Race and Memory in United States History

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Interpreting Slavery

A newish book about the interpretation of the history of slavery, which grew out of work with the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery.

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17 Artists To Fire You Up When Things Look Bleak

Because when you're moved by art, you become less complacent.

Also includes Another Round’s interview with Kimberly Drew (aka @museummammy).

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White Artist’s Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Draws Protests

The canvas, based on open-coffin photographs of the 1955 lynching victim, speaks to the images’ power to address race and violence.

Recent controversy that raises questions about who can—and should—speak to racial violence in America, and how.

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Pertinent to our discussion of spatial and temporal strategies for challenging the ideology of colorblindness.

Description from Wikimedia: 

Mural on the wall of row houses in Philadelphia. The artist is Parris Stancell, sponsored by the Freedom School Mural Arts Program.

Left to right; Malcolm Shabazz (Malcolm X), Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass.

The quote above the pictures,"We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest", is from Ella Baker, a founder of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), a civil rights group. which amongst other contributions, helped to coordinate "Freedom Rides"in the early 1960's.

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S.103 threatens digital history initiatives around race | National Council on Public History

Mapping Prejudice in the Minneapolis Historyapolis project. Screenshot credit: Kirsten Delegard Not so long ago, few historians knew anything about GIS, or geographic information systems. Many of us saw little need to learn complicated software built on scripting languages and databases. We retreated to the familiar environment of the archives, leaving the technical challenges of GIS to geographers and computer scientists. This early hesitation disappeared with the realization that this software platform could open an expansive new window on the past. Public historians are now evangelists for GIS, which makes it possible to store massive amounts of historic data, link that information to coordinates on the earth, and display the results in rich and interactive visual environments. Mapping Inequality. Screenshot credit: Kirsten Delegard. A compelling example of how GIS can transform our understanding of history can be found in the "Mapping Inequality" project hosted by the University

Here is a comment from the National Council on Public History about Senate Bill 103, which would make it illegal to use fund to build, maintain, or provide access to the kinds of databases that scholars use to study housing inequality.

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Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary about the underground ballroom scene in Harlem. In the years since its release, the film has seen its share of controversy, rooted in accusations of exploitation, the politics of representation, and questions of cultural appropriation.

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Lyrical Paintings of Life Inside a WWII Internment Camp

Estelle Peck, a white Californian, married Arthur Ishigo, a second-generation Japanese American, in 1929. Interracial marriages were illegal in the sta ...

Short piece on the work of Estelle Ishigo (née Peck), an Anglo woman who went with her nisei husband to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center during World War II. There she created drawings and paintings that constitute a poignant visual archive of the internment experience. You can also view her work through UCLA’s Special Collections and the Japanese American National Museum.

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Episode of the podcast Code Switch dealing with the question of what American identity means for those citizens who are "foreign in a domestic sense"—Puerto Ricans.

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Syllabus of readings to contextualize the film Get Out in the history of racial exploitation and resistance in the U.S.

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Enslaved Women Were Not Mistresses — They Were Victims of Rape

It's time to get the facts straight.

Essay referenced in our discussion of sexuality as a site for race-making, which grew out of a presentation on the Emmett Till Project.

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Patrick Grossi and Temple Contemporary

Excellent public history project out of Temple University that explores neighborhood change through acts of commemoration—funerals for homes in predominantly black neighborhoods that are being demolished. Patrick Grossi won the National Council on Public History’s G. Wesley Johnson award for his article about the project, “Plan or Be Planned For.”

Video of the event:

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The Provocateur Behind Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Issa Rae

How the director Melina Matsoukas helps female artists reinvent themselves.

Pertinent to our discussion of Desire and Disaster in New Orleans (by way of the “Formation” video) is this profile of director Melina Matsoukas. Also an excuse to post one of the best videos gifs of all time:

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The Fate Of Confederate Monuments, After Charleston (with images, tweets) · Conductor_X

A Social Media Story storified by Conductor_X

Storify of tweets from the final session (#s69) of #NCPH2016, dealing with the challenge of Confederate monuments for public historians. These reflect both the comments of the panelists and the views of the audience. The Twitter backchannel was (as you can see) very active, and often at odds with the panel itself. 

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When former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement on the fourth of July, 1910 to fight current black heavywight champion Jack Johnson in Reno, Nevada, he boasted that he was doing it "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro." Jeffries, though, was trounced. Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, Gail Bederman demonstrates, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance. In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans—Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—she illuminates the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.

Explores the racial and gendered meanings of “civilization” at the end of the 19th century/beginning of the 20th century through studies of four influential Americans: Ida B. Wells, G. Stanley Hall, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Teddy Roosevelt. The introduction also examines how the Columbian Exposition in Chicago represented prevailing American ideas about the “civilized” and “savage” peoples of the world.

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Sick from Freedom

Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death.

Important work on epidemic disease among freedpeople during and after the Civil War, which came up in our discussion of Visualizing Emancipation.

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Eyes on the Prize - 01 - Awakenings (1954-1956)

Covers the murder of Emmett Till and ensuing trial, along with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. See also: the Emmett Till Project.

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Comparisons of the treatment of the Chinese and African-Americans in the U.S. in the 19th century

Aarim-Heriot’s work is useful for understanding how anti-blackness framed white Americans’ encounter with other racialized Others—here, Chinese immigrants.