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Archive for June 2025

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938

National Museum of Africam American History & Culture | Austin History Center
National Museum of Africam American History & Culture | Austin History Center

Even though the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, it could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control. As a result, in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until much later. Freedom finally came on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state, were free by executive decree. This day came to be known as “Juneteenth,” by the newly freed people in Texas. Above: Emancipation Day celebration, June 19, 1900 held in “East Woods” on East 24th Street in Austin.

Professor Cluver awarded King’s Birthday Honour in recognition of services to children’s wellbeing and to global public health

University of Oxford: Department of Social Policy and Intervention
University of Oxford: Department of Social Policy and Intervention

Professor Lucie Cluver, also Honorary Professor in Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town and Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College, has led research to provide evidence to improve the lives of children and adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa for over 20 years.

The Government rebranded aid as charity to dodge international responsibility

LSE | eyematter/Shutterstock
LSE | eyematter/Shutterstock

The Labour Government has confirmed that it will be going against its campaign promise to raise foreign aid to 0.7 per cent of gross national income, and will instead be cutting it further to 0.3 per cent. Gloria Novović argues that the Government’s new framing of foreign aid as charity is a gross misrepresentation of the UK’s domestic and international commitments.

From Charlottesville to the White House: How the “Unite the Right” rally altered American politics

There is a direct path from the Unite the Right rally of August 12, 2017, to the Stop the Steal insurrection of January 6, 2021. As I researched this book, many more towns and cities in America began seeing armed vigilantes staging rallies and protests, protecting their God-given right to this or that, including their right to threaten unarmed people. Much like school shootings, these clashes began to seem par for the course. The dark money seeding their efforts has found its way into our national politics. I watched the governor of Virginia declare war on “divisive history,” while African American fiction and history and young adult books touching on queer sexuality were removed from library shelves.

US Army’s image of power and flag-waving rings false to Gen Z weary of gun violence − and long-term recruitment numbers show it

The Conversation | C Carlson/AP
The Conversation | C Carlson/AP

And as a scholar of terrorism and targeted violence, I believe a close reading of available data on military recruitment suggests U.S. gun violence may be largely to blame for the lack of interest in joining the military…. Very rarely are introspective questions publicly debated today about the objective attractiveness of military service or the appetite for violence among young people. The problem, I believe, is not that young people are insufficiently patriotic – it’s that they have already been fighting a war, daily, for their entire lives.

Community Action Lehigh Valley, the region’s largest antipoverty nonprofit, says essential programs are at risk

Allentown Morning Call | CALV
Allentown Morning Call | CALV

“It’s slash, slash, slash, slash,” said Dawn Godshall, chief executive officer of Community Action Lehigh Valley, summarizing the shrinking the federal bureaucracy… The nonprofit Community Action, known as CALV, serves a six-county area, administering programs that fight hunger, homelessness and other social ills.