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Category: History

  • Our Civic Duty: Why We Published the Pentagon Papers

    With the release of The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, the story of the Pentagon Papers has rekindled public conversation about the importance of a free press. The papers divulged the history and facts of the United States’ political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, which were…

  • Learning the Truth About Thanksgiving and America’s Origin Story

    With the anticipation of a mouth-watering feast and time away from the office to lounge with family and friends, Americans come together for Thanksgiving. It’s the holiday where conversations about our national origins abound. But much of the US’s widely accepted origin story is skewed by the lens of settler colonialism and has silenced the…

  • Radical Abolitionist Benjamin Lay Reclaimed by Quakers 279 Years Later

    The recognition represented a profound, heartfelt act of retrospective justice, because Lay had been unjustly disowned in the first place. It was a symbolic rejection of what a previous slave-owning generation of Quakers had done and it was simultaneously an affirmation that Benjamin Lay’s values matter to the Abington congregation, in the present and for…

  • Why Do People Pass?: The Complex Journeys of Belonging and Identity in America

    By Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page: In June 2015 a surprising number of Americans stopped to gawk at a thirty-seven-year-old “African American” woman named Rachel Dolezal who, after an almost decade-long act, was outed by her parents as a white woman who chose to pass as black. The national response, culminating in a Today show…

  • We Need to Do More to Fight Addiction

    By Christopher M. Finan: Addiction killed a young friend of mine last fall. Americans are alarmed by the surging number of fatal drug overdoses, mostly caused by prescription painkillers, heroin, and fentanyl. There were 52,000 in 2015, and it is estimated that 59,000 people died in 2016. What are we doing about it? Not enough.

  • The 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?”

    Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?” speech to students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia. In it, he lays out three important steps to follow in order for the students to reach their full potential, no matter their status life, and calls on them to…

  • We Remember Charley Shively, Visionary of the Gay Liberation Movement

    By Michael Bronski: Charley Shively, one of the pivotal figures in the Gay Liberation Movement, died Friday, October 6 at the Cambridge Rehabilitation and Nursing Home, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had been a resident since June of 2011, suffering from Alzheimer’s. He would have been eighty on December 8, 2017. At the 1977 Boston Gay…

  • “Beyond Standing Rock,” But Not Beyond Reproach

    By Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Since the days of the #NoDapl encampment, now nine months in the past, dozens of films have been released documenting the event. One of the latest is an offering from award-winning documentarian Brian Malone, titled Beyond Standing Rock. Malone has been touring the film and I recently had the chance to view…

  • Poor People’s Campaign Redux, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

    By Joseph Rosenbloom: As a graduate student at Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote about the social ill of poverty and vowed to do something about it. He put the resolve on hold. For his first decade as a civil rights leader, he dedicated himself to ending racial segregation and…

  • Nine Radical Facts about Abolitionist Quaker Dwarf Benjamin Lay

    He sounds like a fascinating nonfiction character—too quirky to be true—but radical Quaker dwarf Benjamin Lay truly lived, and historian Marcus Rediker has brought his virtually unknown story to life in The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist. Mocked as “the little hunchback” and written off by his contemporaries…