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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The 28th of August 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, one of the largest political rallies in US History for African American civil rights. Between 200,000 and 300,000 participants marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial demanding meaningful civil and economic rights. At the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. Martin Luther […]
By David Cunningham
Like many teachers, I intend to treat the upcoming 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington as an occasion to revisit Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famed “I Have a Dream” speech. Many of my students will, I expect, be deeply affected by Dr. King’s ability to impart a timeless quality to the “fierce urgency of now” that he associated with the Civil Rights Movement.
By Barry S. Levy and Victor W. Sidel
Although there has been much progress in the United States toward social justice and improved health for racial and ethnic minorities in the 50 years since the 1963 March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, much social injustice persists in this country — with profound adverse consequences for the public’s health.
By Sally G. McMillen
Today we celebrate Women’s Equality Day in commemoration of the certification of the 19th Amendment, granting of women’s right to vote throughout the country. Women in the United States were granted the right to vote on 26 August 1920.
By Jean Allain
Today is International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, established by UNESCO “to inscribe the tragedy of the slave trade in the memory of peoples”. That tragedy was the development of, in Robin Blackburn’s words, a “different species of slavery”. One that took the artisan slavery of old (consisting in the main of handfuls of slaves working on small estates or as domestic servants) and industrialised it, creating plantations in the Americas which fed the near insatiable appetite of Europeans for sugar, coffee, and tobacco.
By Daniel Parker
Jeremy Bentham wanted to become a Carlisle Peace Commissioner but his application was wilfully ignored by Governor Johnstone. The Carlisle Peace Commissioners set out to the United States in 1778, three years into the American Revolutionary War, to negotiate a peace treaty.
By Dr. Robert V. McNamee
In July, Electronic Enlightenment (EE) updated with materials taken from the Virginia Historical Society and the correspondence of Adam Ferguson, amongst others. These apparently disparate historical correspondences (and others already published in EE) are brought together within this unique digital framework so that students, scholars and the public can read, in this instance, “across the Atlantic”.
By Brenda Stevenson
Those who followed the Trayvon Martin case this summer did so not just because of the conflicting details of the shooting deaths of these two unarmed black youth, but because these cases, like too many others, have played out in our public consciousness as markers of American justice. Does “liberty and justice for all” actually exist; or are these words from our Pledge of Allegiance just part of the grand American narrative that is more myth than reality?
By Elyse Turr
August 3rd marks the 90th anniversary of Calvin Coolidge being sworn in as our 30th President following the sudden death of Warren G. Harding. Calvin Coolidge won re-election in 1924. In The Forgotten Presidents: Their Untold Constitutional Legacy, Michael Gerhardt uncovers the overlooked vestiges of his presidency.
If Abraham Lincoln can be credited for delivering America from the grip of Civil War-era secessionism, he stood on the shoulders of two presidential giants: the iconic 19th century visionary honored the same constitutional ideals of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore.
Twenty-five years ago today, President Ronald Reagan gave $20,000 to each Japanese-American who was imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II. Though difficult to imagine, the American government created several camps in the United States and the Philippines to lock away Japanese Americans.
By Sharon Zukin
Today, the sixth of August, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tompkins Square Park riot in New York’s East Village. Though on that night many neighborhood residents were protesting in the streets, the riot was caused by police brutality.
By Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Fifty years ago, the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union signed a pact to stop testing nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, oceans, and space. As we commemorate the treaty, we will not agree on what to celebrate. There are two sides of the story.
By Sam Lebovic
Since its creation in the summer of 1946, the Fulbright program has become the “flagship international educational exchange program” of the US government. Over the past 67 years, almost 320,000 students, scholars and teachers have traveled internationally as part of the program’s vast effort to improve mutual understanding between nations.
July 30, 2013 marks the 150th anniversary of the Treaty of Box Elder between the United States and the Northwestern Shoshones. At first glance it’s not much of a treaty, just five short articles. Unlike the treaty that a month before defrauded the Nez Perces of 90 per cent of their land, or the Treaty of Fort Laramie with the Sioux in 1868, which the U.S. broke to steal the Black Hills, the Box Elder treaty gets little attention. Most historians who have written about treaties…
It is sixty years since the Korean War came to a messy end at an ill-tempered armistice ceremony in Panmunjom’s new “peace” pagoda. That night, President Dwight Eisenhower made a brief and somber speech to the nation. What the U.S. negotiators had signed, he explained to his compatriots, was merely “an armistice on a single battleground—not peace in the world.”