PUBLIC
HISTORY
Book Tour Journal: Tornados and Hurricanes, Human and Natural.
We were in Montgomery when tornados devastated downtown Selma, on January 12, hitting urban and rural regions across Georgia and Alabama, and killing at least eight people. In the morning we had considered riding to Selma, stopping to take in the art and public...
Daytona Notebook # 1. In search of Gordon Parks at the Halifax Historical Museum
A 2021 article described local efforts to uncover Black history and revive historic African American neighborhoods in Daytona Beach. In it was a photograph attributed to Gordon Parks, and originating from the Halifax Historical Museum. I wanted to see the...
Bookstores are Political
Bookstores are political. Today there are the those that have banned-book clubs and offer space to Trans support groups. They feature the works of Black, Indigenous, Latine and LGBTQ authors and subjects. “Labor” is a section, and so is “AAPI.” Genocide is a fact of...
Social Emotional Learning Circa 1965: “Be Like Christopher”
In Mrs. Macintosh’s second grade class at the Lawrence Elementary School in Brookline, Massachusetts, the October 1965 lessons focused on social emotional health. We were encouraged to believe in ourselves and our ideas, even if they were unpopular, to be...
Monumental Trauma
In the South Korean drama Rain or Shine, (to avoid a spoiler go to next paragraph), two survivors of a building collapse, interview other survivors about what kind of memorial they want. The construction company, now rebuilding on the site, had erected a memorial. A...
Calling up the Nineteenth Century to Understand our Own Times. Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth, Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered and Tony Horowitz’s Spying on the South
Annette Gordon-Reed, and Barbara Kingsolver are writers grounded in history, science, and Tony Horowitz was a writer steeped in evidence, yet reading On Juneteenth, Unsheltered, and Spying on the South together, felt like a mystical retreat with three mediums,...
The Aspiring Intersectional Feminist Traveler
I am preparing to be interviewed by the Intrepid Traveler. That caused me to consider, what kind of traveler am I? I am not intrepid. I travel loaded with fears and cautions. I think I am an aspiring Intersectional Feminist Traveler. What does it mean to be an...
Never Again
The America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is reopening in 2022. It was closed for twelve years. Milwaukee cancelled its financial support for the public history site shortly after the death of its founder, Dr. James Cameron, the only known survivor of a lynching.
Dr. Cameron got the idea for his museum after visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. I have not been to this US Museum, but I have toured German concentration camps several times and I am always struck by how Germany works to never forget while the US, which must be forced to remember. The foreclosure of America’s Black Holocaust Museum, by Milwaukee officials is emblematic of that eagerness to bury the history of US terrorism.