However you chose to spend the long holiday weekend, we hope that you enjoyed some moments of peace! As always, we encourage you to share this post, though a link here does not imply full agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.
- Daniel Rubin, “These immigrants wrote the first U.S. protest against slavery in 1688. Philadelphia wasn’t quite ready.” Philadelphia Inquirer (November 23, 2023): LINK. Early Philadelphia Quakers protested against slavery in Pennsylvania as early in 1688, but the original document was lost over time. After a long search — including in the archives of CIC member Swarthmore College — Black Quakers and their allies found the document and restored it. The petition is now part of the Quaker & Special Collections at CIC member Haverford College.
- Sherrilyn Ifill, “Why are U.S. courts afraid of the 14th Amendment? Because it’s radical.” Washington Post (November 24, 2023): LINK (a free account may be required to read this). The former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund notes that “The 14th Amendment was meant to protect Black people … [and protect] the nation against insurrection.” But “post]-Reconstruction courts have rarely upheld or applied in full the ambitious demands of the 14th Amendment. Instead, its guarantees have been watered down to accommodate the political forces of the day, or repurposed to serve powerful interests.”
- Brenda Wineapple, “A Political Convert in the Long Shadow of the Civil War,” New York Times (November 22, 2023): LINK. A review of Elizabeth R. Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023), a new biography of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet — the “Confederate Judas” who fought under Robert E. Lee and then became a supporter of Reconstruction. “Marble monuments enshrine the Lost Cause, which General Longstreet, whoever he was, valiantly knew to be a cause well lost.”
- Chad Davis, “Pumpkin or sweet potato pie? There’s a rich history behind both,” NPR (November 22, 2023): LINK. A soul food historian explains how the legacy of slavery is literally baked into holiday favorites: “It’s really the expertise of these enslaved cooks, making something unfamiliar to them to please their slaveholders, that eventually gets embraced and adopted.”
- Benjamin Weber, “The Critical Need to Teach the History of Mass Incarceration,” TIME (November 20, 2023): LINK. “Those pushing censorship are afraid of mass incarceration for the same reason they’re afraid of the history of slavery: Because reckoning with these histories raises the moral imperative to repair them.”
- Nargis Kachrumathur, “Can doulas do it? Preventing medical racism in the birthing process,” The DePauw (November 20, 2023): LINK. At CIC member DePauw University (Greencastle, IN), a professor and her student are collaborating on research about obstetric violence and doula care in Indiana, specifically focusing on Black doulas. They hope to answer the question: Are doulas the solution to high (and disproportionate by race) maternal mortality rates in the United States?
- Lonnie G. Bunch III, “Reflections From a Dutch National Reckoning,” Smithsonian Magazine (November 17, 2023): LINK. The Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution discusses efforts to reckon with the legacy of slavery in the Netherlands, including a new National Slavery Museum that will highlight the Dutch role in the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades.
- James Robert Burns, “‘Slaves’ and ‘Slave Owners’ or ‘Enslaved People’ and ‘Enslavers’?” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (November 2023): LINK. A discussion of the current debate among historians about the proper terminology for enslavement. “Studies of slavery increasingly refer to ‘enslaved people’ rather than ‘slaves,’ and to a lesser extent, to ‘enslavers’ rather than ‘slave owners’ … Despite this [trend], few historians have justified their terminology.”