My 28-year-old nephew, Willie Lee “Chill” Oglesby, Jr., was murdered on November 8, 2017. One of the first things that his mother and my sister, Aleta (affectionately called “Snooky”), did was to commission Novel T’s to create 44 official RIP (Rest in Peace) T-shirts. As ritualized mourning wear, all of Willie’s immediate and extended kin,… Read more →
Tag: Memory
Dutch Monuments for Stillborn Children
“He has been dumped.” Mrs. van Melsen tells me these words as we look down at the inscription on the monument at the graveyard near Sint Pieter’s church in the Dutch city of Maastricht that reads: “Silenced indeed, but never forgotten.” And then Mrs. van Melsen tells me the story of the stillbirth of her… Read more →
Up in Flames: The Death of Brazil’s Museu Nacional
What do you do when your archive burns down? That’s a question that I, as well as thousands of researchers in Brazil and across the globe, faced on Sunday, September 2, when Brazil’s Museu Nacional (National Museum) in Rio de Janeiro went up in flames. The largest national history museum in Latin America, the Museu’s… Read more →
War Art 100 Years Later: The “World War I and American Art” Exhibit and the Centenary of the Great War
On March 12, I attended the exhibit “World War I and American Art” at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. This museum and art school, one of the oldest art academies in the United States that first opened in 1805, hosted the exhibit as part of a nationwide effort to remember American entry… 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 →
Silence and Noise: What AIDS Activism and Social Memory Can Teach Us
In the mid-1980s, when I was a twenty-something college dropout, I met people my age or older who knew a lot about history, about our history, the history of queer people. Part of this history included that of the men who were forced to wear the pink triangle in the Nazi concentration camps. And maybe… Read more →
Rosie the Riveter for President: Margaret Wright, the People’s Party, and Black Feminism
“I’ve been discriminated against because I am a woman, because I am black, because I am poor, because I am fat, because I am left-handed.” On an August afternoon in 1976, about 100 people from 14 states gathered at an alternative high school in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco to hear Margaret Wright… Read more →
“I Know This Guy”: Humanity in Hamilton’s America
As those of you with more exciting social calendars than mine may not know, this past Friday PBS aired a documentary about the making of the Broadway hit Hamilton: An American Musical. The documentary, entitled Hamilton’s America, provides Hamilfans and relative newcomers alike with backstage passes to the drama we may never get to see…. Read more →
Sex, Death, and Three Irish Women
In November 1984 the Catholic parish of Tynagh, County Galway, Ireland, gathered to bury a woman who had been dead for 150 years.1 Local tradition asserted that the woman, Áine, gave birth to three illegitimate children in the 1830s or 1840s and then became gravely ill. Citing her sexual transgressions, Áine’s parish priest would not… Read more →
Report from Pride: LGBT History Is (Not Yet) American History
Last June I participated in the annual Pride March in New York City, the biggest celebration of LGBT pride in the world. My girlfriend and I marched with the Episcopal Diocese of New York, waving a tiny rainbow flag someone handed us and walking behind a long white banner down 5th Avenue. After a slow start,… Read more →