During my childhood in Buenos Aires, adults usually told us to be careful while using telephones and cinema seats because people diagnosed with HIV could hide infected syringes in these “dark spots” to spread the virus. Generally portraying people with HIV as resentful and dangerous, popular representations activated historical racial and sexual boundaries that legitimated… Read more →
Tag: Education
“I Would Rather Die”: A Review of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland
On April 27 of last year, sociologist and psychiatrist Jonathan M. Metzl was at a public reading for his new book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, when a group of megaphone-wielding “identitarians” interrupted him. They offered up a cringe-inducing nativist political platform and chanted “this land is… Read more →
What Women “Want”: Wordsmithing Education Reform Rhetoric
Persuaders and Persuadees The decentralized nature of public education in America means that any one individual who wants to implement sweeping change needs to use rhetoric and persuasion to convince others their idea is the best one. For most of American history, the persuaders have generally come from one demographic group and directed their powers… Read more →
Queering History: Back to School Edition
In his second inaugural address in 2013, President Barack Obama stated that As a high school history and government teacher, I love to show my students either the text or video of this speech. Besides containing a nice example of alliteration as an effective rhetorical device, the passage makes direct reference to documents, places, and… Read more →
Mission Nursing, Migration, and Mobility in Twentieth-Century Iran
The American Association for the History of Nursing is so pleased to partner with Nursing Clio for this special series, which showcases some of the innovative and diverse work being done by historians of nursing across the world. The AAHN holds its annual meeting this week in Rochester, New York, and these essays are windows into the… Read more →
Almost Fourteen: The Book That Stopped Me in My Research Tracks
One of the things I always warn people about before their first archival trip is just how boring historical research can be. We sit for days in silent archives, flipping through folders of papers, hoping to find little tidbits that we can build into a cohesive narrative about the past. (Thank goodness for the invention… Read more →
“Save Changes”: Telling Stories of Disability Protest
At first, it was a simple case of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” as I worked with WikiEducation Foundation to teach a methods course in which students created disability history content. But the more I learned, the more it became clear that we were engaging in multiple forms of protest, especially once I… Read more →
Bans, Boycotts, and Brawls: The 1970s West Virginia Textbook Controversy
To find tensions in American society, look at K-12 textbooks. Not in them, but in the debates they bring to the fore. In the wake of the Donald Trump victory and right-wing populism, the protests in Kanawha County, West Virginia from 1974-5 are worth learning about. At the Kanawha County Board of Education meeting on… Read more →
No Safe Spaces: Missouri, ISIS, and What We Can Do About It
Before the terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut a few weeks ago, I had begun writing an essay about race, gender, and free speech at the University of Missouri. The President and Chancellor have recently stepped down amidst charges from the student body that they were unresponsive to multiple incidents of racial intimidation (as well… Read more →
Big Promises, Bigger Failures: When Public Education Makes You Sick
Promises, promises… We take it as a given that schooling is good for us, that overall population health increases with increased educational attainment. Indeed, from their founding, public schools have promised to improve population health as part of their basic mission. As a result, in the name of health concerns, schools have long held a… Read more →