History Archives - Page 10 of 78

Past Present

The History of Adoption

Past Present Podcast, Episode 326

May 17, 2022 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: The phrase “domestic supply of infants” in a footnote to the leaked draft Supreme Court decision regarding abortion has horrified many Americans. Niki referred to this Atlantic article about the intense process of adopting a baby. Natalia referenced this New ...

Feminism

Anarchafeminism

The urgent need for a feminism that does not create further hierarchies

May 16, 2022 • by Chiara Bottici

The more we searched for the “anarchafeminist tradition,” and the more we tried to identify the “anarchafeminist canon,” the less interested we were in it. While researching for this book, it became clear that the concept of an “anarchafeminist tradition,” let alone that of an “anarchafeminist canon,” is fraught with ...

Colonization

How My Grandmother Ceased to Be African

How East African Asians have been written out of African history

May 11, 2022 • by Shivani Somaiya

And in the pre-independence era, a new racial politics emerged, one that has, for far too long, encapsulated much of East Africa’s postcolonial thought, in which families like ours were increasingly depicted as foreigners to a place that had long been our home....

The Arts

How We Remember Leads Us to What We Remember

A review of the Noguchi Museum’s “No Monument” exhibit

May 10, 2022 • by Miko Yoshida

No Monument, contained within one and a half rooms on the first floor of the Noguchi Museum complex, challenges institutional accounts of Japanese Americans detention—often illustrated using photographs of disconsolate families surrounded by a few remaining possessions—by celebrating personal expression in a time of hardship. ...

How We Remember Leads Us to What We Remember

Politics

What Are We Defending When We Defend Democracy?

The unruly role of modern social movements in testing the limits of political freedom

March 31, 2022 • by James Miller

I realized, as I wrote to Bill, “that it's quite unclear precisely what form of the American regime we are all ostensibly defending, at this juncture in history. Is it the current form as you describe it, which is so peculiarly open to popular pressure from the bottom up? What if ...

What Are We Defending When We Defend Democracy?

Politics

Why We Should Rethink the Distinction Between “Institutional” and “Contentious” Politics

Movements and parties do not begin as separate kinds

March 30, 2022 • by Elisabeth Clemens

It was not so long ago, perhaps a few decades, that inquiry into movements and political parties lived within separate disciplines. Aspiring political scientists who were interested in movements might have found themselves forced to make careers in sociology. Until recently, political sociologists were focused on protests and revolutions, paying ...

Politics

The Growing Power of American Social Movements

And why elites still matter

March 29, 2022 • by William Galston

Social movements often fail, the scope of their concerns is limited, and their impact on parties is cyclical, rather than ever-expanding. ...

The Growing Power of American Social Movements

Politics

What Freud Would Say About Left-Wing Infighting

Sanders supporters and others need to resist the temptation to retreat into ideological purity

February 15, 2022 • by Todd Gitlin

At the 2008 reunion of veterans of the 1968 Columbia occupation, I remember sitting near him at one session and watching the abuse he patiently took from aging movement heavies who voiced their anger at him for having raised doubts, in his books, about the wisdom of their most violent ...

What Freud Would Say About Left-Wing Infighting

Past Present

The History of Emoji

Past Present Podcast, Episode 312

February 9, 2022 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: The Unicode Consortium has released dozens of new emoji, including a pregnant man, a melting face, and multiple new family configurations. Natalia referred to this Atlantic essay and to this BBC piece, and Niki to this essay on Science Friday. In ...

Literature

Decolonizing Daniel Defoe

How Black lives matter in A Journal of the Plague Year

February 9, 2022 • by Anna Neill

It isn’t hard to see why A Journal of the Plague Year has enjoyed renewed attention in recent times. But to invoke it without considering Defoe’s support for British imperialism and the expanding Atlantic slave trade is to make literary history complicit with colonial and racial injustice....

Activism

Why Activists Matter to Constitutional Change

Beyond textual loopholes: the case of the Thirteenth Amendment

February 2, 2022 • by Sam Klug

n the immediate aftermath of the Thirteenth Amendment’s passage, African American activists, Reconstruction legislators, and the formerly enslaved initially hoped it would be broadly applied. ...

Why Activists Matter to Constitutional Change

Democracy

The Phantom of the “Greatest Generation”

“Citizen soldiers” of America, unite!

January 26, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

With the greatest generation serving as their antithesis, it has become de rigueur to mock and attack the baby boomers: spoiled children of fathers infinitely better than they. But whatever the errors and failings of the post-war generation, it rose up against war and racism and stifling rules, all of ...