Lichtenstein spoke with Uetricht for the Jacobin podcast The Dig in March 2023; you can listen to the episode here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

MICAH UETRICHT

You write in your essay collection, A Contest of Ideas, about being the son of a German Jew who fled the Nazis during World War II and an American mother who fled Mississippi around the same time. You came of age during the civil rights movement era. Is that how you were first politicized?

NELSON LICHTENSTEIN

At the dinner table, my father was sort of a social democrat. My mother was hostile to the Gothic South even before the civil rights movement, but yes, the civil rights movement was a defining moment for everyone in my generation. I didn’t go to Mississippi in ’62 or ’63 but I did end up in Alabama in the summer of ’66. It was extraordinarily important.

My father ran this five-and-dime store in Frederick, Maryland, which is sort of a border state. And you could see the racial dynamics of the clientele and the sales staff. The town was segregated. I came of age just as desegregation was taking place.

I went to Alabama to work for a newspaper called The Southern Courier, which was funded by Northern liberals. We were trying to break the media boycott of the civil rights movement, even that late in ’66. I was posted to Selma and Mobile, Alabama, and Lowndes County, Georgia. It was revealing. I remember seeing Stokely Carmichael speak in a small southern church. I saw a social movement in reality, and that’s an extraordinary experience. It stays with you for life.

Three or four years earlier when people were in Mississippi in ’61, ’62, their lives were in danger. That was not the case at all with me. But I could see the nature of the struggle, and also I could see what success was. I remember one day in Selma, it was hot, and I thought, “I’m going to go to some air conditioned restaurant and have a nice breakfast, just take a break.” I go in, and there’s a placemat, which already, by the summer of ’66, included details of the march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as one of Selma’s historic events. The march had already naturalized and been made part of the history, eighteen months later. I remember thinking this is what happens when a social movement wins.

MICAH UETRICHT

Shortly after that you started graduate school in history at UC Berkeley, and you joined the Trotskyist group, the International Socialists [IS], shortly thereafter, right?

NELSON LICHTENSTEIN

It took two years or so. I was an activist in the movement of that moment. A lot of my friends were in it already, but I didn’t know about it right away. Some people went to Berkeley from places like New York or Madison or Chicago. They knew exactly what they wanted to do when they got there. That wasn’t the case with me.

I was very impressed with the fact that every organization had a leaflet, and the leaflets of the IS were like legal size, single space, no margins — kind of an entire thesis from 1917 to the present and what we do about it. I was impressed by that. A lot of people in the history department were in the IS, and so I came around that group and began to participate in their activities.

They’ve had to battle public apathy toward the impending 250th anniversary of American independence, which has hardly been helped by the false starts, recriminations and lawsuits plaguing the federal commission charged with coordinating the celebration.

And then there’s the tongue-twisting word itself, which has left more than a few people puzzling over not just what a semiquincentennial is, but how the heck you say it.

Still, as July 4 approaches, the effort is stepping into overdrive, as planners hit what some wryly call the annual panic button. On Tuesday, the rebooted United States Semiquincentennial Commission, also known as America250, will roll out a public engagement campaign at American Family Field in Milwaukee, where the Chicago Cubs will face the hometown Brewers. And so far, at least 33 states have created commissions, while institutions across the country are steaming ahead with plans for exhibitions and events of their own.

Across the country, there’s a sense of excitement and cautious optimism, along with no small amount of worry over how to create a unifying commemoration at a moment when fighting about American history seems to be the real national pastime.

“The effort to do inclusive history is bumping up against this other view of history, which is exclusive, exclusionary, simplistic and whitewashed,” said John Dichtl, the president and chief executive of the American Association for State and Local History. And now it’s all coming together, he said, “in a ferocious and fascinating way.”

Partisan political battles have yet to embroil Semiquincentennial planning specifically. “But as we talk to people,” Dichtl said, “the No. 1 thing they want is more help navigating these times, which are probably only going to get worse.”

In May, unease ran through the historical community when former President Donald J. Trump released a campaign video pledging to hold a yearlong “Salute to America 250,” including a “Great American State Fair” with pavilions from all 50 states, nationwide high school sports competitions and the construction of his proposed “National Garden of American Heroes.”

The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower and transformed the face of the country with “iron palaces”, including Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens’ Temperate House and the arches at St Pancras train station.

Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time.

Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a lecturer in history of science and technology at University College London (UCL) and author of the paper, said: “This innovation kicks off Britain as a major iron producer and … was one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world.”

The technique was patented by Cort in the 1780s and he is widely credited as the inventor, with the Times lauding him as “father of the iron trade” after his death. The latest research presents a different narrative, suggesting Cort shipped his machinery – and the fully fledged innovation – to Portsmouth from a Jamaican foundry that was forcibly shut down.

The Jamaican ironworks was owned by a white enslaver, John Reeder, who in correspondence described himself as “quite ignorant” of iron manufacturing, noting that the 76 black metallurgists who ran the foundry were “perfect in every branch of the iron manufactory”, and, through their skill, could turn scrap and poor-quality metal into valuable wrought iron.

Some of these workers are named in records, and include Devonshire, Mingo, Mingo’s son, Friday, Captain Jack, Matt, George, Jemmy, Jackson, Will, Bob, Guy, Kofi and Kwasi.

Their innovation came after the workers introduced the use of grooved rollers into the foundry to mechanise the formerly laborious process of hammering out impurities from low-quality iron. The same kind of grooved rollers were used in Jamaican sugar mills.

• Lisa Desjardins:

  1776 is a symbol of freedom, reason, and the founding of this country. But two centuries later, that date, 1776, was a rallying cry for rioters disrupting a national election at the Capitol.

• Protesters:

  1776! 1776!

• Rioters:

  1776! 1776!

• Rioters:

  1776!

• Lisa Desjardins:

  It is an example of how the politics and rhetoric around the founding has become inflamed and can eclipse the actual history involved.

  Joining me to discuss are Amy Cooter, the research director at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute, and Jim Grossman, historian and executive director of the American Historical Association.

  Amy, I want to start with you.

  July Fourth celebrates our history of men who were radical in their time in the founding, but I want to talk about the group you study now, those were in militias, those who are extremists. How do they use 1776 for their own purposes?

• Amy Cooter, Senior Research Fellow, Middlebury Institute:

  For them, 1776 has been important for longer than important for much longer than what we just saw with January 6.

  For them, it is kind of their reason to be in the militia, their reason to be as a man in society. They really see themselves as acting in the lineage of the founding fathers and think that true patriots have this obligation to honor them and honor that date.

• Lisa Desjardins:

  Jim, I want to talk also more broadly about the political bloodstream, because talking about the founding fathers is political boilerplate, but especially in recent times for conservatives.

  And I want to play this video. This is South Carolina, Tim Scott, presidential candidate and Republican, his July Fourth message out this year.

  Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), Presidential Candidate: Our founding fathers were geniuses who should be celebrated, not canceled.

• Lisa Desjardins:

  Obviously, there was genius involved in the founding of America. But I wonder how you see the positives and negatives versus the rhetoric which is sort of amped up about the founding fathers.

• Jim Grossman, Executive Director, American Historical Association:

  The problem here is an inclination among many people to see things as black and white, to see things as just, it's either this or it's that.

  And people talk about teaching the glory and the glory, for example, of American history. Senator Scott says they should be celebrated and not canceled. They shouldn't be understood. And that doesn't mean celebrated. It doesn't mean canceled. Their ideas were brilliant. There is no question that the founding documents were, in fact, revolutionary.

  They contained insights into liberty, into freedom. But these men also — they were men. There weren't any women present. These men also were mostly men who owned, bought and sold other human beings. And they lived and had grown up in a world where it was OK to own, buy, and sell other human beings.

  And to understand what they wrote and to understand them, we have to understand that. This is not a theory. This is a fact.

The brothel owner Kitty Schmidt began to sneak portions of her savings out of Nazi Germany sometime in the mid-1930s, often by sending her girls to London with cash sewn in their underwear. By 1938, officials had caught on, but thanks to her police connections, she wasn’t formally charged with currency smuggling. Still, her time had come. If she wanted to flee the Third Reich, it had to be now.

A wealthy Italian client was poised to aid Kitty in her escape plan, but the telegram she sent him in preparation for her trip was intercepted and passed along to the SS functionary Walter Schellenberg.

Schellenberg, as fate had it, was searching for a location to serve as a listening post, a place where unsuspecting men inside and outside the Nazi ranks would be lulled into airing their disloyal thoughts in rooms rigged with microphones. The SS caught up with Kitty before she could cross the Dutch border, locked her in a windowless cell at Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and abused her until she agreed to cooperate with Schellenberg’s scheme.

It’s a gripping story, and a largely unsubstantiated one. Although Schellenberg’s memoirs describe the existence of such an establishment, where all the staff, “from the maids to the waiter,” were spies for the Nazi regime, most of what we know is likely invented. In “The Madam and the Spymaster,” the journalists Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner and Julia Schrammel try to uncover the facts.

The mythmaking around Salon Kitty goes back half a century. In the 1970s, Schellenberg’s memoirs inspired the journalist Joseph Fritz (under the pseudonym Peter Norden) to write “Madam Kitty,” a novelized “true story.” Norden’s version of events was adapted in 1976 as a sexploitation film by the “Caligula” director Tinto Brass.

These twin products, particularly the blockbuster book, enhanced the legend’s notoriety if not its veracity. Viewers of the movie, in which Kitty teams up with one of her girls to destroy their Nazi overseer, would be forgiven for thinking that every character was a fiction.

Kitty, as the authors show, was a real woman, born Kätchen Emma Sophie Schmidt in Hamburg in 1882 to a salesman and his wife. In her early 20s, Kitty worked in Britain as a piano teacher; gave birth to a daughter, Kathleen; and married a Spanish man who later shot himself.

After World War I, Kitty brought her daughter back to Germany and opened her first brothel in Berlin. Commercial sex was effectively legal under the new Weimar government but became criminalized and heavily regulated again in the wake of its collapse. When Kitty opened a new establishment in 1935, she listed it as a hostel on official documents. Then the Nazis came calling.

Since then, deaths during childhood went from commonplace to rare. Partly as a result, the average human life span doubled, granting us, on average, the equivalent of a whole extra life to live. The field of public health is primarily responsible for this exceptional achievement.

Medicine revolves around the care of individual patients; public health, by contrast, works to protect and improve the health of entire populations, whether small communities or large countries. This encompasses researching how to prevent injuries, developing policies to address health disparities, and, of course, tackling disease outbreaks.

George Whipple, a co-founder of the Harvard School of Public Health, proclaimed in 1914 in The Atlantic that “one of the greatest events of the dawning twentieth century is the triumph of man over his microscopic foes.” Even he’d likely be shocked by the success of public health over the past century.

But as the coronavirus pandemic wanes, the field of public health has come under a barrage of criticism. Some are calling to curtail the field’s power. Even many of public health’s strongest proponents are disappointed with how the profession navigated the pandemic.

While it is essential to learn from mistakes of the recent past, such rhetoric could have awful consequences. Our public-health workforce is already burdened by massive attrition. Simultaneously, a growing body of legislation and litigation is chipping away at public health’s ability to address current and future health threats. Politicians have accused health experts of being “wrong about almost everything” during the pandemic. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican who fundraised his reelection bid with “#FireFauci” ads, introduced a bill to eliminate the position that Anthony Fauci recently left at the National Institutes of Health and to split the agency in three.

Dr. Sheffer, sitting next to her 12-year-old son, knew this wasn’t entirely true. Now a historian of 20th-century Europe at the University of California, Berkeley, she had spent years researching Dr. Asperger for her 2018 book, “Asperger’s Children.” Before he became known as a benevolent savior — “a psychiatric Oskar Schindler,” as Dr. Sheffer put it — Dr. Asperger marched in line with the Nazis’ medical framework.

His diagnosis, which he later called autistic psychopathy, was part of the larger Nazi medical effort to divide lives into two categories: worthy or unworthy of living. And, Dr. Sheffer learned with horror, he had personally condemned dozens of children to the killing centers. “I don’t want my son to be named after someone who sent children like him to their deaths,” she told Vox in 2018.

By the time her book was published, Asperger’s syndrome was no longer listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In 2013 it was folded into autism spectrum disorder, in part because there was not solid evidence that it warranted its own diagnosis. But shortened versions of the term are still used widely in the autism community, many of whom refer to themselves with terms, such as “Aspie,” derived from the name Asperger’s.

Dr. Sheffer has since been gratified to see that other medical organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organization, which put out the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, or ICD-11, have largely phased it out. “I think the message has reached the medical community,” she said.

Asperger’s is (or was) a medical eponym, part of a hallowed tradition of naming body parts, diseases, disorders and tools after great medical figures. Its demise illustrates the risk inherent in idolizing anyone from another era, and adds support to a growing movement to end this tradition altogether. But some scholars contend that even “canceled” eponyms have a place, as stark reminders of the ethical breaches medicine should never repeat.

Late at night on April 3, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King Jr, interpreted the parable of the Good Samaritan quite differently, describing him as the member of a scorned caste who had risked his life to save a person of the dominant race who had been beaten and robbed and left to perish on the dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho. King told this story at Mason Temple to people who had risked a dreadful storm to support 1,300 black sanitation workers, part of the city’s working poor, who were engaged in a desperate months-long strike against the City of Memphis.

The workers and King himself were at a breaking point. A few days earlier at a demonstration, nonstrikers had broken windows, setting off a riot by vengeful white police who sent hundreds of demonstrators to the hospital and killed sixteen-year-old, unarmed Larry Payne. King’s nonviolent leadership and the strike’s success now hung in the balance.

King had been under unendurable stress for months. He encouraged his audience to have hope, but he also told strike supporters of his own terrors going down the Jericho Road, as people had stabbed, jailed, beaten, and repeatedly tried to kill him. At the end of his talk, he declared, “I really don’t know what will happen to me now” and virtually predicted his own death. But instead of fearfully standing aside, he told his audience to rally with him to the side of the sanitation workers, no matter the consequences to themselves.

The question was not what will happen to us if we take the dangerous path of extending our empathy to others, he said, but what will happen to the weak and vulnerable if we do not. “Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness,” King declared.

The next day on April 4, 1968, an assassin murdered him.

More than fifty years later, Republicans have turned King’s Good Samaritan story upside down. Some praise Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager referred to as “a nice young man” by Donald Trump who, armed with an assault rifle, shot three Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two of them. (He was exonerated of any crime.) Like the South’s segregationist White Citizens Councils, “the Klan in business suits,” Republicans today urge hatred and violence committed by others to achieve their own political ends. In a posthumous article titled “Showdown for Nonviolence” in Look magazine, King warned that white politicians such as these could use racism to stir up “a kind of right-wing takeover . . . a Fascist development, which will be terribly injurious to the whole nation.”

Jonathan Eig’s new biography sounds a warning about the times we are in, taking us into the heart and soul of King as he goes down the dangerous and terrifying Jericho Road from his birth on January 15, 1929, to his death in Memphis. I wondered what more could be written after the tremendous accounts we already have of King, but it turns out there remains much more to say. Eig has used his sharp journalistic eye to spin a powerful story of King and the movements in which he participated, from the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott in 1955–56 to brutal episodes in Mississippi; St Augustine, Florida; Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Chicago; and Memphis during the 1960s.

“They came from folks who were agricultural workers and domestic workers and laundresses,” Kelley said. “And elevator operators. My mother wanted me to know that being an elevator operator was a really good job at one point.”

Kelley, who is a distinguished professor of Southern studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, follows those Black workers through centuries of history — exploring how segregation and violence, as well as the civil rights and labor movements, shaped the unique experience of Black workers.

“The interests of a Black working class — of accessibility to decent working conditions and a living wage — so many of the things that are hard and difficult about making a living, we really feel first,” she said. “And we have to think in our policies and in our approach to our humanity, how do we do better?”

Click through to the source to listen to the audio of Blair L.M. Kelley's interview with Marketplace's Kai Ryssdal and read an excerpt of Black Folk. 

More often, the Pearly Managers of the world are nameless, faceless people—present but unheard. In stories about the Great Migration, working-class Black folks make their way from rural enclaves and then largely disappear, only to emerge as “Chicagoans,” “New Yorkers,” or “Philadelphians.” In books about the civil rights movement, they are the ground troops who move and march in response to the exhortations of Black leaders. These leaders are almost always middle-class, straight men who are deeply invested in moving Black folks closer to the mainstream of American life. Additionally, these leaders are, perhaps most crucially, affiliated with mainline institutions like churches or nonprofits. What does it look like to center someone like Pearly Manager in a story about Black social life? J. T. Roane answers this in his exquisite new book, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place. Chronicling and making meaning of the lived experience of people who exist on the margins is no easy task. Roane’s meticulous research, brilliant analysis, and prodigious dedication render a powerful and compelling retelling of the construction of Black social life in Philadelphia.

Dark Agoras (the title is a riff on the Greek agora, meaning public space) provides us with a view of the lives lived and worlds built by Black migrants who made their way from the rural South to Philadelphia across the 20th century. Roane’s entryway into Black working-class life was inspired in part by the groundbreaking work of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro. In that 1899 text, Du Bois identified two social categories associated with Black migrant cultures. The first one he described as the “institutions of the ‘vicious and criminal,’” spaces in the Black sections of the city where migrants built an underground, a space where they participated in alternative economies and built social relations not defined by traditional institutions. The second category was the set apart—homes, rented domiciles, and public spaces that hosted prayer meetings, street revivals, and other contingent (frequently non-Christian) religious activities. Using the underground and the set apart, Roane charts how rural ways of being impacted the cultivation of Black social space and shaped modes of resistance in the face of intransigent white supremacy.

Roane anchors his reading of Black working-class life in an exploration of slavery and the immediate post-emancipation era, when Black people worked mightily to confront and confound the logic of the institution. Roane begins here because it is where we see the earliest efforts of Black folks to create and maintain public spaces for themselves—spaces for work, pleasure, mourning, and all the other activities enjoyed by autonomous individuals. It is that placemaking—the construction of dark agoras—that concerns Roane. Throughout the period of enslavement, Black people cultivated an ability to engage in what he calls “unsanctioned placemaking,” a practice of placemaking that “provided the cover for collective self-creation and belonging in excess of domination.”  

But many stories could be lost to history. My family received reparations. My grandfather, Melvin, was 6 when he was imprisoned in Tule Lake, California. As long as I’ve known about the redress effort, I’ve wondered how he felt about getting a check in the mail decades after the war. No one in my family knows how he used the money. Because he died shortly after I was born, I never had a chance to ask.

To my knowledge, no one has rigorously studied how families spent individual payments, each worth $45,000 in current dollars. Densho, a nonprofit specializing in archival history of Japanese American incarceration, and the Japanese American National Museum confirmed my suspicions. When I first started researching what the redress effort did for former incarcerees, the question seemed almost impudent, because whose business was it but theirs what they did with the money?

Still, I thought, following that money could help answer a basic question: What did reparations mean for the recipients? When I began my reporting, I expected former incarcerees and their descendants to speak positively about the redress movement. What surprised me was how intimate the experience turned out to be for so many. They didn’t just get a check in the mail; they got some of their dignity and agency back. Also striking was how interviewee after interviewee portrayed the monetary payments as only one part—though an important one—of a broader effort at healing.

The significance of reparations becomes all the more important as cities, states, and some federal lawmakers grapple with whether and how to make amends to other victims of official discrimination—most notably Black Americans. Although discussions of compensation have existed since the end of the Civil War, they have only grown in intensity and urgency in recent years, especially after this magazine published Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” in 2014. In my home state, California, a task force has spent the past three years studying what restitution for Black residents would look like. The task force will deliver its final recommendations—which reportedly include direct monetary payments and a formal apology to descendants of enslaved people—to the state legislature by July 1.

In 1998, as redress for Japanese American incarcerees was winding to a close, the University of Hawaii law professor Eric Yamamoto wrote, “In every African American reparations publication, in every legal argument, in almost every discussion, the topic of Japanese American redress surfaces. Sometimes as legal precedent. Sometimes as moral compass. Sometimes as political guide.” Long after it ended, the Japanese American–redress program illustrates how honest attempts at atonement for unjust losses cascade across the decades.

....

The notion that recipients should use their money for noble purposes runs deep in the discussion about reparations. It helps explain why some reparations proposals end up looking more like public-policy initiatives than the unrestricted monetary payments that Japanese Americans received. For example, a 2021 initiative in Evanston, Illinois, began providing $25,000 in home repairs or down-payment assistance to Black residents and their descendants who experienced housing discrimination in the city from 1919 to 1969. Florida provides free tuition to state universities for the descendants of Black families in the town of Rosewood who were victimized during a 1923 massacre. But if the goal of reparations is to help restore dignity and opportunity, then the recipients need autonomy. Only they can decide how best to spend those funds. (Perhaps recognizing this, Evanston’s city council voted earlier this year to provide direct cash payments of $25,000.)

In this interview, I spoke to historian J.T. Roane in May about his recent book Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place. The book charts a history through Philadelphia’s working-class Black communities from the Great Migration to the Black Power era as they navigated the city’s complex social terrain to reconstitute and claim spatial presence. Roane examines Philadelphia’s “underground” (stoops, gambling houses, and unlicensed bars) and spiritual spaces (house and storefront congregations, temples, and mosques) to uncover how Black people’s quotidian practices and the work of local organizations constituted a spatial politics. In our conversation, we discussed his work, the significance of geography, and modes of resistance against dominant arrangements of urban political economy in the spaces he calls “dark agoras.”

—N’Kosi Oates

N’Kosi Oates: Let’s begin with W. E. B. Du Bois, because one of his foundational works as a sociologist was The Philadelphia Negro, published at the end of the nineteenth century. Your book also explores black urban life in Philadelphia—you’re looking at the twentieth century and use a historian’s lens instead. How do you expand upon and even depart from Du Bois’s important work?

J.T. Roane: Because Dark Agoras centers on Philadelphia, it is critical to begin with Du Bois’s work. His engagement with Black Philadelphia at the end of the nineteenth century, is, of course, the primary opening of sociology in the American context. But while Du Bois is engaged with working-class Black life, he can also be derisive and dismissive of it, especially around what he sees as its inability to fully integrate into the social fabric of the city—even as he’s challenging the naturalization of Blackness as segregated and exterior to the normative functioning of the city.

Even so, Dark Agoras is indebted to Du Bois. I pick up his engagement with both the city’s underground and the kind of social worlds associated with what I call Philadelphia’s “set-apart,” the various religious and social spatial formations that took shape after the period that he’s writing about in the 1890s.

NO: I’m interested in the relationship between the underground and the set-apart, both of which, in your work, are kinds of “dark agoras.” In which ways do these two sets of communities overlap?  

JTR: Both the underground and the set-apart emerged from the dynamics of segregation. But many of the people who are engaged in the Black set-apart religious and spiritual communities distance themselves pretty explicitly from the economic and the sexual and other kinds of disreputable worlds associated with the underground. Yet even in diametric opposition, there’s so much shared energy between those two spaces.

Some of the energy between these two formulations of dark agoras comes out of migrants’ transposition, of practices and worlds that they had made, first on plantations and then through the movement to mill towns and small agricultural towns in the South, and into the urban South, and then through the Great Migrations into Northern urban geographies like Philadelphia or Chicago.

For years before Apollo 11, officials had been concerned that the moon might harbor microorganisms. What if moon microbes survived the return trip and caused lunar fever on Earth?

To manage the possibility, NASA planned to quarantine the people, instruments, samples and space vehicles that had come into contact with lunar material.

But in a paper published this month in the science history journal Isis, Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University, demonstrates that these “planetary protection” efforts were inadequate, to a degree not widely known before.

“The quarantine protocol looked like a success,” Dr. Degroot concludes in the study, “only because it was not needed.”

Dr. Degroot’s archival work also shows NASA officials knew that lunar germs could pose an existential (if low-probability) threat and that their lunar quarantine probably wouldn’t keep Earth safe if such a threat did exist. They oversold their ability to neutralize that threat anyway.

This space age narrative, Dr. Degroot’s paper claims, is an example of the tendency in scientific projects to downplay existential risks, which are unlikely and difficult to deal with, in favor of focusing on smaller, likelier problems. It also offers useful lessons as NASA and other space agencies prepare to collect samples from Mars and other worlds in the solar system for study on Earth.

In the 1960s, no one knew whether the moon harbored life. But scientists were concerned enough that the National Academy of Sciences held a high-level conference in 1964 to discuss moon-Earth contamination. “They agreed that the risk was real and that the consequences could be profound,” Dr. Degroot said.

For more than a century, the Catholic Church financed its expansion and its institutions with profits made from the purchase and sale of people they enslaved. This chapter of Church history has only recently come to the attention of the public.

"Without the enslaved, the Catholic Church in the United States as we know it today would not exist," writes author Rachel Swarns. She says the priests prayed for the salvation of the souls of the people they owned, even as they bought and sold their bodies.

In 1838, the Jesuits sold 272 enslaved people, which helped save what is now Georgetown University from bankruptcy and helped stabilize the Jesuits in Maryland. Swarns wrote about this sale in 2016 in the New York Times article "272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What does It owe Their Descendants?"

Swarns' new book — The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church — expands on that article. It tells the story of the Church's history of enslavement in America, while illustrating the consequences by focusing on generations of one family that had several members among those 272 people sold by the Church in 1838. Two descendants of the family she writes about in the book found each other as a result of her New York Times article.

To this day, our contemporary institutions are "deeply connected" to slavery, Swarns says. She hopes that telling multi-generational stories of families associated with these institutions will help make this history more present and more personal. "This isn't this faceless, amorphous thing," Swarns says. "These are people. They have names. And we are connected to that. We are connected to that history today."

Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, refused to defend the law when it was challenged by a suit from the parents of two transgender girls. 

At a press conference, Horne said it’s a matter of fairness — and it’s unfair for biological boys to compete against girls in sports.

But ASU sports historian Victoria Jackson says that the issue of transgender athletes in sports is much less black-and-white than that.

Jackson joined The Show to explain just how far back in sports history this issue can be traced.

Click through to source to listen to audio

By contrast, in “My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering,” the New York University professor and historian Martha Hodes describes how for decades a memory block had obstructed her ability to recall all but momentary flashes of the harrowing experience her 12-year-old self endured in 1970. “Why did I remember so little,” she asks, “and what could remembering tell me?”

This memoir is her answer. Her propulsive, high-stress journey is filled with dread and fear, underpinned by her hard-won compassion for the profound pain her long-ago self believed she had no choice but to disown.

Ms. Hodes opens with a summary of the hijacking she had willed herself to forget. On Sept. 6, 1970, she and her 13-year-old sister, Catherine, boarded a New York-bound TWA jet in Tel Aviv. That morning they had said goodbye to their mother, with whom they had just spent the summer at the home she shared with her second husband and their newborn; upon landing in New York, they would be met by their father, with whom they lived the rest of the year. On the last leg of the flight, after stops in Athens and Frankfurt, two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) stormed the cockpit and diverted the plane to a remote airfield in the Jordanian desert. It was one of the most brazen episodes of air piracy prior to 9/11.

In fact, it took the raw destruction of Sept. 11, 2001, to begin to jar loose Ms. Hodes’s memories. While teaching a class in downtown Manhattan, she heard the blasts of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers and later saw the smoking ruins. Soon, unnerving fears and intrusive memories began popping up, as if her unconscious mind was making connections that her rational self still struggled to ward off. But the message came through. “For the first time ever, I wanted to know more,” she writes. “I wanted to connect the twelve-year-old girl who buried as much as she could to the grown-up struggling to understand what happened to that girl. . . . As a hostage I had quelled memories and emotions; as a historian I wanted to search for facts and feelings, to provide meaning for everything that had happened to me and my family.”

It takes every tool in her professional toolbox for Ms. Hodes to breach the divide. She doggedly sifts through official documents, media accounts, government and corporate archives, and various other sources. She tracks down other former hostages, whose eyewitness testimony, she hopes, will permit her to vicariously live through scenes of which she herself had no recollection. Her most valuable source would seem to be the diary she kept during the summer and fall of 1970, which she had packed away for decades. Yet her written record turns out to be almost as spotty and elusive as her memory.

So it’s little surprise that many of us wonder, “What is the future of American democracy?” We turned to historian Thomas Zimmer, a DAAD Professor at Georgetown University, whose work focuses on anti-democratic tendencies and impulses on the American Right since the 1950s. You can find more of his work in his newsletter, Democracy Americana, and on the podcast he co-hosts, Is This Democracy.

DAME: Is America still on the precipice of authoritarianism or fascism? Or have we already passed the rubicon?  

Thomas Zimmer: The situation is undoubtedly serious, and the continuing radicalization of the Right, its increasingly open embrace of authoritarian minority rule, constitutes an acute threat to democracy. But fatalism and cynicism are not helpful. We need to accept the political conflict for what it is: a struggle over whether the U.S. should finally realize the promise of egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy, or forever remain a country in which traditional hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth determine an individual’s status. This conflict will dominate American politics for decades to come. And the only way forward is through it.

DAME: What can history teach us about our nation’s future?

TZ: I am actually skeptical about the idea of “learning from history”—at least if that is supposed to mean we can draw clear-cut lessons from the past. This idea is based on an understanding of history as a set of recurring constellations or situations. But that’s not how “history” works. History is not repetitive, it is accumulative. I certainly believe history has something important to offer. But probably not in the form of ready-made lessons. Studying history can help us in our analysis of the present, make us ask better questions, put things into perspective. In that sense, it can help us understand the dynamics that are shaping the present: How moments of racial and social progress—or even just perceived progress—have always been conflictual, have always led to a reactionary counter-mobilization that threatened to abolish democracy altogether rather than accepting multiracial pluralism. From there, we might be better able to navigate the political conflict.

DAME: People 30 and younger have only experienced this current iteration of American democracy. How do you imagine their experiences have shaped their worldview? Do they share the sense of urgency as older generations?

TZ: We should remember that the lives and perceptions of anyone under the age of 30 have been shaped by a series of crises: 9/11, the War on Terror both internationally as well as domestically, the global depression after 2008, far-right extremism and Trumpism taking over the Republican Party, COVID—all while it’s become widely accepted that we are dealing with a global climate emergency … These crises, and the way they have been (mis-)handled politically, have shaken the belief of a younger generation in the willingness and/or ability of the system to come up with answers that are commensurate with the challenges the country faces, have undermined their faith in the institutions. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. Preserving the status quo will not be good enough, and the younger generation understands this better than any other. Take the problem of gun violence, for instance: If we let only young people vote, we would be getting this under control. I know it’s cliché to say at this point, but I really believe it: The kids are quite alright.

The Chinese official erupted. “What do you mean that’s not good enough? Why isn’t that good enough?” he demanded. He referred to a past conversation with John Kerry, then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. “I talked to Senator Kerry and Senator Kerry said that was good enough.”

Mr. Obama looked at him evenly. “Well,” he replied, “Senator Kerry is not president of the United States.”

That moment of sharp relief, a clash with an intransigent foreign apparatchik by a young American president feeling his own way, comes to life in a new oral history project on the Obama administration released on Wednesday. Six years after Mr. Obama left office, the project by Incite, a social science research institute at Columbia University, has assembled perhaps the most extensive collection of interviews from the era to date.

Researchers interviewed 470 Obama administration veterans, critics, activists and others who were in the thick of major events back then, including Mr. Obama and the first lady, Michelle Obama, amassing a total of 1,100 hours of recordings. Transcripts of the interviews are being released in batches over the next three years, starting with a first set of 17 made public on Wednesday focused on climate change, a central issue then that continues to shape the national debate today.

“There will be hundreds of new insights that come from this study, many of which will change our understanding of the Obama presidency and the period from 2008 to 2016 more generally,” said Peter Bearman, founding director of Incite and the principal investigator for the Obama oral history project.

What makes Mr. Obama’s presidency distinctive is the way it resonated around the world in the “Obama moment,” as Evan McCormick, who led the foreign policy part of the project, put it. “One thing that becomes clear in our interviews is that the moment of great hope and expectation ushered in by the election of the first Black president was a global one,” he said.

That void has been filled with the release of Victor Luckerson’s new book Built From the Fire, a nearly 500-page tome that comprehensively details the makings of Greenwood, the myth; Greenwood, the actual place; the massacre that reduced it to ashes; and the waves of re-destruction that occurred after it was rebuilt. 

Some of those waves came in the form of urban renewal schemes, which pushed many businesses and homes built by massacre survivors out of Greenwood. A highway constructed right through the neighborhood emptied it out even more. Government policies have not been named as major culprits of the neighborhood’s demise in mainstream retellings of the Black Wall Street narrative. But for Luckerson, such policies did as much damage if not more to Greenwood’s heritage than the initial conflagration. 

Originally from Montgomery, Alabama, Luckerson moved to Tulsa in 2019, embedding himself in the Greenwood community, Tulsa’s historical archives, and any other institution or resource he could find to gather information for writing Built From the Fire. 

....

Bloomberg CityLab spoke with Luckerson about the themes covered in his book, what the public often gets wrong about Black Wall Street, and the role of local and federal policies in devastating this once illustrious Black community. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Which disaster would you say did the most harm to Greenwood: the massacre, urban renewal, or the highway?

After the race massacre, we have this really powerful story about resiliency and Black people rebuilding, which is true. This community was devastated with more than 1,200 homes and businesses destroyed, but they were able to rebuild incredibly quickly. By that Christmas there were hundreds of structures back up in the neighborhood. But because they had to rebuild so fast, a lot of the structures were poorly made, so they became dilapidated pretty fast. I looked up Census tract records in the 1940s and saw how the vast majority of Greenwood properties had been built right after 1921, many of them not having indoor plumbing or basic amenities. You get to the ‘60s and ‘70s and urban renewal comes through. Now we have this community where lots of structures are still around, but in really bad need of repair. They are designated as blighted by the urban renewal authority, and so there's really a direct connection between those two events. I would say the massacre was more devastating in the short term, and urban renewal more devastating in the long term.

Did Greenwood survivors have to rebuild from scratch, or was there some level of government assistance?

I don't know if shocking is the right word, but it was telling to discover how little the city wanted to help. The city had this perspective that they were too proud to ask for help. You have a huge disaster like that, one of the first thoughts is: Can we get outside aid from other parts of the country? But I'm told [Tulsa officials] actually turned it down — literally sent checks back to Chicago and other places that were offering aid to Greenwood, with this sort of mentality that, ‘We're a proud city, we can fix our own mess.’  

After that, another group of city leaders who were more craven actually tried to first buy out the property, which Greenwood folk didn't want to sell. They even passed city ordinances that were going to make it harder to rebuild. The state government denied a direct request for aid to Greenwood. You need loans to rebuild your properties, but some white business owners wouldn’t issue loans, or if they did they were at really exorbitant rates. All those mechanical things really undermined the ability for Greenwood to rebuild with the same kind of sturdiness that it had before the race massacre.

Bell-Romero, originally from Australia, had recently finished a PhD at Cambridge. He was at the start of his academic career and eager to prove himself. This was the ideal post-doctoral position: a chance to dig into the university’s archives to explore faculty and alumni links to slavery, and whether these links had translated into profit for Cambridge. It was the kind of work that, Bell-Romero said, “seems boring to the layperson” – spending days immersed in dusty archives and logbooks, exploring 18th- and 19th-century financial records. But as a historian, it was thrilling. It offered a chance to make a genuinely fresh contribution to burgeoning research about Britain’s relationship to slavery.

In the spring of 2020, Bell-Romero and another post-doctoral researcher, Sabine Cadeau, began work on the legacies of enslavement inquiry. Cadeau and Bell-Romero had a wide-ranging brief: to examine how the university gained from slavery, through specific financial bequests and gifts, but also to investigate how its scholarship might have reinforced, validated or challenged race-based thinking.

Cambridge was never a centre of industry like Manchester, Liverpool or Bristol, cities in which historic links to slavery are deep and obviously apparent – but as one of the oldest and wealthiest institutions in the country, the university makes an interesting case study for how intimately profits from slavery were entwined with British life. Given how many wealthy people in Britain in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were slaveholders, or invested in the slave economy, it was a reasonable expectation that both faculty and alumni may have benefited financially, and that this may have translated into donations to the university.

In the past decade, universities in the UK and US have commissioned similar research. Top US universities such as Harvard and Georgetown found they had enslaved people and benefited from donations connected to slavery. The first major research effort in the UK, at the University of Glasgow, began in 2018, but soon similar projects launched at Bristol, Edinburgh, Oxford, Manchester and Nottingham. Stephen Mullen, co-author of the Glasgow report, told me that he was surprised not only by the extent of the university’s financial ties to slavery, but by how much that wealth is still funding these institutions.

In their report, Mullen and his co-author Simon Newman established a methodology for working out the difficult question of how the financial value of historic donations and investments might translate into modern money, which produces a range of estimates rather than a single number: in the case of Glasgow, between £16.7m and £198m. In response to the research, the University of Glasgow initiated a “reparative justice” programme, including a £20m partnership with the University of the West Indies and a new centre for slavery studies.

All of this marks a dramatic change in how Britain thinks about slavery, and especially the idea of reparations. For the most part, when Britain has engaged with this history, the tendency has been to focus on the successful campaign for abolition; historians of slavery like to repeat the famous quip that Britain invented the slave trade solely to abolish it.

This wider trend is reflected in Cambridge. As far as the story of slavery and the University of Cambridge goes, perhaps the most well-known fact is that some of Britain’s key abolitionists – William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson – were educated there. But British celebration of the abolition of slavery in the 1800s has tended to elide the awkward question of who the abolitionists were fighting against, and the point that the wealth and economic power generated by slavery did not disappear when the Abolition Act was passed.

“It was interesting to me that there weren’t so many questions about the other side – were slaveholders educated here? Did slaveholders give benefactions? Did students invest in the different slave-trading companies?” Bell-Romero said. “It’s not about smashing what came before, it’s about contributing and building on histories.”

Cambridge consists of the central university and 31 constituent colleges, each of which has its own administration, decision-making powers and budgets. Most of the university’s wealth is situated within colleges, and from the outset, the legacies of enslavement inquiry relied to an extent on colleges granting Bell-Romero and Cadeau access to their archives. This wasn’t always easy. “The entire research experience, even now, remains a constant struggle for archival access, an ongoing political tug of war,” Cadeau told me in late 2022. “There was financial support for the research from the central university, but mixed feelings and outright opposition were both widespread.”