The American healthcare system has long impacted people of color disproportionately, providing them with second-rate care that, in itself, is difficult to access. An area of healthcare that is often neglected where these disparities have existed for decades is dental care. This has contributed to prominent racial disparities in oral health that can begin early… Read more →
Tag: African American History
Why I Say “Black Lives Matter”
Two paragraphs in my forthcoming book, Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution, continue to haunt me. The paragraphs reference the 1770 protests in New Bern, North Carolina. Like their seventeenth-century English ancestors, these protestors believed that the people had a duty to “regulate” the government, and particularly to step in when… Read more →
The Lady with the Alligator Purse
A Tisket a Tasket, Three Little Fishies, Baa Baa Black Sheep — these nursery rhymes were an integral part of my childhood experience. The rhyme that most captured my attention when I was a child, however, was Miss Lucy Had a Baby: Particularly fascinating to me were not the presence of the nurse, doctor, or… Read more →
A Lesson in Protest: Teaching History and Citizenship in the Trump Era
This semester I am teaching a course called “Resisting State Violence: Race, Policing, and Social Justice in Twentieth-Century America.” One of the course objectives is to encourage students to investigate the histories of policing, surveillance, political repression, deportation, and incarceration, and the ways they intersect with racism, settler colonialism, xenophobia, economic exploitation, and sexism and… Read more →
Not Your (Old, White) Father’s History
If you haven’t already heard, the New York Times recently interviewed retired Princeton historian of the Civil War James McPherson for the newspaper’s “By the Book” feature. McPherson is a well-respected legend in the field, yet many historians were left scratching their collective heads over his responses to such questions as “Who are the best historians writing today?” and “What are the best books about African American history?” Suffice it to say, his answers seemed very white, very male, and well, very dated.
Sunday Morning Medicine
By Jacqueline Antonovich
-A short history of Bookmobiles.
-A 1,600 year-old murder mystery.
-Canada’s sexy new Gonorrhea ads.
-A beautiful air travel map from 1929.
-UN sued over Haiti cholera epidemic.
-The lost legacy of the British Black Panthers.
-Audio files of Auschwitz survivors now online.
Don Lemon, Jay Z, and the Dilemmas of Black Bourgeois Politics
By Austin C. McCoy
Rap superstar Jay Z and CNN news anchor Don Lemon added some extra hot sauce to the “conversation about race” in the wake of one of the “hottest” and racially-charged summers in recent memory. In a July 24 interview with journalist Elliot Wilson, Jay Z responded to a series of comments that Harry Belafonte made about Jay Z, Beyoncé, and other black celebrities in an interview last year. When asked to respond to Belafonte’s lamentation about current black celebrities’ inability or unwillingness to use their fame to advocate for social change, Jay Z shot back: “I’m offended by that because first of all, and this is going to sound arrogant, but my presence is charity. Just who I am. Just like Obama’s is. Obama provides hope…”