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Category: History

  • The Heat and Flavor of Blackness: Celebrating Black Music Month

    By Rashod Ollison | Fresh-cut watermelon smelling like rain and ribs sizzling on a grill bring the music back. The songs complement the food and the weather and Technicolor the memories of when we were all just kids with nothing in our pockets but waxy penny candy. We thought we knew everything. We knew nothing.…

  • Guns Make Killing Easy

    By Dennis A. Henigan I am sitting here, in my only orange shirt, in observation of National Gun Violence Awareness Day, and my thoughts turn to the New York Times’ remarkable recent study of 358 shootings last year in which four or more people were killed or wounded. As the Times noted, these were not…

  • Native American Cultural Appropriation Is a War of Meaning

    By Dina Gilio-Whitaker | The war that is Native American cultural appropriation rages on. And make no mistake, this is a war for the control of meaning on what constitutes cultural appropriation, and thus what is considered acceptable in the U.S. American mind when it comes to American Indian culture and even intellectual property rights.…

  • Polly Bemis, Chinese-American Pioneer of the American West

    By Haley Stafford This year, my class took part in National History Day, a program for middle-school students to put together a project on a historical topic of interest. I didn’t have a clue as to what I wanted to research. All I knew was that the theme was “Exploration, Encounter, and Exchange in History.”…

  • “Roots” Reboot

    By Sharon Leslie Morgan On January 23, 1977, more than 100 million people across America tuned their television sets to ABC to watch one of the first and still few programs to truthfully tell the story of American slavery. The historic miniseries, based on the novel by Alex Haley, recounted the genealogical saga of one…

  • Mr. Hornaday’s War: The Return of the Buffalo

    By Stefan Bechtel “In March, 1886, I received a severe shock, as if by a blow on the head with a well-placed mallet. I awoke, dazed and stunned, to a sudden realization of the fact that the buffalo hide-hunters of the United States had practically finished their work.” The writer was William Temple Hornaday, then…

  • The Priest Who Practiced Radical Direct Action: Father Daniel J. Berrigan

    By Bernardine Dohrn In 1970, we received a “Letter from the Underground” from Father Daniel Berrigan, printed in the New York Review of Books. It was a note from a comrade, for Dan too was a “most wanted” fugitive from the FBI and federal law enforcement officials at that time. A Jesuit priest, an acclaimed…

  • Organizing in Plain Sight: The Long-Ignored Activism of Sex Workers

    By Melinda Chateauvert Over the last week and before the print edition appeared, Emily Bazelon’s cover story “Should Prostitution be a Crime?” for the New York Times Magazine, sex workers and their allies were sharing and discussing it widely through Facebook, Twitter, and their blogs. I was thrilled to see people I know, activists I’ve…

  • Defying the Nazis: Discovering the Heroic Legacy of Martha and Waitstill Sharp

    By Artemis Joukowsky: It was 1976, and I was a freshman attending the Allen-Stevenson School in New York City. My history and social studies teacher, John Pariseau, assigned a class report on the subject of moral courage. Pariseau further instructed us to build our papers around a personal interview.

  • “Detained and Deported”: Questions about America’s Immigration Dragnet

    A Q&A with Margaret Regan Starting in the 1980s, we began to have a policy of detaining immigrants. We didn’t really have detention centers ever since we shut down Ellis Island and Angel Island in the 1950s. 1980s policy changed. We were going to do detention centers. So, what do you do? You suddenly start…