slavery

By Beverly Lemire, University of Alberta | – (The Conversation)- Fashion is political — today as in the past. As Britain’s Empire dramatically expanded, people of all ranks lived with clothing and everyday objects in startlingly different ways than generations before. The years between 1660 and 1820 saw the expansion of the British empire and […]

slavery

Slavery and War are tightly Connected – but we had no Idea just how Much until we crunched the Data

The Conversation

By Monti Datta, University of Richmond; Angharad Smith, United Nations University and Kevin Bales, University of Nottingham | – Some 40 million people are enslaved around the world today, though estimates vary. Modern slavery takes many different forms, including child soldiers, sex trafficking and forced labor, and no country is immune. From cases of family […]

Colonialism

Trump joins Aaron Burr and Jefferson Davis as Former High Office-Holder Investigated for Sedition

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Carol D. Leonnig, Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, and Spencer S. Hsu at the Washington Post got the scoop that the Department of Justice has for some time been investigating Donald John Trump for possible charges in connection with his campaign to overturn the 2020 election results. (I call him Donald […]

African-Americans

Juneteenth celebrates just one of the United States’ 20 emancipation days – and the history of how emancipated people were kept unfree needs to be remembered, too

The Conversation

By Kris Manjapra, Tufts University | – The actual day was June 19, 1865, and it was the Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, who first heard the word that freedom for the enslaved had come. There were speeches, sermons and shared meals, mostly held at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations. The […]

African-Americans

Lincoln’s Invention of Thanksgiving was all About how Black Lives Matter

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Thanksgiving Day, as is well known, was an invented tradition arising from the Civil War, promoted by Abraham Lincoln and his successors as a myth to unite the divided country. It doesn’t actually go back to the Pilgrims. There had been many Thanksgiving Days in the nineteenth century, at a […]

African-Americans

If we truly honored Juneteenth, we would end the exception in the 13th amendment

Waging Nonviolence

By Emma Jordan-Simpson | – (Waging Nonviolence ) – In my inbox this morning from a major nonprofit organization that should have known better was a Juneteenth celebratory greeting: “We proudly celebrate Juneteenth, the day slavery finally came to an end throughout the South — historically a monumental feat for American history and now a […]

African-Americans

When You Lift from the Bottom, Everyone Rises: Have We Entered America’s Third Era of Reconstruction?

Liz Theoharis

( Tomdispatch.com) – West Virginia, a state first established in defiance of slavery, has recently become ground zero in the fight for voting rights. In an early June op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin vowed to maintain the Senate filibuster, while opposing the For the People Act, a bill to expand voting […]

History

If You Love Our Country, Don’t Ban Its History

Jill Richardson

( Otherwords.org) – Across the country, several states have passed or introduced bills that ban teaching “critical race theory.” Oklahoma’s governor just signed one. Arizona’s governor just vetoed one. Texas and North Carolina are moving ahead with similar bills. I’d like to set aside the fact that the people most upset about critical race theory […]

African-Americans

Trump doesn’t Understand History any more than he Understands Epidemics

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump has a long history of proclaiming that he understands things better than the people who are experts in those things. When Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, testified to Congress that mask-wearing is even more effective against Covid-19 than a vaccine is likely to […]