Roundup

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• SOURCE: The New York Times
  8/4/2020
  

  Don’t Believe the Lie That Voting Is All You Can Do

  by Daniel Hunter

  Stop minimizing the work of movements.

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• SOURCE: The Bitter Southerner
  8/4/2020
  

  Somebody Died, Babe: A Musical Coverup of Racism, Violence & Greed

  by Kevin Kehrberg & Jeffrey A. Keith

  The song "Swannanoa Tunnel" has been changed through generations of recordings by white musicians, concealing its origins as a song sung by Black convict-lease laborers who were forced to work in deadly conditions, often as punishment for minor crimes (or no crimes at all). 

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• SOURCE: The Hill
  8/4/2020
  

  History, Civil Rights and the Original Cancel Culture

  by Keri Leigh Merritt and Chris Richardson

  Confederate monuments valorize a political movement that violently "cancelled" interracial movements to improve the lives of poor southerners. 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  7/20/2020
  

  Police Sexual Violence Is Hidden in Plain Sight

  by Anne Gray Fischer

  How did we get to the point where sexual assault is considered valid, necessary police work? The answer lies in the origin story of modern police, and specifically in the history of the discretionary enforcement of public order laws.

• 
• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  8/4/2020
  

  Named For The Enemy

  by Ty Seidule

  "The military has perhaps the most diverse workforce in the country. That is something to be proud of. Yet we must ensure that no one who volunteers to protect America works in a place named for someone who committed treason to protect slavery."

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  8/5/2020
  

  The Undemocratic History of School ‘Pandemic Pods’

  by Mark Boonshoft

  The Coronavirus pandemic threatens to entrench the undemocratic practice of exclusive education for children of the rich. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/31/2020
  

  The Next Lost Cause?

  by Caroline E. Janney

  The South’s mythology glamorized a noble defeat. Trump backers may do the same.

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  7/31/2020
  

  The Violence at the Root of the Silent Majority

  by Brian Tochterman

  As a vigilante film, “Joe” inaugurated a genre that exploded onto screens in the 1970s.

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  7/31/2020
  

  Trump’s Mail Ballot Claims are Part of a Long History of Voter Suppression

  by Griffin Black

  Over the years since 1965, voter suppression tactics have returned in forms like voter ID qualifications and voter roll purges that force citizens through administrative hoops to reach the ballot box. 

• 
• SOURCE: LitHub
  7/30/2020
  

  In the 1990s, Feminism Found a New Ally: Computers (excerpt)

  by Lisa Levenstein

  Few observers recognized that Edie Farwell’s group was part of a wide-ranging network of female technology specialists who were using the 1995 Beijing NGO conference to build the infrastructure for what would become online feminism.

• 
• SOURCE: The Baffler
  7/31/2020
  

  Unnatural Disasters: On the Pandemics We Make For Ourselves

  by Ann Neumann

  Like cholera and poverty, Covid-19 is not the crisis; it’s a disease that feeds on our racialized inequalities.

• 
• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  7/31/2020
  

  How Women’s Suffrage Changed America Far Beyond the Ballot BoxA Century of Change For American Women

  by Ellen Carol DuBois

  Looking back at this history, it’s clear that the 19th Amendment wasn’t the end of a movement but an extraordinary milestone in the ongoing fight to extend and protect American democracy. 

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  8/3/2020
  

  Economic Reforms Might Be The Best Health-Care Reforms

  by Evelynn M. Hammonds and Susan M. Reverby

  Only by understanding and confronting this entangled web of racism and public health can we actually solve a problem that has been centuries in the making.

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  8/4/2020
  

  The Never Trumpers Have Already Won

  by Samuel Moyn

  Never Trump's historic role turns out to be not among Republicans so far, but within a Democratic Party whose members have chosen to convert enemies into friends, setting up a guardrail against the capture of their party by the left.

• 
• SOURCE: Counterpunch
  8/3/2020
  

  Renouncing White Privilege: A Left Critique of Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”

  by David Barber

  "The dominant aspect of the contradiction of white supremacy for poor and working class whites is not that white supremacy advantages us, but that it ties us to our own oppression."

• 
• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  8/2/2020
  

  Missing in Action: Accountability Is Gone in America

  by Karen J. Greenberg

  A crucial part of the history of the neoconservative invasion of Iraq and the use of torture in the War on Terror is the utter lack of accountability or consequence for the people who made those decisions. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  8/3/2020
  

  What Tom Cotton Gets So Wrong About Slavery and the Constitution

  by Sean Wilentz

  "I have fundamental publicized objections to the project, but these in no way mitigate Cotton’s serious misrepresentations of the historical record for evident political gain."

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• How Has the Electoral College Survived for This Long?

  by Alexander Keyssar

  Long after the abolition of slavery, Southern political leaders continued to resist any attempts to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote.

• 
• SOURCE: Activist History Review
  8/1/2020
  

  Time to Cancel 2020 Baseball Season: A Lesson for Colleges and Universities

  by Michael T. Barry Jr.

  It is clear the MLB in-person COVID experiment has been a failure. Colleges and universities should take note of this failure and act accordingly.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  8/3/2020
  

  Stop Worrying about Protecting ‘Taxpayers.’ That Isn’t the Government’s Job.

  by Lawrence B. Glickman

  "Taxpayerism has perverted our political culture by denying the existence of a common good — or, perhaps, more accurately, by falsely defining that good, and even freedom itself, as low taxes for the rich and for corporations."