The Interior Department has documented the deaths of more than 500 Indigenous children at Indian boarding schools run or supported by the federal government in the United States which operated from 1819 to 1969. The actual death toll is believed to be far higher, and the report located 53 burial sites at former schools. The report was ordered by the first Indigenous cabinet member, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose grandparents were forced to attend boarding school at the age of 8. “It’s kind of a misnomer to actually call these educational institutions or schools themselves when you didn’t have very many people graduating, let alone surviving the dire conditions of those schools,” says Nick Estes, historian and co-founder of The Red Nation. Estes says the institutions were part of a “genocidal process” of “dispossession and theft of Indigenous people’s lands and resources.”
Finland’s president and prime minister say they plan to end decades of neutrality and join NATO. Sweden is also expected to seek NATO membership. The Kremlin says Russia sees the expansion of NATO on its borders as a threat. “People on both sides will suffer,” says Reiner Braun, executive director of the International Peace Bureau, who warns Russia will escalate in response and move more nuclear weapons near the 830-mile-long Finland-Russia border.
Nebahat Avcıoğlu, Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History, Hunter College, City University of New York
As a category both visual and political, the “Turk” was constructed during the 18th century amidst increasing trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchanges between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. The European portrayal of the Turk in playful, antagonistic, or innocuous terms across cultural practices and artistic media from architecture to porcelain, music, and drawings created a genre later known as turquerie. This talk examines both canonical and lesser-known examples of this visual production across various historical contexts in order to understand the phenomenon as a particularly rich case of European self-representation through the Other.
This annual lecture series highlights Ottoman and Turkish art and its global reach.
The series is made possible by The Turkish Centennial Fund.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York City recently finished a major renovation of its exhibition on the native peoples of the northwest coast of North America. Curators relied heavily on advice from tribal members of that region. (May 13)
The January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, intended to stop the certification of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States of America, “was as close to fascism as I ever want to see our country come,” says Jamie Raskin, Democratic Congressman from Maryland. And he should know — Raskin is a Constitutional scholar as well as a long-time law school professor, and in the hours after the assault on the Capitol, he was chosen to head up the second impeachment investigation of Donald Trump. He’s also a member of the House Select Committee currently investigating the January 6 attack, now set to hold publicly televised hearings next month. “The political scientists tell [us] that the key indicator of a successful coup is a recently failed coup where the coup plotters can diagram the deficiencies in the incumbent regime,” says Rep. Raskin. In this exclusive interview, Raskin talks with Laura about the strengths and weaknesses in US democracy and how best to address them now.
“There were a number of moments when we could have lost it all. And we want people to see precisely what happened and how close we came.” – Jamie Raskin, Congressman (D-MD), Member Jan. 6 House Select Committee
Five thousand years ago man first throws a handful of rocks into a campfire and stumbles upon a discovery that changes the world: Metal. Copper, Tin and Bronze empower the ancient world, in Season 1, Episode 7, “Man and Metals.”
The Greensboro sit-ins were a series of nonviolent protests in February to July 1960, primarily in the Woolworth store—now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum—in Greensboro, North Carolina, which led to the F. W. Woolworth Company department store chain removing its policy of racial segregation in the Southern United States. While not the first sit-in of the civil rights movement, the Greensboro sit-ins were an instrumental action, and also the best-known sit-ins of the civil rights movement. They are considered a catalyst to the subsequent sit-in movement, in which 70,000 people participated. This sit-in was a contributing factor in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
In August 1939, African-American attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker organized the Alexandria Library sit-in in Virginia (now the Alexandria Black History Museum).[7] In 1942, the Congress of Racial Equality sponsored sit-ins in Chicago, as they did in St. Louis in 1949 and Baltimore in 1952. The Dockum Drug Store sit-in in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas, was successful in ending segregation at every Dockum Drug Store in Kansas and a sit-in in Oklahoma City the same year led the Katz Drug Stores to end its segregation policy.[8][9]
The Greensboro Four (as they would soon be known) were Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond, all young black students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in their freshman year who often met in their dorm rooms to discuss what they could do to stand against segregation.[10] They were inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and his practice of nonviolent protest, and specifically wanted to change the segregational policies of F. W. Woolworth Company in Greensboro, North Carolina. During Christmas vacation of 1959, McNeil attempted to buy a hot dog at the Greensboro Greyhound Lines bus station, but was refused service. Shortly thereafter, the four men decided that it was time to take action against segregation.[11] They came up with a simple plan: they would occupy seats at the local F. W. Woolworth Company store, ask to be served, and when they were inevitably denied service, they would not leave. They would repeat this process every day for as long as it would take. Their goal was to attract widespread media attention to the issue, forcing Woolworth to implement desegregation.[12]
On February 1, 1960, at 4:30 pm ET, the four sat down at the 66-seat L-shaped stainless steel lunch counter inside the F. W. Woolworth Company store at 132 South Elm Street in Greensboro, North Carolina.[2] The men, Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil,[13] who would become known as the A&T Four or the Greensboro Four, had purchased toothpaste and other products from a desegregated counter at the store with no problems, but were then refused service at the store’s lunch counter when they each asked for a cup of coffee, a donut with cream on the side.[1][14] According to a witness, a white waitress told the boys “We don’t serve Negroes here”. Blair responded that he was just served 2 feet away, to which the waitress replied “Negroes eat at the other end”. An African-American girl who was cleaning behind the counter called them “stupid, ignorant, rabble-rousers, troublemakers”. Another African-American told them, “You’re just hurting race relations by sitting there”. However, an elderly white woman told them, “I am just so proud of you. My only regret is that you didn’t do this ten or fifteen years ago”. Store manager Clarence Harris asked them to leave, and, when they would not budge, called his supervisor, who told him, “They’ll soon give up, leave and be forgotten”. Harris allowed the students to stay and did not call police to evict them. The four freshmen stayed until the store closed that night, and then went back to the North Carolina A&T University campus, where they recruited more students to join them the next morning.
The next day, on February 2, 1960, more than twenty black students (including four women), recruited from other campus groups, joined the sit-in. This group sat with school work to stay busy from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The group was again refused service, and were harassed by the white customers at the Woolworth store. However, the sit-ins made local news on the second day, with reporters, a TV cameraman and police officers present throughout the day. Back on campus that night, the Student Executive Committee for Justice was organized, and the committee sent a letter asking the president of F.W. Woolworth to “take a firm stand to eliminate discrimination.” Upon hearing of the sit-ins, the president of the college, Warmoth T. Gibbs, remarked that Woolworth’s “did not have the reputation for fine food”.
The Institute of African Studies (IAS) is the first and oldest semi-autonomous research institute of the University of Ghana, Legon. It was set up in 1961 by Ghana’s first President, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, as a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary institute with the mandate to conduct research into all aspects of the arts and the social sciences in Africa. The Institute carries out this mission by engaging in the regeneration of Africa and her people through knowledge production, dissemination, application and preservation. The IAS mission is geared towards a vision of becoming a global leader for scholarship on Africa and her Diaspora.
In Agbogbloshie, a community in Accra, Ghana, people descend on a scrapyard to mine electronic waste for recyclable materials. Without formal training, these urban miners often teach themselves the workings of electronics by taking them apart and putting them together again. Designer DK Osseo-Asare wondered: What would happen if we connected these self-taught techies with students and young professionals in STEAM fields? The result: a growing maker community where people engage in peer-to-peer, hands-on education, motivated by what they want to create. Learn more about how this African makerspace is pioneering a grassroots circular economy.
Though not a new phenomenon, flat Earth theory has enjoyed a huge resurgence recently. A YouGov poll indicated that a third of Americans aged 18 to 24 were unsure of the shape of our planet, in spite of scientific proofs from Pythagoras to Nasa. Why has this happened now, and what does it tell us about society today?
Welcome to Transition Studies. To prosper for very much longer on the changing Earth humankind will need to move beyond its current fossil-fueled civilization toward one that is sustained on recycled materials and renewable energy. This is not a trivial shift. It will require a major transition in all aspects of our lives.
This weblog explores the transition to a sustainable future on our finite planet. It provides links to current news, key documents from government sources and non-governmental organizations, as well as video documentaries about climate change, environmental ethics and environmental justice concerns.
The links are listed here to be used in whatever manner they may be helpful in public information campaigns, course preparation, teaching, letter-writing, lectures, class presentations, policy discussions, article writing, civic or Congressional hearings and citizen action campaigns, etc. For further information on this blog see: About this weblog. and How to use this weblog.
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