The past is never dead. It's not even past
The practice of child abandonment and efforts to manage it have a long history and I recently encountered a series of surviving artifacts from about 250 years ago that provide us with a rare window into the abandoned and the abandoners. In France, as in other European countries, the frequency of abandonment led to the development of institutional responses to protect the children with the establishment of foundling hospitals in towns and cities across Europe.
Like countless other cultures and countries throughout the world, the United States has its own creation myth—its own unique, dramatic story intended to explain where we came from and who we are today. In the case of the United States, this story holds that the nation was conceived in “racial” differences, and that over the last four centuries these self-evident differences have suffused our national character and shaped our national destiny. Yet America’s creation myth is just that—a myth, one that itself rests entirely on a spurious concept: For “race” itself is a fiction, one that has no basis in biology or any longstanding, consistent usage in human culture.
The challenge of informing an inquisitive American public about the nation’s own two-hundred year old tragedy—slavery—has not fallen squarely on the shoulders of historians and other scholars. Artists, and particularly filmmakers, have played a central role in helping the larger public grapple with the horrors and indeed, aftershocks of human bondage.
In this rightfully celebrated book, Barbara Weinstein explores the efforts of São Paulo’s industrial elite to shape and control the Brazilian workforce from the 1920s to 1964 through two government-established yet privately-controlled public agencies—the National Service for Industrial Training (SENAI) and the Industrial Social Se
They met on the boardwalk of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on Labor Day of 1941, introduced by mutual friends. She was a self-described ambitious career girl; an English-major graduate of the University of Delaware, she would spend the war years working first in the advertising department of the DuPont Company, and then as the editor of RCA Victor’s company newsletter. He was a mail clerk for DuPont when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces in December of 1941 and began a three-month stint of basic training.
by Julia Gossard and Shaherzad Ahmadi
My father’s family came from Cape Verde, a tiny archipelago off the west coast of Africa near Senegal. Cape Verde was part of the Portuguese empire until a bloody fight for freedom initially led by my personal hero, Amilcar Cabral, brought independence to nation in July 1975.
In late October 1939 a photographer from the Bureau of Identification spent the day among both warm and chilled beef carcasses, shrouded sides of pork, and racks of washed and dried offal, documenting the daily activities of the Austin Municipal Abattoir.
Do you love Texas history? The Texas State Historical Association, which makes Texas history readily accessible through its Digital Gateway to Texas History, now offers a huge, new, terrific series of readings in the Handbook of African American Texas.
Amy Chazkel’s Laws of Chance explores the rise of a cultural phenomenon that has engrossed the Brazilian imaginary since the turn of the twentieth century: the lottery game jogo do bicho. Its multifaceted analysis ties the “animal game” to the rise of urbanization, consumer capitalism, positivist criminology, and the cash economy in the First Republic (1889-1930).