The evolution of gay rights in under seven minutes. More info …
It causes the most ardent supporters of arts in the schools to hesitate: “We want to give your children the blues.”
In what may initially seem a backwards idea, the Chicago School of Blues has couched a message of positivity in a program that combines the history, music, and movement associated with the blues. The traveling program has been taking this message to Chicago-area schools, cultivating the self-expression and freedom that is so often lost with shrinking arts budgets. In the process, it is preserving an art form that is forever woven into the historical fabric of the city.
Uptown is Upside Down: Remembering Harlem, when a sense of community trumped corporate greed. Keep reading …
Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg smuggled thousands of Jews to safety during the Holocaust. We recognize their heroism, yet most developed countries—including the United States and Canada—prosecute those who do the same today for refugees fleeing Iran, Somalia, and other nations in turmoil.
Smugglers are condemned as roundly as if they were trafficking in sexual slavery, notes University of Michigan law professor James Hathaway. Indeed, recently proposed immigration legislation in Canada uses the terms smuggling and trafficking interchangeably. Yet they are very different things. According to Morris: “While human trafficking involves the exploitation of vulnerable migrants, human smuggling means helping people bypass border controls to get into a foreign country they do not have permission to enter.”
Fight Class: In middle-school history classes, war is almost always at the heart of the matter. It’s natural to frame a nation’s story line on its moments of greatest conflict and change, writes eighth-grade history teacher Dwight Simon, but teachers might be doing students and society a disservice by glorifying and even perpetuating violence as a redemptive force. “In how we teach war—indeed, in trying to justify our fascination with war—we have perhaps tried too hard to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice,” he argues.
Simon charged himself with the task of infusing his course syllabus at Epiphany School in Dorchester, Massachusetts, with greater attention to the pain, torture, and death that accompany combat. New lesson plans highlighted six- and seven-figure casualty statistics, photographs of the dead strewn across battlefields, and soldiers’ personal narratives reflecting an ambiguous or negative perspective of war’s worth.
When Gino Francesconi arrived in New York to study conducting in 1974, one of his first stops was Carnegie Hall. “Because this was where I was going to make it. I wanted to see this hall,” he recalls.
But when the San Francisco native entered the lobby, he was sure he was in the wrong place. “It was dark, it was dingy, there was litter on the floor, and it was small. I didn’t realize that it was bigger than most Broadway lobbies,” he says, laughing, “so I walked into the box office, and, talk about green, I said to the guy, ‘Excuse me, is there another Carnegie Hall around here?’ And he said, without missing a beat, ‘How many Carnegie Halls do you want, buddy?’ And it’s just kind of funny, because there it was, it was all you needed to hear. I didn’t know what it looked like, but I knew what it meant.”
Francesconi has since become intimately familiar with nearly every nook and cranny of Carnegie Hall. Its first and only archivist, he is the concert hall’s walking encyclopedia, a catalog of everything from encounters with legendary artists and landmark performances to obscure facts about the building and behind-the-scenes trivia. But the position is one that he never would have envisioned for himself when he came to New York with dreams of performing on the stage.
Once the hub of Mayan civilization, today’s Petén jungle of Mexico and Guatemala is troubled with drug trafficking, deforestation, and development.
The Buried History of the Holocaust: How long does it take to change how the world thinks about human history? French priest Father Patrick Desbois has been trying to broaden our collective understanding of the Holocaust for the past eight years—and despite diligent work, constant advocacy, and a spiritual impetus, the light at the end of the tunnel remains dim.
Recently profiled in Jewish lifestyle and culture magazine Moment, Desbois contends that people generally simplify the Holocaust as “trains taking people to death camps.” He gives a number of reasons why, including the iron-fisted Soviet control of Eastern Europe, complicit actions of non-Jewish Europeans, and that Western Jews were more likely survive and tell their story. Although a brutal element of the Nazi war effort in Central and Western Europe, ghettos and gas chambers weren’t nearly as common on the Eastern front. In the bread basket of Europe, guns were the executioner’s weapon of choice, and “the rule became one Jew, one bullet.”
They may only be a series and red and brown spots, but they still constitute one of the most important works of art ever made in Central Europe. The spots were discovered on stones in a cave in southern Germany, and are the oldest known signs of painting ever found in the region. (via Der Spiegel)
In the latest issue of Utne Reader (Nov-Dec 2011) Mattilda Bernstein reviews Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States. Here, Bronski offers some insights into the book and his reasons for writing it. Special to Utne Reader.
A decade ago, when I first began teaching lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies at Dartmouth College, I was invited to a fraternity house to moderate a group discussion entitled “Don’t Yell Fag from the Porch.” The frat was renown for its rowdiness and, indeed, someone had recently yelled “faggot” at a student passing by. Undoubtedly not for the first time. After being publically challenged on this behavior, they decided to host a public forum on homophobia in the Greek system. The discussion went well and became an annual event. “Faggot” was yelled with less frequency and, in a few years, the fraternity even had a few “out” gay members. But that evening, and over the years, what bothered me was that the entire discussion was predicated on the idea that Dartmouth College, and its fraternities, was essentially a straight place that had to be open to “gay people.” But that makes no sense. We all know that life – and history – is far more complex and complicated than that. Or do we?
