The Gilder Lehrman Center (GLC) for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at The MacMillan Center at Yale University. The GLC strives to make a vital contribution to the understanding of slavery and its role in the development of the modern world. While the Center’s primary focus has been on scholarly research, it also seeks to bridge the divide between scholarship and public knowledge by opening channels of communication between the scholarly community and the wider public. In collaboration with secondary schools, museums, parks, historical societies, and other related institutions, the Center facilitates a locally rooted understanding of the global impact of slavery.
The Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration (ER&M) enables students to engage in interdisciplinary and comparative study of forces that have created a multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial world.
The major emphasizes familiarity with the intellectual traditions and debates surrounding the concepts of indigeneity, ethnicity, nationality, and race; grounding in both the history of migration and its contemporary manifestations; and direct engagement with and knowledge of the culture, structures, and peoples formed by these migrations.
Undergraduate majors in ER&M take courses and pursue research projects that focus on the United States, on other regions of the world, or on global comparisons; and they explore methodologies drawn from many different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.
The American Missionary Association (AMA) was a Protestant-based abolitionist group founded on September 3, 1846, in Albany, New York. The main purpose of the organization was abolition of slavery, education of African Americans, promotion of racial equality, and spreading Christian values. Its members and leaders were of both races; The Association was chiefly sponsored by the Congregationalist churches in New England. Starting in 1861, it opened camps in the South for former slaves. It played a major role during the Reconstruction Era in promoting education for blacks in the South by establishing numerous schools and colleges, as well as paying for teachers.
Robert Smalls (April 5, 1839 – February 23, 1915) was an American politician, publisher, businessman, and maritime pilot. Born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, he freed himself, his crew, and their families during the American Civil War by commandeering a Confederate transport ship, CSS Planter, in Charleston harbor, on May 13, 1862, and sailing it from Confederate-controlled waters of the harbor to the U.S. blockade that surrounded it. He then piloted the ship to the Union-controlled enclave in Beaufort–Port Royal–Hilton Head area, where it became a Union warship. His example and persuasion helped convince President Abraham Lincoln to accept African-American soldiers into the Union Army.
After the American Civil War he returned to Beaufort and became a politician, winning election as a Republican to the South Carolina Legislature and the United States House of Representatives during the Reconstruction era. Smalls authored state legislation providing for South Carolina to have the first free and compulsory public school system in the United States. He founded the Republican Party of South Carolina. Smalls was the last Republican to represent South Carolina’s 5th congressional district until the election of Mick Mulvaney in 2011.
Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (May 10, 1837 – December 21, 1921) was an American publisher, politician, and Union Army officer. Pinchback was the first African American to serve as governor of a U.S. state and the second African American (after Oscar Dunn) to serve as lieutenant governor of a U.S. state. A Republican, Pinchback served as acting governor of Louisiana from December 9, 1872, to January 13, 1873. He was one of the most prominent African-American officeholders during the Reconstruction Era.
Pinchback was born free in Macon, Georgia to Eliza Stewart and her master, William Pinchback, a white planter. His father raised the younger Pinchback and his siblings as his own children on his large plantation in Mississippi. After the death of his father in 1848, his mother took Pinchback and siblings to the free state of Ohio to ensure their continued freedom. After the start of the American Civil War, Pinchback traveled to Union-occupied New Orleans. There he raised several companies for the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, and became one of the few African Americans commissioned as officers in the Union Army.
Pinchback remained in New Orleans after the Civil War, becoming active in Republican politics. He won election to the Louisiana State Senate in 1868 and became the president pro tempore of the state senate. He became the acting Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana following the death of Oscar Dunn in 1871 and briefly served as acting governor of Louisiana after Henry C. Warmoth was impeached. After the contested 1872 Louisiana gubernatorial election, Republican legislators elected Pinchback to the United States Senate. Due to the controversy over the 1872 elections in the state, which were challenged by white Democrats, Pinchback was never seated in Congress.
Pinchback served as a delegate to the 1879 Louisiana constitutional convention, where he helped gain support for the founding of Southern University. In a Republican federal appointment, he served as the surveyor of US customs of New Orleans from 1882 to 1885. Later he worked with other leading men of color to challenge the segregation of Louisiana’s public transportation system, leading to the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. To escape increasing racial oppression, he moved with his family to Washington, D.C. in 1892, where they were among the elite people of color. He died there in 1921.
Milton Coates was a cotton weigher who served as a state legislator and post office clerk in Mississippi. He represented Warren County, Mississippi in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1882 to 1885. A Republican, he lived on south Farmer Street in Vicksburg.[1]
He was a.defendant in a lawsuit regarding the weighing of cotton by the city of Vicksburg.
Norman Solomon (born July 7, 1951) is an American journalist, media critic, activist, and former U.S. congressional candidate. Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, which works to provide alternative sources for journalists, and serves as its executive director.
Solomon’s weekly column, “Media Beat”, was in national syndication from 1992 to 2009. In 2012, Solomon ran for Congress in California’s 2nd congressional district. He attended the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions as a Bernie Sanders delegate. Since 2011, he has been the national director of RootsAction.org.
Solomon came under FBI scrutiny after he picketed for the desegregation of a Maryland apartment complex at age 14. He became aware of their surveillance later, through a Freedom of Information request.
After high school, Solomon began a lifelong commitment to progressive activism. Solomon engaged in civil disobedience as part of the anti-nuclear movement, and eventually spent 40 days in jail as a result. He made eight trips to Moscow during the 1980s, including one during which he and a leader of an American group, the Alliance of Atomic Veterans, organized a sit-in at the U.S. Embassy, demanding that the U.S. join the Soviet Union in a halt to tests of nuclear bombs.
As a freelance journalist, Solomon reported for a number of years for Pacific News Service. In 1988, Solomon worked briefly as a spokesperson for the Alliance of Atomic Veterans in Washington, D.C.. He was hired in August 1988 to run the new Washington, D.C., office of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
The author of 12 books, his op-ed pieces have appeared in a range of newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post and USA Today. His articles have been published by The Nation and other magazines. He is a frequent contributor to online outlets such as Common Dreams, Salon and LA Progressive.
A book of Solomon’s collected columns, The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media, won the 1999 George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. Jonathan Kozol’s introduction to the book noted “the tradition of Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and I. F. Stone does not get much attention these days in the mainstream press … but that tradition is alive and well in this collection of courageously irreverent columns on the media by Norman Solomon….”
In 2000, Solomon teamed up with Robert Parry to write a series of investigative reports on George W. Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell, published on Parry’s website Consortium News.
Solomon’s book Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (co-authored with Reese Erlich) was published in 2003 and translated into German, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Korean. War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death appeared in 2005. The Los Angeles Times called the book “a must-read for those who would like greater context with their bitter morning coffee, or to arm themselves for the debates about Iraq that are still to come.” A documentary, narrated by Sean Penn, was based on the book released in 2007.
Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, an organization founded in 1997 “as a national consortium of independent public-policy researchers, analysts and activists.” According to its web site, the mission of IPA is to increase “the reach and capacity of progressive and grassroots organizations (at no cost to them) to address public policy by getting them and their ideas into the mainstream media”.
As Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy—which challenged Bush administration’s claims Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction—Solomon organized and led missions to Baghdad, seeking to avert the impending U.S. invasion. In mid-September 2002, he went with Congressman Nick Rahall (D-W.VA), former Senator James Abourezk (D-SD) and Conscience International President James Jennings to Baghdad, where they met with top officials of the Iraqi government, including Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. Days later, Iraq gave a green light for UN inspectors to return to the country. In December 2002, Solomon accompanied actor and director Sean Penn to Baghdad in another attempt to foster dialogue and prevent a U.S.-led attack.
Books
Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State (October 2007) War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (July 2005) Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (co-authored with Reese Erlich) (2003) The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media (1999) Wizards of Media Oz: Behind the Curtain of Mainstream News (co-authored with Jeff Cohen) (1997)
Bernard Lietaer (7 February 1942 – 4 February 2019) was a Belgian civil engineer, economist, author, and professor. He studied monetary systems and promoted the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or complementary currency, which circulate parallel with national currencies.
Bernard Lietaer was born on 7 February 1942 in Lauwe, Belgium. He attended College of St Paul, Godinne from 1955 to 1961. He studied engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, where, later in life, he held an assistant professorship of international finance. During his engineering studies, he was a member of the debating union Olivaint Conference of Belgium. After obtaining his M.Sc. in 1967, he went on to continue his studies at the MIT until 1969.
Lietaer’s post-graduate thesis, published in 1971, included a description of “floating exchanges”.[4] The Nixon Shock of that same year eradicated the Bretton Woods system by decoupling the US dollar from the gold standard and inaugurated an era of “universal floating exchanges”. Prior to that time, the only “floating exchanges” involved some Latin American currencies. The techniques which he had developed for marginal, Latin American currencies were for a time the only systematic research that could be used to deal with the major currencies of the world. A US bank negotiated exclusive rights to his approach and Lietaer began another career.[5]In 1987, he co-founded a currency-management firm, called GaiaCorp, and managed the offshore currency fund “Gaia Hedge II”, which during the 1987-91 period was the world’s top performing managed currency fund.[6] His biography cites the Micropal survey of 1,800 off-shore funds.[6]In the preface to his book The Future of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity, Lietaer claimed: “We almost tripled the money in three years”.[7] Business Week named him “the world’s top currency trader” in 1992.[8]From 2003 to 2006, he was a visiting scholar at Naropa University, USA, where he created the university’s Marpa Center for Business and Economics.[6]While at the Central Bank in Belgium,[year needed] he implemented the convergence mechanism (ECU) to the single European-currency system. During that period, he also served as President of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System.In an 2007 interview, Lietaer claimed that diversified, internationally valid currencies can help “address specific needs and enable certain exchanges – whether to fight global warming, promote employment or facilitate education and health care.”[9]In 2012, he was co-author, along with Christian Arnsperger, Sally Goerner, and Stefan Brunnhuber, of Money & Sustainability: the missing link,[10] a publication of The Club of Rome, in which he predicted that “the period 2007-2020 [would be] one of financial turmoil and gradual monetary breakdown.”
Bibliography The Future of Money (London: Random House, 2001) New Money for a New World (Qiterra Press 2011) (with Stephen Belgin) Hallsmith, Gwendolyn; Lietaer, Bernard (28 May 2011). Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies. New Society Publishers. ISBN 978-0-86571-667-4. People Money: The Promise of Regional Currencies (with Margrit Kennedy and John Rogers) (Triarchy Press 2012) Money and Sustainability: The Missing Link / A report from the Club of Rome (with Christian Arnsperger, Sally Goerner and Stefan Brunnhuber), Triarchy Press Ltd, 30. May 2012, ISBN 978-1908009777 Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity into Prosperity (with Jacqui Dunne) (Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2013), ISBN 978-1609942960 With Helga Preuss, Marek Hudon, Kristof de Spiegeleer, Dieter Legat & Cary Sherburne: Towards a sustainable world. Delta Institute – Dieter Legat E.U. 2019, ISBN 978-3-2000-6527-7
In economics, a time-based currency is an alternative currency or exchange system where the unit of account is the person-hour or some other time unit. Some time-based currencies value everyone’s contributions equally: one hour equals one service credit. In these systems, one person volunteers to work for an hour for another person; thus, they are credited with one hour, which they can redeem for an hour of service from another volunteer. Others use time units that might be fractions of an hour (e.g. minutes, ten minutes – 6 units/hour, or 15 minutes – 4 units/hour). While most time-based exchange systems are service exchanges in that most exchange involves the provision of services that can be measured in a time unit, it is also possible to exchange goods by ‘pricing’ them in terms of the average national hourly wage rate (e.g. if the average hourly rate is $20/hour, then a commodity valued at $20 in the national currency would be equivalent to 1 hour).
How an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance
One of the most iconic images of slavery is a schematic wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship. First published by British abolitionists in 1788, it exposed this widespread commercial practice for what it really was―shocking, immoral, barbaric, unimaginable. Printed as handbills and broadsides, the image Cheryl Finley has termed the “slave ship icon” was easily reproduced, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was circulating by the tens of thousands around the Atlantic rim. Committed to Memory provides the first in-depth look at how this artifact of the fight against slavery became an enduring symbol of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance.
Finley traces how the slave ship icon became a powerful tool in the hands of British and American abolitionists, and how its radical potential was rediscovered in the twentieth century by Black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators. Finley offers provocative new insights into the works of Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and many others. She demonstrates how the icon was transformed into poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance, and film―and became a medium through which diasporic Africans have reasserted their common identity and memorialized their ancestors.
Beautifully illustrated, Committed to Memory features works from around the world, taking readers from the United States and England to West Africa and the Caribbean. It shows how contemporary Black artists and their allies have used this iconic eighteenth-century engraving to reflect on the trauma of slavery and come to terms with its legacy.
Review
“Winner of the Historians of British Art Book Prize, 1600-1800”
“Winner of the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize, Bard Graduate Center”
“Honorable Mention for the William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association”
“A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year”
“Published in 1788, the famous engraving of the human cargo of a slave ship was used widely by campaigners for the abolition of slavery. Finley looks at the dissemination of the image in the 18th century and its ongoing political and artistic resonances.” ― Apollo
“[Committed to Memory] wonderfully shows how the ship travelled from its 18th-century departure port of protest to multiple destinations – prison reform movements, anti-capitalist campaigns, resistance to racial and sexual discrimination, and refugee advocacy.”—Catherine Molineux, Times Higher Education
“[B]eautifully illustrated and brilliantly conceived . . . [t]his book not only constitutes an innovative, gripping and convincing approach to the narrative of slavery, but it also succeeds in anchoring its heritage in the present moment and casting light on contemporary ‘passages.'”—Hélène B. Ducros, EuropeNow
“[Committed to Memory
is] a politically attuned chronicling of slave ship representations from the late 18th to present century. . . . Finley has broken new ground in the discipline of art history . . . [a] valuable, clearly-written, well-researched, global aesthetic history of artistic protest, and explicitly black art.”—Devon Epiphany Clifton, Make Literary Magazine
“An
original and brilliantly conceived account of how the horrors of the transatlantic trade in human cargo have been visualized in art and culture over more than two centuries. Finley has written a nuanced and provocative book that leaves an imprint on one’s mind as indelible as the slave ship icon itself.”―Kellie Jones, author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art
“Stimulating and insightful. Finley hones in on the cultural and political strategies that have animated and illustrated the impact of the Atlantic slave trade.”―Deborah Willis, author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present
About the Author
Cheryl Finley is associate professor of art history at Cornell University. She is the coauthor of Harlem: A Century in Images and the coeditor of Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z.
Publisher : Princeton University Press (August 30, 2022)
This is the first session of “Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures,” presented by the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, and Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture. This four-part program explores efforts by art museums to deploy their spaces and their collections—which are often enmeshed with colonialism and exploitation—to present more complete narratives of and perspectives on slavery and its legacies.
Curators discuss their work on groundbreaking projects in the Netherlands and the United States, namely the Rijksmuseum’s “Slavery” exhibition, the Rembrandthuis Museum’s exhibition “Here: Black in Rembrandt’s Time,” the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s reinstallation of its permanent collection, and the Museums Are Not Neutral initiative. The speakers reflect on the broader call for museums to recognize the relationship of their collections to slavery and to present-day racial injustice.
SPEAKERS:
+ “The Rijksmuseum and Slavery” with Maria Holtrop, Curator of History, Rijksmuseum;
+ “Black Presence in 17th-Century Western Art” with Stephanie Archangel, Junior Curator, History Department, Rijksmuseum;
+ “Reflections on Re-envisioning LACMA’s Permanent Collection” with Diva Zumaya, Assistant Curator, European Painting and Sculpture, Los Angeles County Museum of Art;
+ “Possibilities of Imagining Otherwise” with La Tanya S. Autry, cultural organizer, co-producer of Museums Are Not Neutral, founder of the Black Liberation Center, and independent curator;
+ Welcome by Christopher Atkins, Van Otterloo-Weatherbie Director, Center for Netherlandish Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;
+ Introductions/Moderator: Sarah Mallory, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University.
“History, Memory, and Legacy: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosana Paulino, and Cheryl Finley in Conversation” is the third session of “Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures,” presented by the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, and Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture. This four-part program explores efforts by art museums to deploy their spaces and their collections—which are often enmeshed with colonialism and exploitation—to present more complete narratives of and perspectives on slavery and its legacies. Renowned writer Jamaica Kincaid and groundbreaking visual artist Rosana Paulino will discuss their explorations of the history, memories, and legacies of slavery in their work. They will be joined in conversation by eminent art historian Cheryl Finley.
“History, Memory, and Legacy: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosana Paulino, and Cheryl Finley in Conversation” is the third session of “Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures,” presented by the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, and Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture. This four-part program explores efforts by art museums to deploy their spaces and their collections—which are often enmeshed with colonialism and exploitation—to present more complete narratives of and perspectives on slavery and its legacies.
Renowned writer Jamaica Kincaid and groundbreaking visual artist Rosana Paulino will discuss their explorations of the history, memories, and legacies of slavery in their work. They will be joined in conversation by eminent art historian Cheryl Finley.
SPEAKERS:
+ Jamaica Kincaid, award winning writer;
+ Rosana Paulino, São Paulo–based artist whose work focuses on the position of Black women in Brazilian society;
+ Cheryl Finley, Director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Art History at Spelman College;
+ Rachel Burke, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University;
+ David J. Roxburgh, Department Chair and Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Islamic Art History, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University.
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This talk explores how an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of black resistance, identity, and remembrance. One of the most iconic images of slavery is a schematic wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship. First published by British abolitionists in 1788, it exposed this widespread commercial practice for what it really was–shocking, immoral, barbaric, unimaginable. Printed as handbills and broadsides, the image Cheryl Finley (Associate Professor of Art History, Cornell University) has termed the “slave ship icon” was easily reproduced, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was circulating by the tens of thousands around the Atlantic rim. Committed to Memory provides the first in-depth look at how this artifact of the fight against slavery became an enduring symbol of black resistance, identity, and remembrance. Finley traces how the slave ship icon became a powerful tool in the hands of British and American abolitionists, and how its radical potential was rediscovered in the twentieth century by black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators. Finley offers provocative new insights into the works of Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and many others. She demonstrates how the icon was transformed into poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance, and film—and became a medium through which diasporic Africans have reasserted their common identity and memorialized their ancestors. (Feb. 11, 2019)
The James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference supports research, teaching, and public dialogue that examine race and intersecting dimensions of human difference including but not limited to class, gender, religion, and sexuality.
After stunning testimony in the third hearing by the January 6th Select Committee revealed that even the people pushing the plan for the Vice President to overturn the results of the election knew it was illegal, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell questions why Mike Pence waited until the day of the Capitol riot to publicly shoot down the plan.
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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