even as the pandemic ravaged the city. The takeaway is clear: These laws have never been meant to improve public safety, but rather give police tools to target those who they see fit. This unjust order will continue to produce racist and biased outcomes, until it’s overturned.
...
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4961a09aca1db925350d30700156b5c6 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176789 | China and the United States Could Avoid an Unnecessary War | China and the United States Could Avoid an Unnecessary War
Although few Americans seem to have noticed, China and the United States are currently on a collision course—one that could easily lead to war.
Their dispute, which has reached the level of military confrontation, concerns control of the South China Sea. For many years, China has claimed sovereignty over 90 percent of this vast, island-studded region—a major maritime trade route rich in oil, natural gas, and lucrative fishing areas. But competing claims for portions of the South China Sea have been made for decades by other nations that adjoin it, including Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Starting in 2013, China began to assert its control more forcefully by island-building in the Paracel and Spratly Islands—expanding island size or creating new islands while constructing ports, airstrips, and military installations on them.
Other countries, however, protested Chinese behavior. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague, acting on a complaint by the Philippines that Chinese action violated the freedom of navigation guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, decided in favor of the Philippines, although it did not rule on the ownership of the islands. In response, the government of China, a party to the UN treaty, refused to accept the court’s jurisdiction. Meanwhile, the U.S. government, which was not a party to the treaty, insisted on the treaty’s guarantee of free navigation and proceeded to challenge China by sailing its warships through waters claimed by the Chinese government.
Actually, the positions of the Chinese and U.S. governments both have some merit. The Chinese, after all, conducted a variety of operations in this maritime region for millennia. Also, some of the islands are currently controlled by other claimants (such as Vietnam), and China has been working for years with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on a Code of Conduct that might finally resolve the regional dispute. Nevertheless, the U.S. government can point to China’s provocative militarization of the islands, the rejection of China’s stance by most other nations in Southeast Asia, and the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
But the bottom line is that the issue of legitimate control remains unclear and, meanwhile, both the Chinese and U.S. governments are engaging in reckless behavior that could lead to disaster.
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2295353291ae939925a856978489ad76 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176808 | Manhattan Beach to Present Bruce's Beach History, Community Awaits Historians' Voices | Manhattan Beach to Present Bruce's Beach History, Community Awaits Historians' Voices
Manhattan Beach staffers will deliver a presentation of historical facts surrounding the city’s Bruce’s Beach Park at next week’s City Council meeting, but it will lack the presence of experts that officials had initially planned on and that some in the community had looked forward to.
The city had been trying to include those voices. But confirming exactly who would present information, as well as the breadth of the conversation, has forced officials to continually push back the date for the dialogue.
And now, the Tuesday, Aug. 18, meeting will include a staff presentation only.
The reason, it appears, centers on a dispute between the city and one of its originally scheduled speakers, historian and writer Alison Rose Jefferson. Jefferson — the author of “Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era,” which includes a chapter dedicated to Bruce’s Beach — initially agreed to speak at a council meeting.
But talks — largely between Jefferson and Councilmember Nancy Hersman — about which educational materials the city would provide the community broke down late last month. Jefferson ultimately nixed her appearance. And what followed were rumors that the city never reached out to the historian, and Hersman and Jefferson offering different versions of why the latter backed out.
Those differing accounts, as well as the rumors, come — much like the renewed spotlight on Bruce’s Beach — amid a national civil rights movement, which includes ongoing, often uncomfortable conversations about who gets to tell the stories of the Black community and the generations of systemic racism Black people have faced.
“This is a bigger thing than me,” Jefferson said, “than all of us.
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f1dff173679733e0dad10a39d9323c25 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176857 | Kamala Harris isn’t the First Black Woman to Run for VP. Meet Charlotta Bass | Kamala Harris isn’t the First Black Woman to Run for VP. Meet Charlotta Bass
More than half a century before Sen. Kamala D. Harris was named Joe Biden’s running mate Tuesday, another Black woman from California took the stage at a Chicago convention to make a momentous declaration.
“This is a historic moment in American political life,” the journalist and political activist Charlotta Bass told the crowd. “Historic for myself, for my people, for all women. For the first time in the history of this nation a political party has chosen a Negro woman for the second highest office in the land.”
Indeed, while Harris will indeed be the first Black woman and the first Asian American to appear on a major-party ticket, she is not the first Black woman to run for vice president. That title belongs to Bass, who joined a long-shot Progressive Party ticket in 1952, more than a decade before the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.
Martha Jones, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, said Bass is one of several key figures who paved the way for Harris and several other contenders for Biden’s vice-presidential pick. As a Los Angeles civic leader and the publisher of a major Black newspaper, Bass chronicled and commented on politics before entering the fray herself.
“I don’t think you can understand how we got here in 2020 if you don’t appreciate the way in which Black women have built this moment,” Jones told The Washington Post. “Kamala D. Harris doesn’t just drop from the sky. She’s a political figure whose career is very much linked to a history."
Bass’s chapter in that narrative starts in 1910, when she moved from her native South Carolina to Los Angeles and started working at the California Eagle, an influential Black weekly newspaper, according to Denise Lynn, a historian at the University of Southern Indiana. Bass and her husband became joint publishers, though she took over fully following his death in 1934.
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db2f69683ebe37161194d1f162c75257 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176862 | A Black Nurse Saved Lives. Today She May Save Art | A Black Nurse Saved Lives. Today She May Save Art
In June, Laura Voisin George, a graduate student, was writing a scholarly article about a series of Works Progress Administration frescoes at the University of California, San Francisco.
The 10 panels of “History of Medicine in California,” completed in 1938 by Bernard Zakheim, a Polish-born muralist, show such scenes as Native Americans offering herbs to doctors and a trapper inoculating someone with the smallpox vaccine.
Voisin George recognized a central figure in one of the vivid social realist tableaus. Biddy Mason, a Black nurse, is depicted alongside a white doctor as they treat a malaria patient. Mason, a woman who was born into slavery in 1818, went on to become a midwife, a nurse, a philanthropist and a founder of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles.
Voisin George, who studies history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, learned that the frescoes were about to be destroyed while she was researching. The Jewish News of Northern California reported the news. Her reaction, she said, was: “What? How could this be?”
The university had announced plans to demolish the building to make way for a state-of-the-art research center. It had informed Zakheim’s son Nathan that if his family didn’t retrieve the frescoes, which weigh as much as 2,500 pounds, they would be destroyed.
Until Voisin George identified Mason, neither the artist’s family nor university officials knew about her presence in the frescoes. As news outlets have reported this discovery, Mason has become a star of the murals and their potential savior. An assertion by the federal government that it owns the frescoes has further complicated matters.
Adam Gottstein, the artist’s grandson, said that the university’s placing responsibility on the family to save the artwork “boiled my blood.” It showed a “complete lack of respect and concern for historical art.” Mason’s presence, he said, “adds considerable pressure to UCSF to do the right thing.”
The frescoes were part of the WPA’s Federal Art Project, which hired unemployed artists. Since their creation, the Zakheim murals have been praised, criticized and painted over because a professor said they distracted medical students attending lectures in the auditorium where they are on display. Because of concerns about earthquakes, that auditorium is no longer used.
In 2015, Polina Ilieva, UCSF’s archivist, wrote that the murals “remain the jewel of the university’s art collection.”
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fc2b9de1bc7f43f114240d6fa69b9ecd | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176907 | A Saint's Sins | A Saint's Sins
The campaign for Father Serra’s canonization began in the 1930s, and quickly became a subject of controversy. Father Serra had his fervent backers — one California real estate developer had 100 statues of him cast from a single mold, and sent the monuments to Catholic schools and missions throughout the state, praising the friar as “the first developer of California.”
He also had his furious detractors, among them Native Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic, who attempted to offer historical and anthropological evidence that Father Serra’s missions had been calamitous for their people. Yet, as Dr. Sandos wrote in a 1988 issue of The American Historical Review, while church officials had solicited the input of professional historians, they disregarded research on the physical toll the mission system had taken on Native populations as well as “Serra’s own words, the growing body of evidence from Indians, and the insights available from anthropology, all of which would have contributed to a balanced view of the past.”
It’s not possible to say whether Father Serra would have been canonized had a fuller historical picture been presented. But for Ernestine de Soto, an 82-year-old member of the Barbareño Band of Chumash Indians, there is no question that he is a true saint.
“We’ve been Catholic since the Franciscans’ arrival,” Ms. de Soto, whose mother, Mary, was the last fluent speaker of the Chumash language, told me.
She believes her prayers to Father Serra saved her adult daughter, who was hospitalized with severe pneumonia and little hope. “I begged Father Serra to give my daughter back to me,” she said. “And I said I would be forever devoted to him, and I am.”
Ms. de Soto is devastated by attacks on Father Serra’s statues. She does not dispute what the historical record says about life in the mission system, but thinks Father Serra has received an unfair share of blame. “Why are we dumping everything on him when there were all these Spanish soldiers everywhere?,” she asked pointedly, “why isn’t anyone burning the Presidios?”
Vincent Medina, a Muwekma Ohlone Native American from the San Francisco Bay Area, views Father Serra with a more critical eye. “These statues bring up a lot of feelings: Feelings of invisibility, and the feelings brought up by the crimes, the sins they committed against us, against our ancestors,” he told me. Mr. Medina, whose work ranges from preserving (and serving) Ohlone cuisine to teaching and sharing the Chochenyo language, was baptized Catholic, and worked at the Mission Dolores for several years as a curator.
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c9ad8bf6bd10dc28387a38b72c94579e | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176935 | UNC Chapel Hill Cancels In-Person Classes as Coronavirus Cases Climb | UNC Chapel Hill Cancels In-Person Classes as Coronavirus Cases Climb
...
Jay Smith, a history professor at UNC Chapel Hill, told Spectrum News, "Great relief was the initial impression."
But, he said, "It shouldn't have taken so many infections."
"It was very frustrating that it took this much hard evidence" to move classes online, Smith said. "This was the most predictable disaster in the history of disasters."
Sherryl Kleinman, who has lived in Chapel Hill for 40 years and taught sociology at the university for 38, told Spectrum News 1, "The UNC-CH plan falls far short of what is needed. The University cannot control the density of fraternity or sorority houses, those living in apartments in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and not even in dorms on campus."
She said she hoped university administrators would work with other campuses in the UNC System to return to all online classes and close on-campus student housing.
North Carolina remains in Phase 2 of Gov. Roy Cooper's reopening plan. New coronavirus cases around the state have been trending downward, but there are still almost 1,000 people hospitalized with the virus in the state as of Monday.
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63972299a42c60d0397ef8d7b047dc17 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176992 | Harris’s Speech Placed Her In The Long Legacy Of Black Women Who Built America | Harris’s Speech Placed Her In The Long Legacy Of Black Women Who Built America
On Wednesday, Kamala D. Harris delivered her first official address as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate. Her speech began by evoking the names of formidable Black women: Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Lou Hamer, Constance Motley, Shirley Chisholm and others. She was linking her candidacy to a long, rich history of Black women who have pushed the country toward its democratic ideals.
Harris is the first Black woman to be selected for the second-in-command slot and could be the first Black female vice president, and eventually the first-ever Black female president. To be clear, she is not the Black woman who happens to be a vice-presidential candidate. She is a Black woman vice-presidential candidate. Her identity matters deeply. Historically, Black women have been at the forefront of political, economic and social change and being part of this lineage is how Harris ended up on the Democratic ticket.
It was Black women who made this country. During slavery, Black women toiled in fields and were preyed upon in the house. Black women’s wombs served as the engines of American slavery, reproducing lives and labor. Black women were the original housekeepers and homemakers who lived through the irony of being slandered as unfit mothers and while being perfectly capable of nursing and raising White children for success.
Enslaved Black women resisted their oppression and fought to end the institution of slavery. In fact, abolitionist Frederick Douglass was adamant that “when the true history of the anti-slavery cause shall be written, woman will occupy a large space in its pages; for the cause of the slavery has been peculiarly woman’s cause.” Historians have written painstakingly about Black women bearing the brunt of violence, enduring sexual assault, the theft of their children and a more difficult path to escape slavery’s grip.
It was Black women who channeled grief with inequality into demands for equality. It was a Black woman, Elizabeth Freedman, who was the first African American woman to successfully file a lawsuit for freedom in Massachusetts in 1781 and win her freedom. She challenged the hypocrisy of the Founders, who cried for liberty while owning enslaved people. These women changed the course of history, created precedents and enabled Americans to reimagine what was possible in the face of insurmountable odds.
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60cabb459fb7fedd9eaf567c75057f1f | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176994 | For 100 Years, El Monte Has Celebrated A Blatant Historical Falsehood. Why? | For 100 Years, El Monte Has Celebrated A Blatant Historical Falsehood. Why?
If we all agree that a lie is a lie, is that enough to replace it with the truth? If the people who started this lie are no longer here, why does it linger? Where does it get its strength? What do we need to defeat it?
This particular lie is at least 97 years old. Its exact origins are hard to trace, but its trajectory and path are rather easy to follow. The lie involves the Southern California city of El Monte, and you can find it in the title and subject of a small book published by the El Monte Lodge in 1923 called A History of El Monte: The End of the Santa Fe Trail.
That famous 19th-century trail, which turns 200 next year, begins in Franklin, Missouri, and ends in Santa Fe, New Mexico, nearly 850 miles east of El Monte. But by the 1930s, officials of that San Gabriel Valley city were holding public celebrations, putting up monuments to the Santa Fe Trail, and even staging a play called The End of the Santa Fe Trail at El Monte High School’s auditorium. This lie needed to be cared for, preserved, and displayed, so the city created the El Monte Historical Society in 1938. Throughout the 20th century, this lie has continued to endure, receiving support from mayors, councilmembers, and community leaders. It currently can be found in the city’s official logo and official museum.
Why this lie? It connects El Monte to Westward Expansion after the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, firmly lodging the city within the U.S. nation-state and cutting off anything or anyone that came before the first American families in El Monte in the 19th century.
“The pioneers of any new country are deserving of a big niche in our histories and we cannot love and respect their memory too much,” wrote the author of the 1923 book. How exactly one could love and respect someone’s memory too much is not clear. But in 1973, Lillian Wiggins, director of the El Monte Historical Museum from 1961 to the 1990s, affirmed the city’s exclusive devotion.
Speaking to the L.A. Times, Wiggins, a descendant of El Monte’s first American families, said that the museum’s collections were “strictly ‘wagon trail.’” By which she meant that the museum’s focus was devoted to the end of Santa Fe Trail, the so-called pioneers, and the wagons that brought them. This narrative stands in stark contrast against the demographic reality of El Monte, which has been home to significant Mexican American and Japanese American communities since the early 20th century, and in the last decades, has become a majority-minority city.
....
Rather than the “End of the Santa Fe Trail,” El Monte and South El Monte have been the sites of conflict and contests, often driven by racial hierarchies, for the past 300 years. The area’s real stories are not about wagon-riding white pioneers but about rebellious leaders such as Toypurina, the Gabrielino medicine women who led a rebellion against Spanish colonial rule in 1785; the transnational Mexican anarchist and intellectual Ricardo Flores Magón, who agitated against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz in the 1900s and briefly resided in El Monte; and El Monte native Gloria Arellanes, who held a leadership position in the Brown Berets during the Chicano Movement.
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d39c2449293ff3a7e982f7f848a61bcb | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177012 | A Detailed Look at the Downside of California’s Ban on Affirmative Action | A Detailed Look at the Downside of California’s Ban on Affirmative Action
Twenty-four years ago, California was consumed by debate over affirmative action. A charismatic Black businessman named Ward Connerly led support for Proposition 209, a ballot initiative to ban racial preferences in admission to the state’s world-renowned public universities. The measure passed with 55 percent of the vote and inspired similar changes in nearly a dozen other states.
This November, with an initiative to repeal Proposition 209 on the ballot, California voters will have the opportunity to change their minds. And a comprehensive study released Friday finds that by nearly every measure, the ban has harmed Black and Hispanic students, decreasing their number in the University of California system while reducing their odds of finishing college, going to graduate school and earning a high salary. At the same time, the policy didn’t appear to greatly benefit the white and Asian-American students who took their place.
Affirmative action, Mr. Connerly has said, is outdated, unfair and bad for everyone — including students of color. Of Black students, he said: “Do you know what reinforces the idea that they’re inferior? Being told they need a preference to succeed.”
Opponents of affirmative action have aggressively challenged race-based preferences in the Supreme Court, and are expected to do so again. This month, President Trump’s Department of Justice accused Yale of illegal admissions discrimination against white and Asian-American students.
In California, the effect of Proposition 209 on the state’s elite universities was immediate. Black and Hispanic enrollment at the flagship Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses fell steeply. Legal challenges to the policy were beaten back. A generation of students has since come and gone.
Now a Berkeley economist, Zachary Bleemer, has conducted the first comprehensive study of what actually happened to those students. He assembled an anonymized database of every student who applied to eight campuses in the University of California system from 1994 to 2002, including their high school grades, demographics, income and SAT scores. He tracked where they went to college, whether in California or elsewhere, along with their academic majors and degrees. For those in California, he also tracked what courses they took and how much they earned in the job market for years after graduation.
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62745f23f104fb0cdb4370011f0aa11d | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177021 | For Japanese Americans, Housing Injustices Outlived Internment | For Japanese Americans, Housing Injustices Outlived Internment
On the second weekend of May 1946, more than 500 Japanese-Americans arrived at a dusty, ripped-up corner of Los Angeles County adjacent to a Lockheed Corporation bomber factory. Their bags were unloaded and piled next to bulldozers still planing the dirt outside their new homes, a cobbled-together assortment of used federal housing trailers in glistening silver and bland shades of green.
As the children — who made up nearly two-thirds of the new tenants — played, their parents and grandparents inspected the homes of the new Winona trailer camp. Fewer than a fifth of the trailers had working stoves, and those that did were in such disrepair that four fires ignited in one day. Broken windows and unlockable doors were common. The only phone was protected by a guard whose stated duty was to secure only the property of the site’s contractors, not its residents. There was no food, electricity or heat. Toilets were housed in a communal building, and not connected to the sewer.
“The trailers were so filthy that an animal should not have been expected to live in them,” said Seldon Martin, a Social Security Board official responsible for overseeing the well-being of the occupants, after visiting the camp. “Undoubtedly it was worse than any housing the Japanese had to put up with during evacuation.”
A year earlier, those same people had sat in internment camps across the American West. As they searched for their bags in the trailer camp a year later, county officials scrambled around them to arrange meals from a nearby tuberculosis sanitarium. Similar situations played out up and down the West Coast, as tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans returned after more than three years of incarceration. But they weren’t returning to the world they left.
After President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 paved the way for their removal, Japanese-Americans sold their homes, farms and businesses, often for pennies on the dollar. While incarcerated they worked menial jobs for $12 or $16 or $19 a month — hardly enough to survive on, let alone save for a new beginning. Unable to return to their farms — restrictive covenants and alien land laws often banned Japanese-Americans and their Japanese parents — many who worked on or owned strawberry or lettuce fields before the war moved to Los Angeles and became gardeners, trying to settle into an urban life for the first time in their lives.
Los Angeles, which was home to the largest ethnically Japanese community in North America before the war, was changing, too. The War Relocation Authority, the federal agency tasked with operating the 10 internment camps, worked to empty those camps as quickly as possible following Roosevelt’s closure order in December 1944. The W.R.A. shuttered almost all the camps in the fall of 1945. (One camp, Tule Lake, remained open until March 1946 to house “disloyal” incarcerees.) Each internee received $25 and a train ticket to wherever they wanted to go.
Housing was strained to the seams across the United States, but the situation in Los Angeles, described by one official in October 1945 as “full of dynamite,” was especially dire. More than 1.3 million people — roughly one out of every 100 Americans — moved to California between 1940 and 1944. The California State Reconstruction and Reemployment Commission estimated that 625,000 new homes would need to be built to accommodate the growth in the five years following the war, including 280,000 in Los Angeles County alone. During the war, Little Tokyo first became a ghost town, then swelled with Southern Black workers arriving for defense jobs; for three years Little Tokyo was known as Bronzeville. It was into this chaos that the W.R.A. planned to unload 1,200 incarcerees each week that fall.
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8b0e5fccafa69d642dfe141094f7fcf9 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177121 | Ancestry Promises Holocaust Records Will Be Free | Ancestry Promises Holocaust Records Will Be Free
Steven Spielberg’s U.S.C. Shoah Foundation has partnered with the genealogy giant Ancestry to digitize about 50,000 records, adding to a free searchable database in Ancestry’s Holocaust archive.
The Shoah Foundation’s partnership, and an additional nine million records from the Arolsen Archives in Germany that Ancestry digitized this year to add to its site, nearly doubles the size of Ancestry’s Holocaust archives.
The partnership makes available a Shoah Foundation index of survivor video interviews, and, from the Arolsen Archives, a trove of passenger lists of displaced persons and other persecution documents.
But a recent glitch during a soft launch trial run left some survivors and their family members, already uncomfortable about having so much sensitive information public, wondering just what is free and what isn’t. A formal announcement of the partnership and a media rollout, originally set for Wednesday, is now slated for Sept. 2.
“The customer experience was not optimal” during the soft launch, an Ancestry spokeswoman said in a statement. “We regret that some individuals had an experience during this period that led to the impression the materials were not free.” (My maternal grandparents recorded video testimony with the Shoah Foundation in the 1990s. When I tried to access the records, like Shoah testimony and concentration camp documents, on Ancestry’s free guest membership, I hit the paywall.)
While access to those records was being fixed, there has been past confusion. Those paying members who access the 10 million Arolsen records that Ancestry received last August continued to pay fees to view a collection that was promised as free. The company would not say whether it would offer refunds to those customers and maintains that access has been free.
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be95503a14107b58c0fec01a845c2653 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177226 | Will California Voters End a 24-Year Ban on Affirmative Action? | Will California Voters End a 24-Year Ban on Affirmative Action?
This November, California voters will have the chance to repeal the state’s longtime ban on affirmative action. A state ballot measure, Proposition 16, will be the first major test of voter enthusiasm for social justice measures since the May 28 murder of George Floyd.
The ban on the use of affirmative action by state government was passed as a ballot measure (Proposition 209) in 1996 with strong support from Republican Governor Pete Wilson.
Proposition 16, if passed, would allow the state to use affirmative action programs in government hiring, contracting and university admissions. The measure’s most immediate impact would be on college admissions, where officials could once again use an applicant’s race as a factor in determining acceptance.
The ballot proposition, which would amend the state’s constitution, needs a simple majority to take effect. It was placed on the ballot after a June 24 vote in the Democratic-controlled state Senate. The Senate vote came shortly after the university board of regents voted unanimously to endorse the ballot measure and one month after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Nine States Ban Affirmative Action
California is currently one of nine states that have a ban on affirmative action; the others are Washington, Texas, Florida, Michigan, Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma and New Hampshire. No state that imposed an affirmative action ban, has later had it repealed by voters or the legislature. In November 2019, Washington State voters narrowly defeated a measure to repeal that state’s ban on affirmative action.
How did California, now seen as a bastion of progressive legislation, pass a ban on affirmative action?
The 1990s were a period of rapid change and social unrest in the Golden State. Between 1988 and 1992 the state experienced a 42% increase in illegal immigration. In 1992, Los Angeles endured three days of rioting after the acquittal at trial of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King.
A “tough on crime” mood infused state politics. In 1994, Pete Wilson won a tough re-election campaign and state voters approved two conservative-backed ballot measures, Propositions 184 and 187. The former, dubbed “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” lengthened criminal sentencing, while the latter denied health and welfare benefits to undocumented workers.
By 1996, Governor Wilson was contemplating a run at the Republican presidential nomination and saw the rise in illegal immigration as an issue he could use to his advantage. Ward Connerly, a Black businessman appointed by Wilson to the university board of regents, became the most prominent supporter of Proposition 209, the measure banning affirmative action. In speeches and editorials, Connerly characterized it as a “civil rights” measure.
Shifting Demographics
In 1996, the California electorate was 74% white. Proposition 209 passed by an overwhelmingly majority of white voters, 63-37%, while being opposed by majorities of Black, Hispanic and Asian voters, who constituted a small fraction of the electorate.
Today, the demographics of California have shifted. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, Whites in California make up only 42% of California’s adult population but 58% of the state’s likely voters. In comparison, Latinos comprise 35% of the adult population but just 19% of likely voters.
Asian Americans make up 15% of adults and 13% of likely voters. African Americans comprise 6% of both the adult population and likely voters.
The repeal measure will benefit from a well-funded “Yes” campaign, which has raised more than $3 million. The “Yes” campaign enjoys the support of the state’s leading Democrats and most major unions. Proposition 16 opponents, who have tapped Proposition 209 backer Ward Connerly as a spokesperson, have raised only around $100,000.
The Asian American community appears to be divided in its support. While State Controller Betty Yee, the state’s highest elected Asian American, supports Proposition 16, the Silicon Valley Chinese Association, a business group, strongly opposes it. The group’s president, Crystal Lu, said “We cannot let government choose winners or losers on the basis of your race or gender.”
Although the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) systems have been prohibited from using racial quotas in recent decades, they have implemented policies to diversify enrollment by giving weight to applicants’ economic status.
In 2019, White students comprised 22% of UC undergraduates and 21% of CSU’s, compared to the 36% of the adult population.
While Latinos comprise 39% of the state’s adults, they make up 25% of UC undergraduates and 44% of CSU’s. Note that in 2019, Latinos comprised 55% of high school graduates. Asian Americans comprise about 14% of the adult population but 33% of UC undergraduates, the largest share of any racial group
African Americans make up about 6.5 % of state’s adult population, but only 4% of undergraduates at both the UC and CSU systems.
While no major statewide polls have been conducted on Proposition 16, many of the state’s political experts believe it will pass. The November ballot will include Democratic nominees Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the state’s popular U.S. Senator. California is strongly anti-Trump and a large turnout is expected, which should favor progressive candidates and social justice causes.
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42f3158e359bdd4e582a5193d322f031 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177328 | How an American TV Mini-Series Helped the Germans Acknowledge the Holocaust | How an American TV Mini-Series Helped the Germans Acknowledge the Holocaust
Meryl Streep in Holocaust, NBC, 1978
In a fascinating book, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019), philosopher Susan Neiman praises the German people for coming to terms with their country’s role in the Holocaust. The reckoning took time, Neiman reports. For a few decades after the Second World War there was not much public discussion or teaching about the subject in Germany. In the late 1970s, however, a significant change occurred. Germans began to deal more openly and frankly with the record of Nazi persecutions.
A visitor to present-day Germany can find numerous examples of this “remembrance,” notes Susan Neiman. There is a memorial to the Holocaust at the center of Berlin and there are “Stumbling Stones,” small brass plaques around the city indicating where Jews and other victims of the Nazis lived before deportation. Exhibits about the Holocaust can be found throughout the country, and educational programs at Buchenwald and other concentration camps describe horrible practices at these sites. On the anniversaries of tragic events, such as Kristallnacht, Germany holds “public rites of repentance.” Neiman says Americans can learn how to confront their nation’s troublesome history of slavery and racial oppression by considering Germany’s progress dealing with unpleasant facts about the past.
Why did the German people’s curiosity and interest in the Holocaust surge in the late 1970s? Years ago, I discovered an important clue to this attitudinal change when conducting research for my 2002 book, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood. Working on a chapter called “Impact,” I examined history-oriented dramatic films that influenced public opinion and behavior in significant ways. During that investigation, I came upon details concerning Holocaust, an American-made mini-series that NBC released in the United States in 1978. Subsequent programming in Britain, France, and Sweden attracted large audiences. The greatest buzz and public discussion took place in Germany.
Holocaust is a four-part docudrama with mostly fictional characters. Among its stars is Meryl Streep, then a young actress in an early stage of an extraordinary career. At the center of the story is a kind and respected Jewish medical doctor, Josef Weiss, and his extended family. Weiss’s nemesis is Erik Dorf, an unemployed lawyer who joins the Nazis. Eventually Dorf becomes a deputy to Reinhard Heydrich, a principal leader of the “Final Solution.” By the end of the film, most members of Josef Weiss’s family perish. The story exposes viewers to major historical developments from 1935 to 1945, including the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, concentration camps, and the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
When Holocaust became available for West German television in 1979, some German TV executives did not want to broadcast the film. One complained that it represented “cheap commercialism” in a soap opera format. A program director dismissed the production as typical Hollywood entertainment, “not quite real, not quite truth.” Despite the executives’ resistance, the program appeared on local TV stations and it became an instant hit. About half of West Germany’s population viewed some or all programs in the series, and many people in East Germany managed to watch it through antenna reception. About 30,000 viewers called television stations, requesting information. They asked: How could it happen? How many people knew?
The film made a significant impact on German society. A few months after its broadcast, West Germany scrapped the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes. Media attention to the film provoked a “historians’ debate,” leading scholars to clash on questions about lessons from the record of German society under the Nazis. Educational leaders responded to the public’s interest by developing new courses for schools.
Books and documentary films about the Nazis and the Holocaust appeared in Germany before 1979, but they did not excite the degree of curiosity and interest that the mini-series aroused. Several media analysts in Germany pointed to the dramatic film’s powerful effect. Viewers became emotionally attached to the characters. They were upset when seeing the Germans’ indifference to human suffering and seeing Jewish figures harassed or cut down in brutal actions. Previous reports about this tragic history provided only names and numbers, the analysts noted. This production displayed the impact of historical events in graphic form. The victims seemed like real people. Audiences cared about the Jewish characters’ fate.
Susan Neiman makes a good point in her book. Americans, now struggling to acknowledge their country’s history of racial oppression and wishing to do something about it can learn from Germany’s progress toward “remembering.” Yet the Americans’ recognition of evils from history is not as limited as Neiman suggests. “Hollywood,” the generic name for America’s vast film and video-based industry, has made some worthy contributions to humanitarian awakenings. Holocaust helped Germans to confront their troubled past, and in another notable example, Hollywood confronted Americans with demons from their history.
Marvin J. Chomsky, the director of Holocaust, tugged at the heartstrings of American viewers through broadcast of an emotionally powerful drama on ABC Television in 1977, a year before the release of Holocaust. Roots, a mini-series about the experience of Africans and African Americans in slavery,attracted enormous audiences. The fourth and final program of Roots became the most-watched single episode of an American television show in history up to that point. Chomsky’s Roots did for the American people what Holocaust did for the Germans. The film aroused viewers to ask questions and seek information about a history that was less familiar than it should have been.
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45915a4ed7b06df4ae37468b1d6980c3 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177331 | Prop 16 and the "Chinese Virus" Bring Two Views of Asian American History into Conflict | Prop 16 and the "Chinese Virus" Bring Two Views of Asian American History into Conflict
Anti-Proposition 16 Car Parade, San Francisco Peninsula, August 2020
Nationwide Black Lives Matter protests over the past several months have rejuvenated fights against ongoing racism. A surge of harassment and assault against Asian Americans during the pandemic signifies the recurrence of xenophobia and racial animosity. The racialization of Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus” awakens the dormant yellow peril trope. Meanwhile, a group of Chinese Americans, mostly first-generation immigrants, have been organizing flag-flying, placard-displaying car rallies in the Bay Area and southern California, protesting Proposition 16—a ballot measure that aims to restore affirmative action in California.
Disregarding the structural inequalities that race and gender-conscious affirmative action seeks to dismantle, anti-Prop 16 protesters embrace a conception of equality that comprises two basic ideas: individual effort and colorblindness. They consequently consider racial and gender preferences inherently discriminatory. To comprehend this individualistic view underscoring mere surface equality requires one to trace the history of Chinese Americans’ struggle for equality.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a group of Chinese American social activists, inspired by the civil rights movement, contested surface equality in American courts. Lau v. Nichols is a landmark case wherein limited-English-speaking students of Chinese ancestry in San Francisco alleged the denial of equal educational opportunity by the school district due to the lack of bilingual education. The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1974 that “there is no equality of treatment” without adequate bilingual education, the “effect” of which constituted discrimination. Mandating “different treatment,” the court directed the school district to “take affirmative steps to rectify the language deficiency” for racial minority students. As direct beneficiaries, Chinese American students enjoyed the benefits of these structural improvements.
In a more open and equal social milieu, a growing yet diverse Chinese American community emerged. The ethnic Chinese population almost doubled in the 1970s as a result of the Hart–Celler Immigration Act of 1965. This more liberal immigration law favored immigrants seeking family reunification and those with professional occupations. Many Chinese Americans with professional skills and capital rode the wave of opportunity in the post-civil rights era to achieve socioeconomic success, whereas the majority of new immigrants who came for family reunification struggled in urban poverty. Public perceptions of a successful minority group rising from historical discrimination overlooked the vast intragroup socioeconomic divisions.
Re-emerging in the 1980s, the model minority myth portrayed Asian Americans as an example of self-sufficiency and individual achievement. In contrast to the structural interpretation, the cultural rhetoric that emphasized familial and cultural attributes dominated the public view. Many middle-class and wealthy Chinese families welcomed the illusory rhetoric because it fit in well with traditional values and beliefs that the parents had carefully maintained to nurture their children. This cultural discourse functioned as a powerful force informing Chinese Americans’ understanding of equality.
The positive stereotypes soon backfired. Public perceptions of Asians as disproportionately successful in American society drove a growing amount of anti-Asian resentment. The once positive portrayal of Asian students was repositioned to depict them as monotonous and lacking character and leadership. In order to curtail rising Asian American and declining white enrollments, UC Berkeley made several undisclosed admissions policy changes in the mid-1980s that disfavored Asian applicants. After discovery and investigation by a coalition of Asian American community organizations and further pressure from state government agencies, Berkeley Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman apologized twice and publicly acknowledged the university’s discriminatory policies.
With the disputes barely settled, anti-affirmative action politicians moved in quickly to exploit the Berkeley situation by targeting race-based policies in general. Historian Dana Takagi argues that the political manipulation shifted the focus of discourse from anti-Asian racial discrimination to the faults of affirmative action. Elaine Chao, then U.S. Deputy Maritime Administrator, wrote a 1987 op-ed in Asian Week, connecting the racial quotas against Asian Americans in Berkeley’s admissions process to the university affirmative action programs for underrepresented minorities. Other conservative politicians and intellectuals joined the fray to reinforce the conflation.
The heightened conflation of anti-Asian racial discrimination and race-based policy manifested in Ho v. San Francisco United School District (SFUSD). The SFUSD had implemented court-mandated racial caps in public schools to achieve school integration since the 1980s. In the 1990s, the racial caps’ negative impact on ethnic Chinese students, who faced the highest score cutoff among all racial groups to qualify for admission to a top alternative high school, became more pronounced. Several ethnic Chinese students filed a class-action suit against the school district alleging that the imposed racial caps constituted racial discrimination. The lawsuit found impassioned support from anti-affirmative action Chinese Americans who ignored the mandatory nature of public education and equated the racial caps with affirmative action. This resentment of race-based policies dovetailed with the conviction in the cultural rhetoric, forging a specious argument among some Chinese Americans in support of colorblind policies.
This stance has resonated with many newly arrived Chinese immigrants. These well-off suburban dwellers, most of whom work as professionals, rushed to adopt a misguided position that suppresses race as an essential element in American social relations. Even the pandemic failed to shake their belief in the model minority myth and subdue their passion for protesting Prop. 16. Little wonder that the car rally organizers are part of a broader coalition that supports a recent suit against Harvard, whose political repercussions recall the Berkeley admissions controversy.
The past never vanishes. But what the past really entails for our present depends on an accurate and nuanced interpretation of it. The revival of the racist and anti-immigration narratives around the “Chinese virus” attests to the illusion of a colorless society. Deeply rooted in the history of the United States, racism and xenophobia never go away. In a society where people still believe in racial hierarchies, even a “model minority” group runs the risk of being accused by the racial superior as a threat, whether in the form of university overrepresentation or disease carrying. Over the years, race-conscious policies have induced profound change in institutions, bringing about structural improvements. Nevertheless, until racial hierarchies are shattered, racial discrimination persists regardless of how a racial minority group is ranked along the racial hierarchy.
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2c4b51c1b041007b6ed0e7ad7b35032c | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177336 | Where Kamala Harris’ Political Imagination Was Formed | Where Kamala Harris’ Political Imagination Was Formed
On March 31, 1972, the Black cultural center Rainbow Sign welcomed local press for Berkeley’s official proclamation of “Nina Simone Day.” At this staged convergence of Black artistic and political power, the mood was formal and celebratory at once. Multicolored curtains sparkled behind black balloons. Simone listened attentively in a gold lamé dress and sky-blue headscarf as Warren Widener, Berkeley’s first Black mayor and a frequent guest of Rainbow Sign, read from a decree that exalted her artistry, her every song “an anthem to Black people, for Black people, and about Black people.” The director of the Bay Area Urban League announced an official campaign to make Simone’s song “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” “the new Black anthem.” Simone, acknowledging the impact of the song, said that she was “pleased to be an instrument, to give it to my people. It does not belong to me.”
One of the children who had received the song was the young Kamala Harris, whose Indian-born mother regularly played “Young, Gifted, and Black” (Aretha Franklin’s version, admittedly) on the record player in their living room. Harris, 7 at the time of Nina Simone Day, frequented Rainbow Sign for several years with her mother and sister and absorbed there a sense of political responsibility—that to be “young, gifted, and Black” meant lifting up her community. “It was a citizen’s upbringing,” she writes in The Truths We Hold of her time at Rainbow Sign, “the only kind I knew, and one I assumed everyone else was experiencing, too.” (They weren’t.) Rainbow Sign was where she first “learned that artistic expression, ambition, and intelligence were cool.” It was also where she glimpsed a vision of Black empowerment, orchestrated by middle-class Black women with working-class roots—women who had broken professional barriers and were now trying to mentor a new generation of young Black people to find a vocation for themselves and transform the institutions they joined.
Rainbow Sign plays a key role in the opening arc of Harris’ memoir. By her own account, it’s the place where she first came into sustained contact with Black activists and started to see herself in that lineage. She spends less time, however, placing Rainbow Sign in the context of its era. On the one hand, Rainbow Sign sponsored a radical vision of Black freedom through its arts programs: The center inspired Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima and hosted exhibitions by the expat sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, including one featuring her iconic wooden sculpture of a fist. On the other hand, the political organizations hosted by Rainbow Sign tended toward the liberal side of the Black Power spectrum, calling for the integration of Black people into American politics, with the understanding that better policy would follow.
Rainbow Sign’s unique fusion of culture and politics provided fuel for Harris’ rise as a politician whose every electoral victory has also been seen as a cultural breakthrough. But for Harris, as potentially the first Black, female vice president, that strategy of activism—pragmatic in orientation and at times lofty in tone—will be pressure-tested, just as Rainbow Sign was. The cultural center’s doors were open for only six years. Harris’ campaign will speak to the legacy those six years have left behind.
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1aa9b692f81490f4429ea3a55794dc71 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177366 | As Newsom Weighs Reparations Bill, A Scholar Has A Word Of Caution For California | As Newsom Weighs Reparations Bill, A Scholar Has A Word Of Caution For California
Supporters say it’s yet another case of California leading by example. In acknowledging the sins of California’s forefathers, the state could begin to heal by starting with an apology. But as Newsom considers the legislation before him, one scholar has a word of caution not to detract from where change really needs to happen: Washington, D.C.
William Darity Jr., one of the country’s leading experts on slavery reparations and economics professor at Duke University, hopes the conversation around California’s reparations task force is properly framed with respect to the movement for federal reparations.
Darity Jr. has reservations about the use of the term “reparations” in the bill. He believes it should only be used to describe a full accounting of the damage dealt to African Americans by hundreds of years of enslavement and discriminatory policies — something he says can only be accomplished through the federal government.
“I have a sense of proprietariness about the use of the term reparations, because I think people should not be given the impression that the kinds of steps that are taken at the state or local level actually constitute a comprehensive or true reparations plan,” Darity Jr. said in an interview. “Whatever California does perhaps could be called atonement, or it could be called a correction for past actions.”
The economist is critical of what he calls a piecemeal approach to reparations; where a collection of local and state initiatives form the thrust of slavery reparations in the United States. While AB 3121 is clear about not being a substitute for a national reparations program, Darity Jr. is still worried that the conversation around the project in California might suggest a vision of slavery reparations independent of the federal government.
But Darity Jr. believes the creation of a reparations study team would lock California in as a powerful advocate for federal reparations.
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477f88ea470159c642d13d57a7f1ef2c | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177376 | Glendale, CA City Council Debates Resolution Acknowledging History as a "Sundown Town" | Glendale, CA City Council Debates Resolution Acknowledging History as a "Sundown Town"
The City of Glendale discussed a resolution to acknowledge its history as a "sundown town" where African Americans and other racial minorities were able to work but faced legal or extralegal punishment for remaining in the city limits after the end of the working day.
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9dd8e3e1eb08bf9abc5f4bf82c549e53 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177388 | Online Discussion: The Fight To Vote Feat. Carol Anderson (9/24/2020) | Online Discussion: The Fight To Vote Feat. Carol Anderson (9/24/2020)
Experts warn that the Covid-19 pandemic will create barriers to voting for millions of Americans this November. But the public health crisis is hardly the only cause of this: intensified voter suppression efforts have been enacted over the past decade, creating impediments to the polls that often target communities of color. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder weakened the protections of the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for states to purge voter rolls and establish discriminatory voter ID laws.
In this virtual conversation, Emory University professor Dr. Carol Anderson and Brennan Center Senior Fellow Theodore R. Johnson will discuss how communities, activists, and organizations are leading the fight to protect the vote — and what’s at stake for American democracy.
This event is produced in partnership with NYU’s John Brademas Center and NYU Votes.
Speakers:
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies, Emory University; Author, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Theodore R. Johnson, PhD, Senior Fellow, Brennan Center for Justice
Sep 24, 2020 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Link to Zoom Registration
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c13d739db88bd2424bc89e7fbb743e9a | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177390 | ‘Viking’ Was a Job Description, Not a Matter of Heredity, Massive Ancient DNA Study Shows | ‘Viking’ Was a Job Description, Not a Matter of Heredity, Massive Ancient DNA Study Shows
It was a Viking saga written in genes. In 2008, construction work on an isolated Estonian beach near the town of Salme uncovered the skeletons of more than 40 powerfully built men. They were buried around 750 C.E. in two ships with Viking-style weapons and treasure—apparently the aftermath of a raid gone wrong. DNA from the bones has now added a poignant detail: Four of the men, buried shoulder to shoulder holding their swords, were brothers.
The new data come from a massive effort to sequence the DNA of Vikings across Europe. The results, published today in Nature, trace how the Vikings radiated across Europe from their Scandinavian homeland, and how people with roots elsewhere also took up Viking ways. “The big story is in line with what’s told by archaeologists and historians,” says Erika Hagelberg, an ancient DNA expert at the University of Oslo who was not part of the research team. “It’s the small details of particular sites that are really compelling.” The Estonian site, for example, offers powerful evidence that the crew was a tight-knit group from the same village or town. “Four brothers buried together is new and unique … [and] adds a new dimension,” says Cat Jarman, an archaeologist working for the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, who was not part of the research team.
Over the course of almost 10 years, a team led by geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen assembled samples from across Scandinavia dating to the Viking Age, from about 750 C.E. to 1050 C.E., as well as some earlier and later samples. The team also gathered human remains from burials elsewhere in Europe and beyond that had Viking grave goods or burial styles. “We approached every place where we could see there should exist somehow an association with Vikings,” Willerslev says. Ultimately, the team was able to sequence 442 Viking Age genomes from as far afield as Italy, Ukraine, and the doomed Viking settlements of Greenland.
The results tell dramatic stories of individual mobility, such as a pair of cousins buried in Oxford, U.K., and Denmark, separated in death by hundreds of kilometers of open ocean. The genetic details may also rewrite popular perceptions of Vikings, including their looks: Viking Age Scandinavians were more likely to have black hair than people living there today. And comparing DNA and archaeology at individual sites suggests that for some in the Viking bands, “Viking” was a job description, not a matter of heredity.
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e94a56a856aea34b7830c593f1a74e94 | https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177401 | 52 Years Ago, Thelonious Monk Played a High School. Now Everyone Can Hear It. | 52 Years Ago, Thelonious Monk Played a High School. Now Everyone Can Hear It.
In the late 1960s, a precocious student named Danny Scher was the elected social commissioner at Palo Alto High School in Northern California. His duties included organizing dances and assemblies, but Mr. Scher, who grew up playing in jazz bands, wanted jazz musicians to perform at the school, too. He convinced the vibraphonist Cal Tjader, the singer Jon Hendricks and the pianist Vince Guaraldi (of “Peanuts” fame) to play separate gigs in the school’s spacious auditorium. Then he turned his attention to his idol, Thelonious Monk.
Monk, a pianist, was more than a decade past his most famous recordings and near the end of an unfruitful run at Columbia Records when his manager got the request from Mr. Scher. The jazz titan agreed to perform at the school on Sunday, Oct. 27, 1968. He was already scheduled to be in the area for a three-week stint at the Jazz Workshop, a club in San Francisco, so Mr. Scher had his older brother Les drive there and pick up the pianist and his band. There were no plans to preserve the one-off concert, but a school janitor asked Mr. Scher whether he could record the show if he tuned the piano.
Now, 52 years later, Impulse! Records and Legacy Recordings are releasing it as an album called “Palo Alto” that captures the 47-minute concert in full. The “Palo Alto” recording had collected dust in the attic of Mr. Scher’s family home until he contacted Monk’s son — the jazz drummer and bandleader T.S. Monk — about releasing it. Digitally restored and widely available for the first time on Friday, “Palo Alto” captures a band hitting a high note, even as Monk battled personal and professional turmoil.
Monk and his touring band — the drummer Ben Riley, the tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse and the bassist Larry Gales — performed in Palo Alto as the city, like much of the United States, was gripped by tension. America was rocked by the war in Vietnam and the shooting deaths of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Locally, there was friction between residents of the mostly white Palo Alto and the mostly Black East Palo Alto, an unincorporated area with high unemployment rates. The residents of East Palo Alto didn’t have voting power to govern their own town, and by 1968, local leaders established schools and other institutions to educate residents about Black culture.
The pressure came to a head in 1968, when a contingent of younger East Palo Alto residents started a campaign to rename the city “Nairobi,” after the capital of Kenya. The Monk gig happened a week before the name change was up for a vote before the East Palo Alto Municipal Council. (It was defeated by a margin of two to one.)
In a Zoom interview, Mr. Scher said he was warned by the police department in East Palo Alto to not post fliers advertising the show there. “Wherever I saw a poster that said, ‘Vote yes on Nairobi,’ I’d put up an ad, ‘Come and see Thelonious Monk at Palo Alto High School,’” he said. “The police would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, kid. Hey, white boy, this is not really a cool place for you to be, given what’s going on. You’re going to get in trouble here. This isn’t cool.’”
But Mr. Scher had a show to promote: “I’ve got to sell tickets, and if you think I’m in trouble by being here, I’ll be in even more trouble if the show doesn’t do well.”
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2c9207680086b300bcf2f1c5ac7bd2fb | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Berber | Berber | Berber
Berber, self-name Amazigh, plural Imazighen, any of the descendants of the pre-Arab inhabitants of North Africa. The Berbers live in scattered communities across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Niger, and Mauritania. They speak various Amazigh languages belonging to the Afro-Asiatic family related to ancient Egyptian.
An accurate count of Berbers is difficult to come by for a variety of reasons, including a lack of thorough surveys. The two largest populations of Berbers are found in Algeria and Morocco, where large portions of the population are descended from Berbers but only some of them identify as Amazigh. Roughly one-fourth of the population in Algeria is estimated to be Berber, while Berbers are estimated to make up more than three-fifths of the population in Morocco. In the Sahara of southern Algeria and of Libya, Mali, and Niger, the Berber Tuareg number more than two million.
From about 2000 bce, Berber (Amazigh) languages spread westward from the Nile valley across the northern Sahara into the Maghrib. By the 1st millennium bce, their speakers were the native inhabitants of the vast region encountered by the Greeks, Carthaginians, and Romans. A series of Berber peoples—Mauri, Masaesyli, Massyli, Musulami, Gaetuli, Garamantes—then gave rise to Berber kingdoms under Carthaginian and Roman influence. Of those kingdoms, Numidia and Mauritania were formally incorporated into the Roman Empire in the late 2nd century bce, but others appeared in late antiquity following the Vandal invasion in 429 ce and the Byzantine reconquest (533 ce) only to be suppressed by the Arab conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries ce.
It was the Arabs, who had enlisted Berber warriors for the conquest of Spain, who nevertheless gave those peoples a single name, turning barbarian (speakers of a language other than Greek and Latin) into Barbar, the name of a race descended from Noah. While unifying the indigenous groups under one rubric, the Arabs began their Islamization. From the very beginning, Islam provided the ideological stimulus for the rise of fresh Berber dynasties. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, the greatest of those—the Almoravids and the Almohads, nomads of the Sahara and villagers of the High Atlas, respectively—conquered Muslim Spain and North Africa as far east as Tripoli (now in Libya). Their Berber successors—the Marinids at Fès (now in Morocco), the Ziyanids at Tlemcen (now in Algeria), and the Ḥafṣids at Tunis (now in Tunisia) and Bijaya (now Bejaïa, Algeria)—continued to rule until the 16th century.
Meanwhile, Berber merchants and nomads of the Sahara had initiated a trans-Saharan trade in gold and slaves that incorporated the lands of the Sudan into the Islamic world. Those achievements of the Barbar were celebrated in a massive history of North Africa (Kitāb al-ʿIbār) by the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldūn. By then, however, the Berbers were in retreat, subjected to Arabization of two very different kinds. The predominance of written Arabic had ended the writing of Amazigh (Berber) languages in both the old Libyan and the new Arabic script, reducing its languages to folk languages. At the same time, an influx from the east of warrior Arab nomads from the 11th century onward was driving the Berbers off the plains and into the mountains and overrunning the desert. Together those factors were turning the population from Berber speakers into Arabic speakers, with a consequent loss of original identities. From the 16th century onward the process continued in the absence of Berber dynasties, which were replaced in Morocco by Arabs claiming descent from the Prophet and elsewhere by Turks at Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.
When the French conquered Algeria in the 19th century and Morocco in the 20th, they seized on the distinction between the Arab majority and the Berbers of the mountains. On the strength of Ibn Khaldūn’s history, the latter were once again classified as a people under their modern name of Berbers. The identification and description of their language, the anthropological study of their society, and their geographical isolation all gave grounds for their separate administration as a people going back before the time of Islam to a pagan and Christian past. Those colonial studies and policies have determined much of the history of the Berbers down to the present but meanwhile have left a record of their manners and customs before the advent of modernity.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the Berber world had been reduced to enclaves of varying size. In Tripolitania and southern Tunisia those were chiefly formed by the hills of the Nafūsah Plateau and the island of Jerba, in eastern Algeria by the mountains of the Aurès and Kabylie, and in Morocco by the ranges of the Rif, the Middle and High Atlas, the Anti-Atlas, and the Saharan Atlas. In southern Morocco they consisted of the oases of the Drâa valley, and in the northern Sahara mainly those of the Mʾzab with those of Ghadames, Touggourt, and Gourara. In the central and southern Sahara was the vast area of the Ahaggar mountains and the desert to the south.
The economy was largely subsistence agriculture and pastoralism practiced by farmers, transhumants, and nomads, coupled with weaving, pottery, metalwork, and leatherwork, and local and some long-distance trade. Dwellings varied from caves to pitched-roof houses to flat-roofed “castles” to tents. Whatever the dwelling, its construction was designed to create an interior ruled by the women of the family. Outside the home, women would gather at the fountain or well and at the tomb of the local saint, whereas men would meet at the mosque or in the street and square. In the case of the nomadic and matrilineal Tuareg of the central Sahara, the camp was largely controlled by the women, who chose their husbands and, with their songs, were central to social gatherings.
The dwelling was home to the nuclear, usually patrilineal family, which was the basic unit of a tribal group going under the name of a common ancestor, whose Ait, or people, they claimed to be. In principle all families and clans were equal, governed by codes of honour likely to give rise to feuds but also by a council of elders, the jamāʿah, who kept the peace by adjudication, rulings on compensation, and determination of punishments. In fact the various societies were not egalitarian. The village and the clan regularly admitted newcomers as inferiors, and the ruling elders came from leading families. If villages or clans went to war, as they frequently did, a chief might be chosen who on the strength of his prowess might attract clients, form his own army, and—like the lords of the High Atlas about 1900—establish his own dominion. The Tuareg of the Ahaggar and southern Sahara, also called Blue Men because of their indigo-dyed robes and face veils, were aristocratic nomads ruling over vassals, serfs, and slaves who cultivated the oases on their behalf; they in turn recognized supreme chiefs or kings, who were called amenukals. They had preserved a form of the old Libyan consonantal script under the name of Tifinagh, though most writing was in Arabic, by a class of Muslim scholars. Such saintly scholars were everywhere figures of authority, and among the Ibadi Berbers of the Mʾzab they ruled the community.
While many of those features of Berber society have survived, they have been greatly modified by the economic and political pressures and opportunities that have built up since the early years of the 20th century. Beginning with the Kabyle of Algeria, emigration from the mountains in search of employment created permanent Berber communities in the cities of the Maghrib as well as in France and the rest of western Europe. That emigration in turn has conveyed modern material and popular culture back into the homelands. The independence of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania, Mali, and Niger meanwhile created a new political situation in which Berber nationalism made its appearance. That circumstance was largely a reaction to the policies of the new governments, which have frowned on a separate Berber identity as a relic of colonialism incompatible with national unity. In Morocco the monarchy felt threatened, first by the French use of Berbers to dethrone the sultan in 1953 and second by the role of Berber officers in the attempted assassinations of the king in 1971–72. In Algeria the rebellion in Kabylie in 1963–64 was further justification for a policy of Arabization, resented by Berbers not least because many had been educated in French. Berber studies were forbidden or repressed in both Morocco and Algeria, but in Algeria in 1980–81 the cancellation of a lecture on Berber poetry touched off a “Berber Spring” of demonstrations in Kabylie that were energized by popular Berber songs and singers.
Berberism under the name of Imazighenity (from the Berber Amazigh, plural Imazighen, adopted as the proper term for the people) was meanwhile formulated academically by Berbers in Paris who founded the journal Awal in 1985. Berber languages have been revived as a written language called Tamazight (the name of one of the three Moroccan Berber languages) with a modified Latin script as well as Tifinagh, and the people and their culture have been fleshed out in print through UNESCO’s ongoing publication of the French-language Encyclopédie Berbère (1984– ).
Growing demands for the recognition of Berbers—in theory as the original inhabitants of North Africa and in practice as distinct components of its society—have met with some success. Tamazight is studied in Algeria and since 2002 has been recognized as a national, but not official, language; despite popular unrest in Kabylie, Berbers have yet to achieve a strong political identity in an Algerian democracy. Berberism in Morocco has led to the creation of a Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture, to schoolteaching in Tamazight, and finally, since 2011, to the recognition of Tamazight as an official language, all in the interest of national unity under the monarchy. Meanwhile, Berber culture provides the invaluable tourist industry with much of its cachet: its distinctive architecture, crafts, and costumes set in a romantic landscape that is specifically Moroccan. In Libya the overthrow of Muammar al-Qaddafi opened the way for the Berbers of the Nefūsah Plateau to demand a recognized position in the new order, but the Tuareg from abroad whom Qaddafi had recruited into his army were driven out of the country. The Algerian Tuareg of the Ahaggar were turned into cultivators, their nomadism surviving only as a tourist attraction. But the Tuareg soldiers returned to the southern Sahara to reignite, in concert with Islamic militants, a long-standing conflict of their people with the governments of Mali and Niger over Berber minority status and to make yet another demand for separate status. Although the outcomes of contemporary conflicts remain uncertain, Berberism is sufficiently established as an ideology and as a cultural and political program to provide the scattered communities of Berbers with a new national identity in place of the old anthropological one.
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57c24c88df67fd93f9c625381650cdd8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Berlin-album-by-Reed | Berlin | Berlin
…about a sadomasochistic love affair, Berlin (1973), and a double album of guitar drones, Metal Machine Music (1975), that are among his most notorious works. Onstage, his image and appearance changed yearly, from a leather-bondage-wearing ghoul feigning heroin injections to a deadpan guitar-strumming troubadour.
…of his 1973 record album Berlin. In Miral (2010) Schnabel explored the Arab-Israeli conflict through the eyes of four Palestinian women living in Israel in the mid-to-late 20th century. He later considered the last years of 19th-century painter Vincent van Gogh (portrayed by Willem Dafoe) in At Eternity’s Gate (2018).
…as the lavish song suite Berlin (1973), the feedback oratorio Metal Machine Music (1975), and the concept album New York (1989). In addition to his own pop and rock solo recordings, Cale produced and collaborated with Velvet Underground-influenced artists such as Iggy and the Stooges, Jonathan Richman,
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b76c35dc8a15385bb0d4c6137d5386f9 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Berlin-Alexanderplatz | Berlin Alexanderplatz | Berlin Alexanderplatz
Berlin Alexanderplatz, novel by Alfred Döblin, published in 1929. It appeared in English under the original title and as Alexanderplatz, Berlin. It tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, a Berlin petty criminal who tries to rehabilitate himself after his release from jail. Often compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses, the book is notable for its interior monologue (presented in colloquial language and Berlin slang) and somewhat cinematic technique.
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45289fd950ae7e40060ed4f59c5dfdb0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/berry-food | Berry | Berry
…fruit is popularly called a berry, especially if it is edible. Raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries, for example, are not true berries but are aggregate fruits—fruits that consist of a number of smaller fruits. Cranberries and blueberries, however, are true botanical berries.
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e54c26d1b71548263863f1ac1e70fe7b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Berta-languages | Berta languages | Berta languages
Berta languages, group of languages that form a part of the Nilo-Saharan language family. Some 125,000 Berta speakers live in Ethiopia; approximately 22,000 live in Sudan. Two of the main varieties of Berta are Berta proper (also known by the derogatory name Beni Shangul), which is spoken in western Ethiopia in a corner formed by the Blue Nile River and the Sudanese border, and Gobato, also spoken in western Ethiopia. The Berta languages were assigned by Joseph H. Greenberg as a subgroup of Chari-Nile within Nilo-Saharan, but Chari-Nile is no longer considered a valid genetic unit.
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2ee424ee13776e9e6efb30694dea0531 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bertha-Mason | Bertha Mason | Bertha Mason
Bertha Mason, fictional character, the Creole wife of Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys.
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acb20c718e256e43a87f5ea81d03c94b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bertillon-classification | Bertillon classification | Bertillon classification
…standards and saw his “Bertillon classification” of causes of deaths come into use in many nations. To facilitate the collection of data in French government offices, he wrote an elementary course in administrative statistics (1895). Increased alcoholism in France and a decline in French population growth relative to the…
…system was based on the Bertillon Classification of Causes of Death, developed by French statistician and demographer Jacques Bertillon. In 1898 the American Public Health Association recommended that Canada, Mexico, and the United States use that system and that it be revised every decade. In the following years Bertillon’s classification…
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6e58a3e59643748c8c18dc39da95fbeb | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bertram-family | Bertram family | Bertram family
Bertram family, fictional characters, the wealthy aunt, uncle, and four cousins with whom the protagonist, Fanny Price, is sent to live in Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park (1814). Sir Thomas, a principled and reserved man, is angered when Fanny refuses to marry Henry Crawford. Lady Bertram is a self-indulgent, vain woman, and three of the four Bertram offspring are selfish and unthinking: Tom is a dissolute young man who later repents his idleness, and Maria and Julia are both self-involved young women whose elegant manners hide their empty characters. The remaining son, Edmund, a serious young man who becomes a clergyman, is secretly beloved by Fanny.
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58fcdee32828027381355bd0b234e936 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Betrayal-film | Betrayal | Betrayal
…version of Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal (1983).
…Gandhi with such films as Betrayal (1983), Turtle Diary (1985), and Pascali’s Island (1988). He was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for his performance as Meyer Lansky in the Las Vegas crime drama Bugsy (1991). In the 1990s he also played a child’s chess coach in Searching for…
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8903f004295a0c66f5322dd6127aaa69 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/betrothal | Betrothal | Betrothal
Betrothal, promise that a marriage will take place. In societies in which premarital sexual relations are condoned or in which consensual union is common, betrothal may be unimportant. In other societies, however, betrothal is a formal part of the marriage process. In such cases a change of intention by one of the parties is a serious matter and may be referred to as a breach of promise, a civil transgression subject in some instances to a fine or other penalty.
Marriage has historically been so frequently a matter of alliance between kin groups that mate selection has been removed from the hands of the participants and negotiated by important or assigned representatives of each group. In many, but by no means all, such cases, betrothal has been marked by various forms and degrees of mutual visits and gift exchange between the two families. Sometimes, especially when two potentially hostile groups are concerned, child betrothal may be adopted to ensure continuing social, economic, or political harmony.
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453c554b99322e29f07fd510aed80b43 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Betsileo | Betsileo | Betsileo
Betsileo, a Malagasy people living in the central highlands of south-central Madagascar. They speak a dialect of Malagasy, the West Austronesian language that is common to all Malagasy peoples. River valleys inhabited and farmed by Betsileo are separated from one another by dense montane forest.
The Betsileo were initially divided into a great many autonomous clans. They were conquered by the expanding Merina kingdom to the north in the early 19th century, after which they came under French colonial administration. They are efficient and productive cultivators of rice on painstakingly irrigated and terraced hillsides. They also grow cassava, corn (maize), yams, bananas, and sugarcane. Many others have become carpenters, bricklayers, or other skilled craftsmen or have settled in other areas of Madagascar to work as merchants or government employees.
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a329d458f40193981052413c177ca9e0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Better-Care-Reconciliation-Act | Better Care Reconciliation Act | Better Care Reconciliation Act
…the ACA, initially called the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA). Like the AHCA, the BCRA, in numerous versions under various names, would have decreased the deficit but significantly increased the number of uninsured, and it would have increased insurance premiums in the first year after its passage, according to analyses…
…Senate version emerged, retitled the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) of 2017, it took an approach similar to that of the House bill, though it called for earlier and more substantial cuts to Medicaid funding. Meeting with opposition from both hard-line conservative and moderate Republican senators, the BCRA lacked the…
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a284b77a12019833d2afa45f5be05dde | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Beyond-the-Bedroom-Wall-A-Family-Album | Beyond the Bedroom Wall: A Family Album | Beyond the Bedroom Wall: A Family Album
Beyond the Bedroom Wall: A Family Album (1975) is a multigenerational saga of a North Dakota family; Born Brothers (1988) continues the story of Charles and Jerome Neumiller, characters from Beyond the Bedroom Wall who also appear in The Neumiller Stories (1989). Poppa John (1981)…
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f6f167f4c77319a252de26a1c142a11c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/bezique | Bezique | Bezique
Bezique, trick-and-meld card game related to pinochle, both of which derive from the 19th-century French game of binocle, itself a development of the card game sixty-six.
Bezique is now mostly played by two players using a 64-card deck consisting of two standard 52-card decks in which the 2s through 6s have been removed; the cards rank in descending order A, 10, K, Q, J, 9, 8, 7. Eight cards are dealt to each player in batches of three, two, and three, and the next card is turned faceup to establish the trump suit (a 7 immediately scores 10 points for the dealer). The remaining cards are placed facedown to form the stock.
Nondealer leads to the first trick; thereafter, the winner of each trick leads to the next. The second player to a trick may play any desired card without obligation to follow suit. The highest card of the suit led or the highest trump played wins the trick. Of identical cards, the first played beats the second.
Captured aces and 10s, called brisques, count 10 points each and are added to players’ scores at the end of the hand. A player holding a 7 of trumps may either score 10 points immediately for playing it to a trick (not for winning the trick) or exchange it for the card that was turned up to establish the trump suit.
Upon winning a trick, and before drawing a replacement card from stock, the winner may meld (declare) exactly one of the following combinations by taking the appropriate cards from in hand, laying them faceup on the table, and marking the appropriate score:
Melded cards are left on the table but continue to form part of their declarer’s hand, remaining individually playable to tricks at any time. They may also be used in subsequent melds with the following restrictions:
Having scored for any melds, the trick winner draws the top card of the stock, waits for the opponent to draw the next, and then leads to the next trick. When only one card remains in the stock, the loser of the last trick will draw the turned-up card (usually an exchanged 7).
After the stock is exhausted, any cards remaining from melds are taken up into their owners’ hands. In the last eight tricks, no melds are made, and the rules of play change. The second to a trick must follow suit and win the trick if possible. Thus, if unable to follow suit to a nontrump lead, a trump must be played if possible. Finally, the winner of the eighth trick scores 10 points. A game is usually played to 1,000 or 1,500 points.
The great popularity of bezique in the 19th century led to the creation of more-elaborate and higher-scoring versions played with more than two 32-card decks shuffled together, such as four (rubicon bezique), six (Chinese bezique), and even eight decks. Bezique all but died out in the 20th century under the pressure of rummy games, which are quicker and simpler.
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4be7f47adfb734e1b220362a430489e1 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bhadracarya-pranidhana | Bhadracaryā-praṇidhāna | Bhadracaryā-praṇidhāna
Bhadracaryā-praṇidhāna, (Sanskrit: “Vows of Good Conduct”, ) also called Samantabhadra-caryā-praṇidhāna, (“Practical Vows of Samantabhadra”), a Mahāyāna (“Greater Vehicle”) Buddhist text that has also made an important contribution to the Tantric Buddhism of Tibet. Closely related to the Avataṃsaka-sūtra (“Discourse on the Adornments of the Buddha”) and sometimes considered its final section, the Bhadracaryā-praṇidhāna presents a universe of totally interdependent phenomena manifesting the Buddha. But its main emphasis is on entering into the full realization of such a universe—or into the Pure Land of Amitābha—through actions conforming to the 10 great vows of the bodhisattva (buddha to be) Samantabhadra.
These 10 vows, understood as the essence of the vows and deeds of all past and future buddhas, came to be used as daily lessons in Chinese monasteries. In Tibet they were incorporated as utterances in a number of rites, thus influencing the development of Tantric ritualism.
Briefly summarized, the vows include: inexhaustible service to all buddhas; the learning and obedience of all teachings of all buddhas; the plaint for all buddhas to descend into the world; the teaching of the dharmas (universal truths) and the paramitas (transcendental virtues) to all beings; the embracing of all universes; the bringing together of all Buddha’s lands; the achievement of Buddha’s wisdom and powers to help all beings; the unity of all bodhisattvas; and the accommodation of all sentient beings through the teaching of wisdom and Nirvāṇa.
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daeb251232d3e19eef748a55e900fbaf | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bhagavata | Bhagavata | Bhagavata
Bhagavata, (Sanskrit: “One Devoted to Bhagavat [God]”) member of the earliest Hindu sect of which there is any record, representing the beginnings of theistic devotional worship (bhakti) in Hinduism and of modern Vaishnavism (worship of the god Vishnu). The Bhagavata system was a highly devotional faith centred upon a personal god, variously called Vishnu, Vasudeva, Krishna, Hari, or Narayana. The school was referred to as ekantika-dharma (“religion with one object”—i.e., monotheism). The Bhagavatas believed in simple rites of worship and condemned Vedic sacrifices and austerities.
The Bhagavata sect originated among the Yadava people of the Mathura area of northern India in the 2nd and 1st centuries bce. From there it spread as the tribes migrated to western India and the northern Deccan and then into South India. The sect continued to be prominent within Vaishnavism until at least the 11th century ce, when bhakti was revitalized by the great theologian Ramanuja.
The Bhagavadgita (1st–2nd century ce) is the earliest and finest exposition of the Bhagavata system. By the time of the Bhagavadgita, Vasudeva (Krishna), the hero of the Yadava clan, was identified with the Vedic god Vishnu. Later, the deified sage Narayana, whose followers were originally called Pancharatras, was assimilated, and, still later, the pastoral and amorous Krishna was added to the multiplicity of traditions.
The sect contributed greatly to the spread of image worship among upper-class Hindus. Few early Vaishnava images are still extant, but those that have survived are mainly from the Mathura area; perhaps the earliest is the image of Balarama, the half brother of Krishna, attributed to the 2nd–1st century bce.
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cd9fc05c063446d0092d475191b37bc1 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/bhaiband | Bhāīband | Bhāīband
Bhāīband, (Hindi), Urdu-Persian Berādarī, (“brotherhood”), important instrument of caste self-government in India; the bhāīband is the council formed by the heads of families that belong to the same lineage in a particular area, thus constituting an exogamous (those who do not intermarry) unit within the endogamous (those who do intermarry) caste group. One of their concerns, in addition to questions arising as a result of their common lineage, is the securing of exogamous alliances and safeguards against lineage inbreeding. Often the local bhāīband may be coterminous with the panchayat, or governing council, of a particular caste section.
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0956e3c307502a26394bb61f6012736c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/bhanavara | Bhanavara | Bhanavara
Bhanavara, (Sanskrit and Pali: “recitation section”) any of the units, usually 8,000 syllables in length, into which Pali Buddhist texts were divided in ancient times for purposes of recitation. The system developed as a means of preserving and transmitting canonical material before it was committed to writing and before written texts were in general use among the people.
At first, different groups of bhanakas (“reciters”) were responsible for different parts of the canon; Dighabhanakas, for example, specialized in the Digha Nikaya (“Long Collection”). Later, in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), these groups developed into early schools of interpretation, and their differing views are reflected in some of the commentary literature.
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763d7d021988c76554753bb8a972b13e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/bhumi | Bhūmi | Bhūmi
Bhūmi, in Mahāyāna Buddhism, the stages of spiritual progress of the bodhisattva, or one who, though capable of enlightenment, delays his buddhahood in order to work for the salvation of others. The stages (which are also termed vihāras, “stations”) appear as 7, 10, and 13 in various texts, but the scheme that is most commonly agreed upon is the one given in the Daśabhūmika-sūtra (“The Sūtra on the Ten Spiritual Levels”). It lists the progressively superior stages as: (1) pramuditā (“joyful,” with the thought that, having begun the career of a bodhisattva, he will attain enlightenment and will help others), (2) vimalā (“free from impurities”), (3) prabhākarī (“luminous” with the noble doctrine), (4) arciṣmatī (“brilliant,” the rays of his virtue consuming evil passions and ignorance), (5) sudurjayā (“hard to conquer”), (6) abhimukhī (“turning toward” both transmigration and nirvana), (7) dūraṅgamā (“far-going”), (8) acalā (“immovable”), (9) sādhumatī (“good-minded”), and (10) dharmameghā (showered with “clouds of dharma,” or universal truth).
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46cfc60852e9939b0ed564d7599b303f | https://www.britannica.com/topic/bhut | Bhut | Bhut
Bhut, Hindi bhūt, in Hindu mythology, a restless ghost. Bhuts are believed to be malignant if they have died a violent death or have been denied funeral rites; they are particularly feared by women, children, and the newly married.
Bhuts haunt trees, deserts, abandoned houses, the hearths and roofs of homes, crossroads, and boundaries but never rest on the ground. Rudimentary shrines are sometimes established for bhuts, and when in fear of them a believer will invoke Śiva, as he is considered to be their lord.
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efdd320217b0f1f4054cf91521821618 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/bias-attitude | Bias | Bias
effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general. According to the researchers…
Bias is sometimes presumed to be a chronic affliction of sociology. This may arise in part from the fact that the subject matter of sociology is familiar and important in everyone’s daily life. As a result, variations in philosophical outlook and individual preferences can contribute…
Sampling errors and bias both constitute a continuing concern, especially since so much sociological knowledge is derived from samples of a larger universe. Where bias cannot be controlled, its extent may sometimes be estimated by various methods, including intensive analysis of smaller samples. For example, the population undercount…
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c96fd90c9ac37f9b7c1bdb5a161878c2 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/bias-cut | Bias cut | Bias cut
The bias cut of material, a mode introduced in the 1920s by the French couturiere Madeleine Vionnet, was widely adopted in the 1930s and was very effective with the longer skirts, creating a figure-hugging style which then flared out at the hemline. Brassieres were redesigned to…
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1129ba6629ebabc4c2324e23604fdafc | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Biathanatos | Biathanatos | Biathanatos
…casuistic defense of suicide entitled Biathanatos. His own contemplation of suicide, he states, prompted in him “a charitable interpretation of theyr Action, who dye so.” Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, attacks the recusants’ unwillingness to swear the oath of allegiance to the king, which Roman Catholics were required to do…
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6286e67ce86e87acb766bab956fdc386 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bible | Bible | Bible
Bible, the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. The Christian Bible consists of the Old Testament and the New Testament, with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox versions of the Old Testament being slightly larger because of their acceptance of certain books and parts of books considered apocryphal by Protestants. The Hebrew Bible includes only the books known to Christians as the Old Testament. The arrangements of the Jewish and Christian canons differ considerably. The Protestant and Roman Catholic arrangements more nearly match one another.
The Bible contains the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity and has long been the most available, familiar, and dependable source and arbiter of intellectual, moral, and spiritual ideals in the West. The great biblical themes are God, his revealed works of creation, provision, judgment, and deliverance, his covenant, and his promises. The Bible sees what happens to humankind in the light of God’s nature, righteousness, faithfulness, mercy, and love.
The Hebrew Bible was written in Hebrew. Its Greek translation, the Septuagint, made it accessible in the Hellenistic period (c. 300 BCE–c. 300 CE) and provided a language for the New Testament and for the Christian liturgy and theology of the first three centuries CE. The Bible in Latin, the Vulgate, shaped the thought and life of Western people for a thousand years. Bible translation led to the study and literary development of many languages.
The Hebrew Bible has three divisions: Torah (Instruction, or Law; also called the Pentateuch), Neviʾim (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). These books are known to Christians as the Old Testament. The Christian Bible consists of the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, the Old Testament includes writings considered apocryphal by Protestants. The New Testament contains four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), Acts, 21 letters, and Revelation.
Parts of the Hebrew Bible were written in perhaps the 10th century BCE. The final redaction and canonization of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) most likely took place during the Babylonian Exile (6th–5th century BCE). The entire Hebrew Bible was complete by about 100 CE. The books of the New Testament were written in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.
The Bible centres on the one and only God, the Creator of all that exists. God’s will and purpose are viewed as just, loving, and ultimately prevailing. The Hebrew Bible starts with an account of God’s creation of the world, and it tells the story of the Israelites and the Promised Land. The New Testament deals with the life, the person, and the teachings of Jesus and the formation of the Christian church.
A brief treatment of the Bible follows. For full treatment, see biblical literature.
Traditionally, the Jews have divided their scriptures into three parts: the Torah (the “Law,” or Pentateuch), the Neviʾim (“Prophets”), and the Ketuvim (“Writings,” or Hagiographa). The Pentateuch, together with the Book of Joshua (hence the name Hexateuch), can be seen as the account of how the Israelites became a nation and of how they possessed the Promised Land. The division designated as the “Prophets” continues the story of Israel in the Promised Land, describing the establishment and development of the monarchy and presenting the messages of the prophets to the people. The “Writings” include speculation on the place of evil and death in the scheme of things (Job and Ecclesiastes), the poetical works, and some additional historical books.
In the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, various types of literature are represented; the purpose of the Apocrypha seems to have been to fill in some of the gaps left by the indisputably canonical books and to carry the history of Israel to the 2nd century bce.
The New Testament is by far the shorter portion of the Christian Bible, but, through its associations with the spread of Christianity, it has wielded an influence far out of proportion to its modest size. Like the Old Testament, the New Testament is a collection of books, including a variety of early Christian literature. The four Gospels deal with the life, the person, and the teachings of Jesus, as he was remembered by the Christian community. The Acts of the Apostles carries the story of Christianity from the Resurrection of Jesus to the end of the career of St. Paul. The various Letters, or Epistles, are correspondence by various leaders of the early Christian church, chief among them St. Paul, applying the message of the church to the sundry needs and problems of early Christian congregations. The Book of Revelation (the Apocalypse) is the only canonical representative of a large genre of apocalyptic literature that appeared in the early Christian movement.
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068b50fa20bc8ba65ce0a8c856ecec68 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Biblica-Hebraica | Biblica Hebraica | Biblica Hebraica
…was soon displaced by the Biblica Hebraica (1906, 1912) by Rudolf Kittel and Paul Kahle, two German biblical scholars. The third edition of this work, completed by Albrecht Alt and Otto Eissfeldt (Stuttgart, 1937), finally abandoned Ben Hayyim’s text, substituting that of the Leningrad Codex (B 19a). It has a…
…third and subsequent editions of Biblica Hebraica edited by Rudolf Kittel are based, the five are grouped together but in a historical order. Nevertheless, their appearance usually follows the order of the liturgical calendar:
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778d06a4cdc21d8c312484069f4f4735 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Biblical-Hebrew-language | Biblical Hebrew language | Biblical Hebrew language
…divided into four major periods: Biblical, or Classical, Hebrew, until about the 3rd century bc, in which most of the Old Testament is written; Mishnaic, or Rabbinic, Hebrew, the language of the Mishna (a collection of Jewish traditions), written about ad 200 (this form of Hebrew was never used among…
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b21453bc5bae8ad36176711f7eb36db8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/biblical-literature/The-Christian-canon | The Christian canon | The Christian canon
The Christian church received its Bible from Greek-speaking Jews and found the majority of its early converts in the Hellenistic world. The Greek Bible of Alexandria thus became the official Bible of the Christian community, and the overwhelming number of quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures in the New Testament are derived from it. Whatever the origin of the apocryphal books in the canon of Alexandria, these became part of the Christian Scriptures, but there seems to have been no unanimity as to their exact canonical status. The New Testament itself does not cite the Apocryphal books directly, but occasional traces of a knowledge of them are to be found. The Apostolic Fathers (late 1st–early 2nd century) show extensive familiarity with this literature, but a list of the Old Testament books by Melito, bishop of Sardis in Asia Minor (2nd century), does not include the additional writings of the Greek Bible, and Origen (c. 185–c. 254) explicitly describes the Old Testament canon as comprising only 22 books.
From the time of Origen on, the Church Fathers who were familiar with Hebrew differentiated, theoretically at least, the apocryphal books from those of the Old Testament, though they used them freely. In the Syrian East, until the 7th century the church had only the books of the Hebrew canon with the addition of Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sira (but without Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah). It also incorporated the Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, and the additions to Daniel. The 6th-century manuscript of the Peshitta (Syriac version) known as Codex Ambrosianus also has III and IV Maccabees, II (sometimes IV) Esdras, and Josephus’s Wars VII.
Early councils of the African church held at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419) affirmed the use of the apocryphal books as Scripture. In the 4th century also, St. Athanasius, chief theologian of Christian orthodoxy, differentiated “canonical books” from both “those that are read” by Christians only and the “apocryphal books” rejected alike by Jews and Christians. In the preparation of a standard Latin version, the biblical scholar St. Jerome (c. 347–419/420) separated “canonical books” from “ecclesiastical books” (i.e., the apocryphal writings), which he regarded as good for spiritual edification but not authoritative Scripture. A contrary view of St. Augustine (354–430), one of the greatest Western theologians, prevailed, however, and the works remained in the Latin Vulgate version. The Decretum Gelasianum, a Latin document of uncertain authorship but recognized as reflecting the views of the Roman church at the beginning of the 6th century, includes Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, and I and II Maccabees as biblical.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the apocryphal books were generally regarded as Holy Scripture in the Roman and Greek churches, although theoretical doubts were raised from time to time. Thus, in 1333 Nicholas of Lyra, a French Franciscan theologian, discussed the differences between the Latin Vulgate and the “Hebrew truth.” Christian-Jewish polemics, the increasing attention to Hebrew studies, and, finally, the Reformation kept the issue of the Christian canon alive. Protestants denied Old Testament canonical status to all books not in the Hebrew Bible. The first modern vernacular Bible to segregate the disputed writings was a Dutch version by Jacob van Liesveldt (Antwerp, 1526). Martin Luther’s German edition of 1534 did the same thing and entitled them “Apocrypha” for the first time, noting that, while they were not in equal esteem with sacred Scriptures, they were edifying.
In response to Protestant views, the Roman Catholic Church made its position clear at the Council of Trent (1546) when it dogmatically affirmed that the entire Latin Vulgate enjoyed equal canonical status. This doctrine was confirmed by the Vatican Council of 1870. In the Greek church the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) had expressly designated as canonical several apocryphal works. In the 19th century, however, Russian Orthodox theologians agreed to exclude these works from the Holy Scriptures.
The history of the Old Testament canon in the English church has generally reflected a more restrictive viewpoint. Even though the Wycliffite Bible (14th century) included the Apocrypha, its preface made it clear that it accepted Jerome’s judgment. The translation made by the English bishop Miles Coverdale (1535) was the first English version to segregate these books, but it did place Baruch after Jeremiah. Article VI of the Thirty-nine Articles of religion of the Church of England (1562) explicitly denied their value for the establishment of doctrine, although it admitted that they should be read for their didactic worth. The first Bible in English to exclude the Apocrypha was the Geneva Bible of 1599. The King James Version of 1611 placed it between the Old and New Testaments. In 1615 Archbishop George Abbot forbade the issuance of Bibles without the Apocrypha, but editions of the King James Version from 1630 on often omitted it from the bound copies. The Geneva Bible edition of 1640 was probably the first to be intentionally printed in England without the Apocrypha, followed in 1642 by the King James Version. In 1644 the Long Parliament actually forbade the public reading of these books, and three years later the Westminster Confession of the Presbyterians decreed them to be no part of the canon. The British and Foreign Bible Society in 1827 resolved never to print or circulate copies containing the Apocrypha. Most English Protestant Bibles in the 20th century omitted the disputed books or had them as a separate volume, except in library editions, in which they were included with the Old and New Testaments.
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feffe58c85059f24a76e9ad9aabde8fd | https://www.britannica.com/topic/biblical-literature/The-fourth-Gospel-The-Gospel-According-to-John | The fourth Gospel: The Gospel According to John | The fourth Gospel: The Gospel According to John
John is the last Gospel and, in many ways, different from the Synoptic Gospels. The question in the Synoptic Gospels concerns the extent to which the divine reality broke into history in Jesus’ coming, and the answers are given in terms of the closeness of the new age. John, from the very beginning, presents Jesus in terms of glory: the Christ, the exalted Lord, mighty from the beginning and throughout his ministry, pointing to the Cross as his glorification and a revelation of the glory of the Father. The Resurrection, together with Jesus’ promise to send the Paraclete (the Holy Spirit) as witness, spokesman, and helper for the church, is a continuation of the glorious revelation and manifestation (Greek epiphaneia).
Irenaeus calls John the beloved disciple who wrote the Gospel in Ephesus. Papias mentions John the son of Zebedee, the disciple, as well as another John, the presbyter, who might have been at Ephesus. From internal evidence the Gospel was written by a beloved disciple whose name is unknown. Because both external and internal evidence are doubtful, a working hypothesis is that John and the Johannine letters were written and edited somewhere in the East (perhaps Ephesus) as the product of a “school,” or Johannine circle, at the end of the 1st century. The addressees were Gentile Christians, but there is accurate knowledge and much reference to Palestine, which might be a reflection of early Gospel tradition. The Jews are equated with the opponents of Jesus, and the separation of church and synagogue is complete, also pointing to a late-1st-century dating. The author of John knows part of the tradition behind the Synoptic Gospels, but it is unlikely that he knew them as literary sources. His use of common tradition is molded to his own style and theology, differing markedly with the Synoptics in many ways. Yet, John is a significant source of Jesus’ life and ministry, and it does not stand as a “foreign body” among the Gospels. Confidence in some apostolic traditions behind John is an organic link with the apostolic witness, and, from beginning to end, the confidence is anchored in Jesus’ words and the disciples’ experience—although much has been changed in redaction. Traces of eyewitness accounts occur in John’s unified Gospel narrative, but they are interpreted, as is also the case with the other Gospels. Clement of Alexandria, a late-2nd-century theologian, calls John the “spiritual gospel” that complements and supplements the Synoptics. Although the Greek of John is relatively simple, the power behind it (and its “poetic” translation especially in the King James Version) makes it a most beautiful writing. Various backgrounds for John have been suggested: Greek philosophy (especially the Stoic concept of the logos, or “word,” as immanent reason); the works of Philo of Alexandria, in which there is an impersonal logos concept that can not be the object of faith and love; Hermetic writings, comprising esoteric, magical works from Egypt (2nd–3rd centuries ad) that contain both Greek and Oriental speculations on monotheistic religion and the revelation of God; Gnosticism, a 2nd-century religious movement that emphasized salvation through knowledge and a metaphysical dualism; Mandaeanism, a form of Gnosticism based on Iranian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Jewish sources; and Palestinian Judaism, from which both Hellenistic and Jewish ideas came. In the last source there is a Wisdom component and some ideas that possibly come from Qumrān, such as a dualism of good versus evil, truth versus falsehood, and light versus darkness. Of these backgrounds, perhaps, all have played a part, but the last appears to fit John best. In the thought world of Jewish Gnosticism, there is a mythological descending and ascending envoy of God. In the prologue of John, there is embedded what is proclaimed as a historical fact: The Logos (Word) took on new meaning in Christ. The Creator of the world entered anew with creative power. But history and interpretation are always so inextricably bound together that one cannot be separated from the other.
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46a5d52dcd2f2180c7da9921801b409b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/biblical-uncial | Biblical uncial | Biblical uncial
…thinner, the hand is called biblical uncial, so named because this type is used in the three great early vellum codices of the Bible: Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus of the 4th century and Codex Alexandrinus of the 5th century. It is now certain that this style goes back to…
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fe75d6e17fb47d8b96115284f2206d7e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bielski-partisans | Bielski partisans | Bielski partisans
Bielski partisans, organization of Jewish partisans who fought Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1942 and 1944 in occupied Poland (now Belarus). Established by brothers Tuvia, Asael, and Zus Bielski, the group conducted guerrilla operations and provided shelter and protection to some 1,200 Jews.
Tuvia, Asael, and Zus Bielski were 3 of 12 children born to a family in Stankevichi, a village near Nowogródek, Poland (now Navahrudak, Belarus). They were the only Jews in that small community, and they quickly became self-sufficient. The brothers had distinctly different personalities: Tuvia—he was the oldest, at age 35 in 1941 when the Germans invaded Poland—was an intellectual with demonstrated leadership qualities; Asael, 33, was known for his steadfast work ethic; and Zus, 29, experienced brushes with the law because of his quick temper. Although the Bielski family had managed to survive the initial German attack, by December 1941 the brothers’ parents and two of their younger siblings had been killed. As Jews throughout the region were killed or forced into ghettos by the thousands, the brothers sought refuge in the woods that they had explored as children. Asael and Zus found homes for a dozen of their surviving relatives, including their younger brother, Aron. Tuvia moved another group of relatives to greater safety by integrating them with friendly non-Jews.
In spring 1942 the Bielskis decided to gather all of their relatives into a densely wooded area between Minsk and the Neman River. The brothers also began acquiring weapons. As the oppression of Jews continued in the Nowogródek ghetto, Tuvia, who had emerged as the leader of the Bielskis, argued that the time had come to expand the group beyond their family. After Tuvia overcame the initial objections of Asael and Zus (who argued that a smaller group would be easier to protect), the Bielskis attempted to recruit Jews from the ghettos. Despite the risks, many were willing to brave the uncertainty of the wilderness, and by autumn 1942 the Bielski group had swelled to nearly 100 members.
The Bielskis assembled a capable fighting force from the escapees, and they joined the growing ranks of partisans who were engaging in guerrilla raids against the Nazi occupiers. In October 1942 a joint force of Bielski and Soviet partisans attacked a German supply convoy, killing at least one German soldier. The Bielskis’ reputation grew throughout 1942, although fighting men remained a minority of the group’s overall population. Indeed, many of the Bielskis’ fighters spent their nights procuring food, sometimes by theft, from the local populace.
As winter approached, the group constructed covered dugouts to stave off the cold. As temperatures dropped, enemy activity increased, with Germans and German-allied local officials engaging in a cat-and-mouse pursuit of the Bielskis. One attack by German military police left 10 Bielski partisans dead; Asael led a reprisal raid, killing the collaborators who had revealed the location of the group. Through early 1943 the group continued to grow, and the Bielski band soon numbered more than 800. While Tuvia repeatedly moved the camp, its location was difficult to conceal from local peasants, and security became an increasing source of concern.
In June 1943 the Bielski camp was again assaulted, and the brothers relocated the group to a dense forest near the town of Nalibaki (now in Belarus). The area was home to numerous Soviet partisan units, and the group suffered its biggest attack yet as part of a massive anti-insurgency campaign orchestrated by the Germans in August 1943. Over subsequent weeks the brothers established a new camp that came to be known as Jerusalem. It boasted a kitchen, a forge, a school, a gunsmith, and a mill. As the Bielskis were nominally subordinate to the larger Soviet partisan command structure, overt displays of Jewish or Zionist expression were generally avoided, but the camp’s tannery doubled as a synagogue.
The relative isolation of the Jerusalem camp allowed the Bielskis to engage in an expanded range of partisan activities. They attacked military outposts and convoys and placed improvised explosive devices on railroad tracks. They also clashed with other partisan groups in the area, especially those associated with the Polish Home Army and the London-based Polish government-in-exile. Although the Bielskis had enjoyed fairly good relations with Home Army partisans in the early years of the war, Soviet policy dictated the suppression of such groups within its sphere of influence.
In July 1944 the Red Army liberated the area where the Bielski camp was located. The Bielski brothers reported to Soviet authorities that their group included 1,140 Jews and that their partisan operations had killed a total of 381 enemy fighters. The surviving members of the group emerged from the woods to find the homes that they had left behind in ruins and their families missing or dead. Asael was drafted into the Red Army and killed during the siege of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in February 1945. After the war Tuvia and Zus immigrated to Israel and fought in the first Arab-Israeli war (1948–49). They both moved to the United States in the 1950s, living the rest of their lives out of the public eye. Zus ran a trucking and taxi company, while Tuvia drove a delivery truck for his eldest brother, Walter, who had moved to the United States before the war. Tuvia died in 1987 and was buried in Long Island, New York, but his body was exhumed a year later, and he was given a state funeral with military honours in Jerusalem.
The story of the Bielski partisans was dramatized in the film Defiance (2008), which cast Daniel Craig in the role of Tuvia Bielski.
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ef6c6308acbf22517f046b57336225a2 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/biennio-rosso | Biennio rosso | Biennio rosso
Throughout the biennio rosso (“two red years”; 1919–20), revolution appeared imminent. While spontaneous land occupations swept through the south, riots and lootings hit shopkeepers in the north and centre in the summer of 1919, and prices were cut by half throughout the country. Socialist deputies walked out…
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