Aging on the Run, Public History, Sustainable Economies
“I accepted the story I heard on foreign media: that the [1997] Albanian civil war could be explained not by the collapse of a flawed financial system but by longstanding animosities between ethnic groups… its plan could be disrupted only by outside...
Aging on the Run, PTSD and Historical Trauma, Public History, Radical Hospitality, Social Movements
Berat— Albania’s oldest city —has 1,000 identically-shaped windows in its Ottoman-era old town and a Byzantine city on top of one of its mountains. The Osum River runs through the town with buildings hugging the slopes. A green ridged range covers its north...
Aging on the Run, Nationalism, Public History, Sustainable Economies
In Albania, time folds, though the marching chronology of the country’s last 130 years appears stark with fundamental change: The Ottoman Empire, Nationalist Monarchy, Italian Fascism, Enver Hoxha’s Stalinism, Enver Hoxha’s Maoism, Enver’s Hoxha’s Enverism— a...
Aging on the Run, Nationalism, Public History, Radical Hospitality, Sustainable Economies
Getting off the train in Madrid, we followed the crowds into the dark city. Our train companions formed a line for taxis, but we crossed the street and got on the right bus and to the right apartment. Perhaps that does not sound like a big deal to you, but we are...
Aging on the Run, PTSD and Historical Trauma, Public History
One of the books I gave away when we started this journey was Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. I treasured this collection that recorded humanity’s ugliest moments so that we do not forget. I have spent a lifetime being...
Aging on the Run, Israel/Palestine, long term travel, Nationalism, PTSD and Historical Trauma, Public History
In Cádiz, we took a bus to Tarifa, Spain, where the Mediterranean and Atlantic meet, and a ferry to Tangier, Morocco. In Tarifa, we could see Africa across the water. There was a small police presence guarding the coast, and some public protest art depicting...
