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From Stephen Elliott
Journalist Joe Mozingo digs deep into his ancestral history to uncover the origin behind his surname, and discovers it’s one of the few African names to survive not only the Middle Passage, but the history of American slavery itself.
...moreByliner’s list of spectacular nonfiction articles of 2012 highlights two complementary essays from the Atlantic‘s Civil War issue.
First, Yoni Appelbaum uses a hyperrealistic “cyclotron” painting of the Battle of Gettysburg as a pin to puncture the national narrative that the Union and the Confederacy were equally noble, and that veterans from both sides had only to recognize their mutual heroism to become “comrades.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates takes on the same battle and the same narrative (as well as the same Faulkner passage) from a different perspective.
...more...moreAs a historian, I amplify these echoes as reminders that the abortion movement was never monochromatically white. We can ill afford these silences at a time when women’s actions during pregnancy—whether choosing home birth, drug use, or merely delivering a stillborn child—are criminalized.
Here’s a letter written in 1865 by an ex-enslaved man, Jourdan Anderson, in response to his former master’s request that Jourdan return to work on his farm.
“I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars.
...moreHere’s lots of good info on the situation in Chile, and here’s some more. We’re all thinking of folks down there.
Who wants a Sumatran tiger for a pet?
“The inescapable truth is that “the world” never forgave Haiti for its revolution, because the slaves freed themselves.” — Sidney Mintz at The Boston Review
A handy interactive guide to everything Italian Prime Minister and media mogul Sylvio Berlusconi has “allegedly” done wrong.
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A review of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (with help from John Updike)