The Future is Another Country
“I see my duty as an activist-historian to also uplift the voices of other activist-historians who may not be traditional historians, but are doing essential historical work, by highlighting their historical-activism on any platform available and joining them in direct action whenever possible.”
One of the major purposes of the humanities is to expose students to new points of view, especially the views of minorities and other disadvantaged groups whose voices are often neglected. The Civil War Era is a particularly useful period for such considerations, as it prominently featured racial division that continue today.
The more answers about Negro History Week I found in Du Bois’s papers and collections associated with his life and times, the more questions surfaced. These inquiries have pushed my research on Du Bois and Negro History Week into broader considerations of the mixed methodology he used in the production of black history, and the black radical internationalist framework of his historical imagination.
The festive season is a time when we’re confronted with the best and worst of ourselves as a society. But for academics, and particularly for those of us still toiling away in graduate school, the chance to reconnect with friends and family brings with it a formidable challenge—the perennial task of explaining, to the satisfaction of your interlocutor, what exactly it is that you study anyway, huh?
Staying with Prexy in Chicago reenergized me. I felt better about my own scholarship, and wanted to continue it. Moreover, I determined to start drawing more connections to the injustices I saw in the present.
My grandmother was right; my high school students needed me. What my grandmother may not have anticipated though was the extent to which I needed my students.
Under the guise of entertainment, fantasy, and allegory, the Trojan horse of Sci Fi sneaks in big questions about the implications of science and technology that students would do well to ponder.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but that’s not why we study it.
The advances that helped make universities minimally accessible through needs-blind admissions, federal Pell grants, and Title IX protections were all forged by the political struggles of the generation that came before us. How are we going to expand upon them?
Neoliberalism is an incredibly complex system of political economy and there are many more questions to answer. Still, as the contributors all brought up this month, historians have an important role in deconstructing an abusive market system.
