US history

How Americans Remember (And Forget) Their Wars

May 5, 2017 John Dower, www.tomdispatch.com Educate! US history, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

By John Dower for Tom Dispatch - Some years ago, a newspaper article credited a European visitor with the wry observation that Americans are charming because they have such short memories. When it comes to the nation’s wars, however, he was not entirely on target. Americans embrace military histories of the heroic “band of [American] brothers” sort, especially involving World War II. They possess a seemingly boundless appetite for retellings of the Civil War, far and away the country’s most devastating conflict where American war deaths are concerned. Certain traumatic historical moments such as “the Alamo” and “Pearl Harbor” have become code words -- almost mnemonic devices -- for reinforcing the remembrance of American victimization at the hands of nefarious antagonists. Thomas Jefferson and his peers actually established the baseline for this in the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, which enshrines recollection of “the merciless Indian Savages” -- a self-righteous demonization that turned out to be boilerplate for a succession of later perceived enemies. “September 11th” has taken its place in this deep-seated invocation of violated innocence, with an intensity bordering on hysteria.

Which Way To The Barricades?

May 4, 2017 Steve Fraser and Nelson Lichtenstein, www.jacobinmag.com Strategize! Class Struggle, History, Strikes, US history, Workers

By Steve Fraser and Nelson Lichtenstein for Jacobin Magazine - Shelly’s “Masque of Anarchy” has been a spectral presence for nearly two hundred years, summoned at climactic moments of civil warfare. Composed to memorialize the 1819 Peterloo massacre, the poem commemorates the sixty thousand people who gathered at the very dawn of the industrial revolution to demand a radical expansion of suffrage, especially to those laboring in England’s dark satanic mills. Dozens died, hundreds were wounded. The poem wasn’t published for over a decade, until the Chartist movement took it up in 1832. Another ten years after that, it became the anthem of an almost nationwide general strike. Participants referred to the time leading up to that moment and the strikes that preceded it as “holy days.” Since then “Ye are many—they are few” has inspired rebellion, resistance, and liberation again and again. The New York garment worker strikes of 1911, the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, May 1968 in Paris, and, most recently, the pro-democracy congregations during the Arab Spring and the Occupy uprisings of 2011 are all etched in our collective memory. There are also largely unknown, but hardly less remarkable, general strikes: not just those that shut down Winnipeg and Seattle in 1919...

A Great Political Organizer Worth Knowing Bob Lee

April 1, 2017 Jakobi E. Williams, www.viewpointmag.com Educate! Activists, Multiracial Unity, US history

By Jakobi E. Williams for Viewpoint Magazine - Bob Lee, a key member of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party (ILBPP), founder of the original Rainbow Coalition in Chicago, and self-described lifelong community organizer, passed away Tuesday March 21, 2017 after a battle with cancer. He was 74 years old. He leaves behind his wife Faiza, two brothers, a son, and a long list of activists and organizers influenced by his dedication to the poor and underserved. I last saw Bob Lee less than two weeks before his death in his hospital room in Houston, Texas. Still the consummate organizer, he was trying to organize the hospital’s nurses and dining staff from the confines of his hospital bed!

Not Your Grandma’s Civil Rights Strategy

March 29, 2017 Jon Else, www.tomdispatch.com Strategize! Civil Rights, History, US history

By Jon Else for Tom Dispatch - On a glorious afternoon in August 1963, after the massive March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom wrapped up on the national mall, President John F. Kennedy, prodded by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, welcomed John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and other march organizers to the White House for a discussion of proposed civil rights legislation. Fifty-four years later, on an afternoon in January 2017, when the even more massive Women’s March on Washington wrapped up, President Donald Trump responded with a sarcastic tweet. Just the day before, Trump’s team had removed the “civil rights” page from the issues section...

Expanding The Slaveocracy

March 28, 2017 Matt Karp & Eric Foner, www.jacobinmag.com Educate! Racism, Slavery, US history

By Matt Karp & Eric Foner for Jacobin Magazine - One of the cottage industries in the historical profession right now is studying the relationship between capitalism and American slavery. This is an old discussion; it goes way, way back. Karl Marx said things about it. That’s not exactly the subject of your book, but I’m wondering how you think your study, which is a study of slaveowners and their vision of America as a great power in the world, fits into the ongoing debates about slavery and capitalism nowadays? The book joins a whole series of works that explore the slave South in a transnational sense. That’s another fashionable aspect: reemphasizing the dynamism and brutality of antebellum slavery.

For Reparations: A Conversation With William A. Darity Jr.

March 20, 2017 Adam Simpson et al, www.thenextsystem.org Create! Reparations, US history

By Adam Simpson, Carla Skandier and William A. Darity Jr. for Next System Project - William A. Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. The focus of his work is on inequality based on race, class, and ethnicity. He has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and most recently Jacobin Magazine. He is currently co-writing with Kristen Mullen a new book about reparations for African Americans, From Here to Equality, hoped to be released by Fall of 2017.

Lost Manuscript Of Eyewitness Account Of Tulsa Race Massacre

March 11, 2017 Allison Keyes, www.smithsonianmag.com Educate! Black History, Massacres, Race, US history

By Allison Keyes for Smithsonian - The manuscript, "The Tulsa Race Riot and Three of Its Victims," by B.C. Franklin was recovered from a storage area in 2015 and donated to the African American History Museum. (NMAAHC), Gift from Tulsa Friends and John W. and Karen R. Franklin) An Oklahoma lawyer details the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood where hundreds died 95 years ago. The ten-page manuscript is typewritten, on yellowed legal paper, and folded in thirds. But the words, an eyewitness account of the May 31, 1921, racial massacre that destroyed what was known as Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street,” are searing. “I could see planes circling in mid-air.

Teaching The History Of White Nationalism In U.S.

March 3, 2017 Paul Horton, www.livingindialogue.com Educate! US history, White Nationalism

By Paul Horton For Living In Dialogue - During the last year the Southern Poverty Law Center has reported an increase in hate crimes and hate groups. As political discourse in the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has become increasingly focused on identity politics, ethnic, cultural, and racial nationalisms have struggled to acquire opportunity and recognition within broader American publics. Reacting to this historical push from marginalized identity groups, an aggressive white nationalism has recently pushed back and reclaimed political power. Although white nationalism has always been a dominant, if not the dominant ideology in American history

Sanctuary Echoes Cities Opposing The Fugitive Slave Act

February 23, 2017 Tim Butterworth, www.otherwords.org Educate! Black History, Immigration, Sanctuary Cities, Slavery, US history

By Tim Butterworth for Other Words - A century and a half before Trump's refugee ban, cities like Boston rebelled against the Fugitive Slave Act. Shortly after Donald Trump’s order to ban thousands of documented, vetted immigrants and refugees from our shores, crowds rushed to airports all over the country to protect those who’d just arrived. Soon after, crowds in Phoenix and other cities surrounded federal immigration enforcement vans during raids on immigrants, in an attempt to block deportations. In Boston, which was home to many of these actions, I was reminded of another time citizens rejected an odious federal law to protect refugees seeking shelter here. On May 24th, 1854, Anthony Burns — a 19-year-old man who’d escaped slavery in Virginia — was captured in the city and held under armed guard by federal marshals.

James Baldwin And The Meaning Of Whiteness

February 21, 2017 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Educate! Black History, US history, White Privilege

By Chris Hedges for Truth Dig - Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” is one of the finest documentaries I have ever seen—I would have stayed in the theater in New York to see the film again if the next showing had not been sold out. The newly released film powerfully illustrates, through James Baldwin’s prophetic work, that the insanity now gripping the United States is an inevitable consequence of white Americans’ steadfast failure to confront where they came from, who they are and the lies and myths they use to mask past and present crimes. Baldwin’s only equal as a 20th century essayist is George Orwell. If you have not read Baldwin you probably do not fully understand America. Especially now. History “is not the past,” the film quotes Baldwin as saying. “History is the present. We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal.”

75th Anniversary Of Imprisonment Of Japanese: Anti-Immigrants Long Roots

February 21, 2017 Educate! Immigration, Japan, Racism, US history

By Dorothy M. Ehrlich for ACLU - Seventy-five years ago, in one of the darkest moments in American history, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. Immediately, the federal government began forcing 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps for fear they posed a threat to national security. For many years, we have recognized the infamous date of the order, February 19, 1942, with a “Day of Remembrance” at ceremonies throughout the nation designed to ensure that this indelible stain on our democracy is never forgotten. It is ordinarily a solemn occasion and a day of reflection. But on this day, the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, our current anti-Muslim crisis sounds a chilling echo of that earlier injustice, which must not be ignored. This year we are called to transform our quiet reflection into a fierce resistance.

WEB Du Bois: Retracing His Attempt To Challenge Racism With Data

February 20, 2017 Mona Chalabi, www.http://theguardian.com/ Educate! Black History, Racism, US history

By Mona Chalabi for The Guardian - The civil rights pioneer and scholar is most famous for his book The Souls of Black Folk, but his use of data to show inequality is still profound today. Any African American to be admitted to Harvard University in 1888 had to be exceptionally gifted. But that description doesn’t come close to capturing the talent of WEB Du Bois, a man who managed to write 21 books, as well as over 100 essays while being a professor and a relentless civil rights activist.Du Bois saw no trade-off between those pursuits – his scholarship was protest and his protest was scholarship. He deeply understood something that every activist scrawling a banner in Washington knows today – messaging matters.

Even Before Sanctuary Cities, Here’s How Black Americans Protected Fugitive Slaves

February 13, 2017 Barbara Krauthamer, www.theconversation.com Educate! Black History, Slavery, US history

By Barbara Krauthamer for The Conversation - While the Constitution mainly called for the return of runaway slaves, the 1850 law vastly expanded the authority of federal law enforcement officials. The law criminalized helping or harboring a runaway slave and denied the accused person the right to offer testimony in her or his own defense. The 1850 law confirmed what generations of enslaved African-Americans knew too well: They existed as property, not persons, in the eyes of the law. Enslaved women and men could not enter legal marriages because slaveholders claimed their bodies, time, movement and even reproductive capacity.

Freedom Rider: No Tears For John Lewis

January 21, 2017 Margaret Kimberley, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! Congress, US history

By Margaret Kimberley for Black Agenda Report - The people who fought against Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s were quite literally risking their lives. The list of martyrs is a long one. Activists of that era are rightly respected and their courage must not be forgotten or taken for granted. But as congressman John Lewis proves, their actions at that time should not provide dispensation from critique in the 21st century. Lewis is the latest target of president-elect Donald Trump’s attacks but that shouldn’t give him a pass either. Despite his early history, Lewis now exemplifies everything that is wrong with the Congressional Black Caucus, the Democratic Party and the black misleadership class.

What To Do Now

December 14, 2016 Sam Smith, www.prorevnews.blogspot.com Strategize! Politics, US history

By Sam Smith for Progressive Review News - Face the facts: The First American Republic is over. The Constitution is being trashed by both major parties. We are incapable of responding to the environmental crisis. Liberals can’t tell the difference between being elite and being extinct. We’re in the most expensive wars of no purpose in our history. Both major parties have moved steadily to the right over the past thirty years. Both have never been so corrupt. Ethnic prejudice is at an overt level unseen since the days of the civil rights struggles. The economy is still in the pits for many of our citizens. Thanks to Citizens United, money has replaced votes as the dominant political campaign objective.

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