Beacon Broadside

recent posts

about

Category: History

  • Fierce Activists, Fierce Agitators: Women at the Vanguard of the Labor Movement

    I’d been following the domestic workers movement here in Massachusetts as they campaigned to pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. In 2014, Massachusetts became the fourth state to approve the domestic workers bill of rights which guarantees basic work standards, such as meal and rest breaks, parental leave, protection from discrimination, sexual harassment, etc.…

  • The Canonization of Junípero Serra and The Race for Innocence

    In 1988, Pope John Paul II beatified Junípero Serra, the first step to canonization. In the wake of the Red Power movement of the 1970s and the International Indigenous Movement that followed, there was a strong outcry from California Indigenous descendants of those who perished of overwork, starvation, and outright killing in the Franciscan missions…

  • Siempre Luchando: Mothers and Their Children Under Fire in Detention Centers

    By Margaret Regan Photo credit: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Department of Homeland Security) Dilley, a small Texas city eighty-three miles north of the Mexican border, greets visitors with a cheerful sign.  “Welcome to Dilley, Texas,” it reads. “A Slice of the Good Life.” That good life extends only so far. Just west of town,…

  • Un-Renaming Denali

    By Christine Byl Photo credits: Christine Byl I've lived in Interior Alaska for the past eleven years, about 100 miles, as the raven flies, from the highest mountain in North America. I have always called this formidable and beautiful summit "Denali," as do a majority of Alaska residents, including our three Republicans in Congress. Since…

  • Striking Down the Nostalgia for Mammy: Black Women and Labor Activism

    By Premilla Nadasen Nearly eighty years ago, Margaret Mitchell published what would become a best-selling novel, Gone with the Wind. More than thirty million copies have sold worldwide, and in 1939, the film adaptation was released. The novel tells the tale of a young white woman slaveholder, Scarlett O’Hara, who struggles to come to terms…

  • Trauma Suffered on This Small Bridge: A Q&A with Ronnie Greene

    On September 4, 2005, eight years before the #BlackLivesMatter movement was born, officers of the New Orleans Police Department opened fire on two families crossing the Danziger Bridge. Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the city six days before. The officers were on site for an unrelated distress call. All the innocent victims were black and unarmed.…

  • The Doctrine of Discovery

    By Roxanna Dunbar-Ortiz | In 1982, the government of Spain and the Holy See (the Vatican, which is a nonvoting state member of the United Nations) proposed to the UN General Assembly that the year 1992 be celebrated in the United Nations as an “encounter” between Europe and the peoples of the Americas, with Europeans bearing the gifts of…

  • Discrimination Doesn’t End on the 25th Anniversary of the ADA

    By Lennard J. Davis Davis signing copies of Enabling Acts at the ADA 25th Anniversary Event in Washington, DC This blog appeared originally on The Huffington Post. While July 26 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, we need to recall that discrimination against people with disabilities is not over. The ADA…

  • Road Trips to The Mall; or, What I Did on My Summer Vacation

    By Kim E. Nielsen Photo credit: Kim E. Nielsen In the last three months The Family and I have twice piled into the car for eight-plus-hour (one way!) road trips to Washington, D.C. As family road trips, the journeys necessarily included junk food, some nausea, lots of laughter, sunburn, bickering, loud music, crowded hotel rooms,…

  • Forty-Six Words That Changed Disability History

    By Lennard J. Davis | Trying to find a moment when the ADA began is like trying to find the source of the Nile or the Amazon. So many tributaries flow into the making of the ADA that you cannot say if any single stream is the true source. But you can say that at some point, like…