Last night, Major League Baseball legend Reggie Jackson was asked in a Fox Sports show about how he felt about returning to Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., for a Negro League tribute game. The 78-year-old, who started his MLB career in Birmingham in 1967, did not hold back. He told interviewer Alex Rodriguez about his experience of racial slurs and being denied entry to restaurants and hotels, in a city where the Ku Klux Klan was committing attacks of racial hatred. Here's the story from NBC, including the full video.
Today is Juneteenth. Michelle Garcia, Editorial Director of NBCBLK, curated Flipboard's Good Life newsletter this week. She chose a range of stories about the past and present of Juneteenth, including a look at the "Harriet Tubman of Texas," the commercialization of the holiday, and the work that still remains. "Now that it's a federal holiday, part of figuring out how to mark the day as a nation comes with educating the public about it," writes Garcia. Here's her Storyboard.
One new coin for me this week, but it's a neat, old, #USA cent - the 1857 Flying Eagle cent. Yes, a coin with a #Bird on it! I know you never expected that from me :D
James, by Percival Everett.
You are a runaway slave, your escape attempt joined by a white child named Huckleberry, and as the Mississippi River (and various white people) try to kill you, it gets harder to keep your truth from Huck.
4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.
Today is Earth Day. National Geographic tells the story of the first time the event was held, in 1970. It was the result of outrage at a devastating oil spill in Santa Barbara in Jan. 1969, which killed thousands of birds and stained beaches along California's coast.
There are more than 180,000 historical markers throughout America, and many of them tell only partial truths. Over the past year, NPR has analyzed crowdsourced data to uncover some of those errors. Many were strange, funny or silly — like a sign that marks the home of a world-famous Santa Claus school in Albion, New York, and a marker in Arizona that pays tribute to a donkey that drank beer. But many paint a fractured version of history: 70% of markers that mention plantations do not mention slavery, and there are 500 markers that describe the Confederacy in glowing terms. Here's more.
Pretty day. Sorry that we'll be a little stinky on the Dinky 🚉 (the nation's shortest scheduled rail line). https://www.njtransit.com/dinky We'll do our best to clean up before boarding. 🦨😂
I've been yelling from the rooftops, READ EDWARD E. BAPTIST! Specifically his book, "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism". And of course many people don't have the time or interest for a history book, no matter how compelling. Well, good news! Vox has an interview with Dr. Baptist, about the book, which gives a good overview of his themes and arguments. READ IT!!
"Of the many myths told about American slavery, one of the biggest is that it was an archaic practice that only enriched a small number of men.
The argument has often been used to diminish the scale of slavery, reducing it to a crime committed by a few Southern planters, one that did not touch the rest of the United States. Slavery, the argument goes, was an inefficient system, and the labor of the enslaved was considered less productive than that of a free worker being paid a wage. The use of enslaved labor has been presented as premodern, a practice that had no ties to the capitalism that allowed America to become — and remain — a leading global economy.
But as with so many stories about slavery, this is untrue. Slavery, particularly the cotton slavery that existed from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the Civil War, was a thoroughly modern business, one that was continuously changing to maximize profits."
A PROUD FAMILY LEGACY—the pioneering accomplishments of the US military’s first Black generals, a father and son—serves as the center of a close, thoughtful look at the history of military inclusion and segregation. B PLUS
Today, I started reading How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr. I will admit that I'm a bit raw because my sister is in the hospital, but JFC, this is brutal!
Between what we weren't told as kids and details on things that we were sort of told, it's incredibly informative and interesting, but I can't stop crying about things in it.
Like, I never knew the Philippines had been an American territory.
Also, the Japanese in WWII... yeah, what a serious lesson in what happens when you dehumanize the people on the other side. I mean, sure, the NAZIs did it too, don't get me wrong, but I knew more about the European theater in WWII.
Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Stop rolling your eyes, this isn't a patriotic post! You know me better than that.
This is about spilling the tea... about the British East India Company's spilled tea, and what that had to do with Bengal, textile workers, and famine.
See, BEIC was using its private armies to open markets around the world to their trading policies, and to install local rulers who would keep the goods and money flowing. They did this in Bengal, one of the world's biggest producers of textiles in the mid-1700s.
Then, in 1768, drought hit Bengal and crops failed. People began to go hungry, but the BEIC's puppet rulers and agents just continued to collect taxes--and, in some cases, to profiteer off the sale of food. Over the next two years, these practices exacerbated the food shortages, leading to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, in which 7 - 10 million people are estimated to have starved to death. That's at least 25% of the entire Bengali population of the time.
This put a big dent in the profits of the BEIC (oopsie, who knew famine profiteering could have negative economic impacts?), leading to a financial crisis in England. This is also why BEIC was unloading tea for cheap in the American colonies, to get some of those revenues back.
So yeah, "no taxation without representation" was the rallying cry, but isn't it interesting that we (USians, I mean) were never taught that the REASON colonists were worried about this is because they felt they had something in common with starving Bengalis: namely, the vulnerability to a multinational corporation which clearly demonstrated its depraved indifference to human suffering in pursuit of profit.
#CfP#histodons
The US #Military and the #Holocaust
International Research #Workshop, Center for Advanced #HolocaustStudies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (#USHMM), July 15–26, 2024
Co-Convenors: Kaete O’Connell (Yale University) and Adam Seipp (Texas A&M University)
Application deadline: February 2, 2024
Check out my new article, co-authored with some very swell gents. We find that lynch victims' surviving family members were more likely to move out of the county than were other people living in their census districts. People victimized by the US regime of violent racial terror respond the same way that other terrorism victims do. Implications for dispossession & reparations.
Dating Sept. 25, 1773, this account statement between Joseph Woodfolk & George Mitchell is signed by James Madison Sr., the president's father.
It includes a receipt for various supplies, including 2 bed cords, 8 nails, 1 quart mug & 1 pair of buckles.
Document with Madison Sr.’s signature, MF2014.22.5, The Montpelier Collection.
#OTD 1787 the full text of the #Constitution was printed for the public for the first time in the "The Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser", issue No. 2690, published by Dunlap & Claypoole, Philadelphia.
Sept.17 marks the anniversary of the signing of the #Constitution. #JamesMadison wrote to #ThomasJefferson in March 1787, when plans were underway for the #ConstitutionalConvention, “What may be the result of this political experiment cannot be foreseen.”
11 days before the Constitution was signed, Madison wrote Jefferson, “If the present moment be lost it is hard to say what may be our fate.”
We know that Demas was born #OTD in 1777 because Isaac Hite recorded his birthdate after receiving Demas and his family as a wedding gift from James Madison Sr.
#OTD in 1845, 250 veterans of the Battle of Baltimore were honored in Washington DC on the battle’s
31 st anniversary – and they took time to honor their wartime First Lady.
(1)
(3)
Dolley Madison,
by then 77 years old, had become an icon of an earlier time in American history.
William Elwell, 1848 portrait of Dolley Madison, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Join Montpelier’s Sr. Research Historian Hilarie Hicks as she discusses Montpelier’s duPont family history, shows personal photos of the duPonts at Montpelier, and reveals some surprising connections between the Madisons and duPonts.