In order to understand the present and prepare for the future, we must understand the past and the ways that the past impact the present. As Frederick Douglas put it in his 1852 speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” When … Read More We Must Critically Engage With the Past or We Are Doomed to Repeat It
The myth of opportunity in America runs deep, so deep in fact you’d be forgiven if you thought it appeared as the American Dream in the founding documents. It’s an old myth, one rooted in Puritanism and the Protestant Work Ethic, transformed by Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography, extrapolated by Horatio Alger in his Ragged Dick stories, epitomized by Jay Gatz in F. Scott … Read More The Myth of Opportunity in History Textbooks
Talking about the physical body, Dr. Blau, in Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, says, “It is an outrage that it’s permitted to disintegrate underground, or given to the mercy of flames, burned like rubbish. If it were up to Blau, he would make the world differently — the soul could be mortal, what do we need it for, anyway, but the body would be immortal.” For Blau, … Read More Angelo Soliman’s Importance in Olga Tokarczuk’s “Flights”
Writing about how their time in Washington D.C. and at Howard University drew to a close in the early 1940s, Pauli Murray reflected on all the work they did, notably the 1943 sit-ins in the nation’s capital and how those sit-ins laid the foundations for the 1960s. Murray thinks about the tensions between their “urge toward kamikaze defiance of Jim Crow and the more … Read More Our Role in the Relay of “Cosmic Composition”
Over the past week or so, I have seen multiple people on my social media feeds post this timeline. I don’t know who originated it, or who wrote it. However, I do know that almost every semester I construct my own timeline and break it down in class, usually going back to the end of the Civil War. When doing this, I break it … Read More We Are Not Removed from Our Past
Interminable Rambling 