BY HANK REICHMAN I’ve mentioned before on this blog that, given the extraordinary events of 1968, this is a big year for 50th anniversaries. But today marks a notable 70th anniversary. On the morning of February 27, 1948, a plane traveling from Oakland to the Mexican border crashed in Los Gatos Canyon, California, about an…
BY HANK REICHMAN “We do not fear arrest.” So declared seventeen full or endowed professors at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in a letter to UNC Chancellor Carol Folt demanding the University take down Silent Sam, a Confederate monument that has been a focus of controversy on the campus since the Charlottesville events last…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the greatest of all American scholars and intellectuals. To commemorate the occasion and explore the lessons of DuBois’s life and work for our time, the always thought-provoking Black Perspectives blog of the African American Intellectual History Society has…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Agents of Change, the documentary film about the late 1960s student rebellions at San Francisco State and Cornell Universities, which led to the establishment of Black Studies programs at both schools, is now available for streaming. The film was shown to enthusiastic audiences at the AAUP’s 2015 and 2016 Summer Institutes. …
BY TIRIEN ANGELA STEINBACH Tirien Angela Steinbach is the executive director of the East Bay Community Law Center, the community-based clinic for Berkeley Law School, where she graduated from law school in 1999. Since its founding in 1988 by law students at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, EBCLC has become the largest provider…
BY HANK REICHMAN The other day, as part of an informal self-reeducation in American history prompted by our current political fix, I was rereading after many decades Richard Hofstadter’s 1948 The American Political Tradition, a series of portraits of leading American politicians from the founders to FDR. Only one of Hofstadter’s subjects, the abolitionist Wendell…
BY AARON BARLOW David Brooks writes in today’s The New York Times of “the fact that we’ve regressed from a sophisticated moral ethos to a primitive one.” This has always been a favorite conservative trope, that we should yearn for the beliefs and coherences of yesteryear. Yet it has no truth behind it, as any…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a statement issued August 28 by the Council of the American Historical Association. The AHA is also compiling an ongoing bibliography of the diverse perspectives of AHA members. The American Historical Association welcomes the emerging national debate about Confederate monuments. Much of this public statuary…
