History (4,742 posts)

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.

Reading about book bans in the US, I couldn’t help but see the parallels. The battle between those arguing for diversity and LGBTQ representation in children’s books, against those who want to remove them from school bookshelves and public libraries, was all too familiar to anyone who had grown up in the UK. Back in 1983, British newspaper, The Daily Mail, brought a scandal to their readers’ attention.

As a parable from the past to help us come to grips with our perilous present, you could do worse than screen Storm Warning, the 1951 noir that may be the most unlikely Klan movie ever made.

In the eighth essay of the Legacies of Eugenics series, Pepper Stetler explores the troubling history of IQ tests and special education.

Sparked by dubious arrests based on mistaken information, Western Australia’s Laverton royal commission reverberates fifty years later

Like many advances in reproductive technology, the artificial womb lent itself first to speculative fiction, then to scientific research, and finally to feminist theory. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the artificial womb appeared in hundreds of pulpy newspaper stories and dystopian novels, including Brave New World (1932), in which ectogenesis—the development of embryos outside the uterus—enables the mass production of human beings. Above: The first ‘incubator babies’ from the 1909 World Fair.

This is where his institutional career would begin: Rochester Borstal, the original children’s detention centre in Britain, where borstals themselves would later acquire their name. Opened in 1902 beside the Kentish village of Borstal, now swallowed up by the town of Rochester, it’s the sort of place you’d expect Miss Trunchbull to be nutting about in, terrorising the kids with maniacal joy. Heading the experimental scheme was the prison commissioner, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, who was seeking an alternative to the usual treatment of putting children directly into adult prisons.

Over three days in April 1981, violence broke out in Brixton, London between young people – who were largely Black and working class – and the Metropolitan Police. Hundreds were injured. What did the government inquiry into the ‘Brixton riots’ or ‘Brixton uprisings’ find out?

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood . . . back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism . . . to one’s youthful idea of “the artist” and the all-sufficiency of “art” and “beauty” and “love” . . . back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” Henry James