A Usable Past

Today would have been the 98th birthday of Montgomery’s beloved seamstress and Secretary of the NAACP.  Parks was 42 at the time of her political activism on that bus, which directly led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Although she was not the first woman who sat down in an act of civil disobedience (if you do not know about Claudette Colvin, go read about her here. Now.), she has become an icon of American and civil rights history. Happy birthday, Ms. Parks.

Claudette Colvin

More civil rights history this week – February 2, 1960:

Want another reason to dig Debbie Wasserman Schultz?  She defines the bullshit H.R. 3 as  “a violent act against women.” Which of course it is, but apparently in our Congress you need ovaries to see that.

“It really is — to suggest that there is some kind of rape that would be okay to force a woman to carry the resulting pregnancy to term, and abandon the principle that has been long held, an exception that has been settled for 30 years, is to me a violent act against women in and of itself.”

And in homo news… Baby steps for Illinois…

Oh yeah, and lesbians!

Check out “Women at War” by historian Elizabeth R. Varon at the New York Times to find out about women’s political and social involvement leading up to the Civil War.

Pretty!

New Archival Digital Collection!  From “Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement“  An On-line Archival Collection, Special Collections Library at Duke University.

The materials in this on-line archival collection document various aspects of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United States, and focus specifically on the radical origins of this movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Items range from radical theoretical writings to humourous plays to the minutes of an actual grassroots group.

Check out the sweet documents available, including this one below:

United Women's Contingent: March on Washington Against the War, April 24. (flyer)

From The Feminist Librarian Reads.

Student waitresses work in Wilder Hall

Women’s History Sources clued me in to a great exhibition on food at fellow Seven Sister school Mount Holyoke College called “Everything Is Wholesome and Abundant”: A Culinary Chronicle of Mount Holyoke College, 1837- today.  Check out the sweet (pun fully intended) culinary history of the oldest women’s college in the U.S.

Waitresses prepare to serve Deacon Porter's hat

And some great queer images I found of the gays:

Washington DC, Early 1970's

Enjoy!

So says James Oakes in The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (1982) where he dismantles Eugene Genovese’s argument in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) that the slaveholding class in the American South was a monolithic, paternalist group of upper-class white men.  Owners of enslaved Africans were very economically and socially diverse, and the New York Times recently uncovered this awesome map based on an 1860 slave Census that illustrates this diversity.

Thanks again to Sociological Images for this fascinating map.

Want to *really* feel no pain?

Try Pemberton’s French Wine of Coca!  Only five ounces of coca leaf per gallon of syrup!

Who says you shouldn’t mix your alcohol, cocaine and caffeine?

From Sociological Images.  Learn more at Professor Elliott’s Cabinet.

(Also – want to know how old Schweppes is?  Really old.)

Julie Z at the fbomb created a nifty reproductive rights timeline. Here are some excepts:

1870’s: The Comstock Laws are passed, making contraception illegal and declaring that all attempts to make contraception and family planning available are, “obscene.” These laws resulted in a lot of unwanted pregnancies, and increasing poverty because families of lower classes often had more children than they could support. The Comstock Laws led to illegal abortions. While wealthy women could find a way to obtain safer abortions under the radar, poor women had to resort to causing themselves extreme physical strain or inserting sharp devices (like clothes hangers) into themselves. Such methods commonly resulted in, “cervical wounds, serious bleeding, infections, shock and death.”

1936: Sanger is arrested when postal authorities find that she is illegally ordering contraception. Her case was reviewed by Judge Augustus Hand, writing for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, how overrode the Comstock Laws, and ruled that contraception could no longer be considered obscene. The ruling applies to New York, Connecticut and Vermont. It isn’t until the 1960’s that married couples in the United States can obtain contraceptives from licensed physicians.

1967-1970: Colorado becomes the first state to liberalize abortion laws by developing the “Model Penal Code on Abortion” which advocated for legal abortion in cases of “rape, incest, severe fetal defects, and when the women’s life or health was at risk.” Hawaii (which made abortion totally legal), New York (which allowed abortion through the 24th week of pregnancy if the procedure was preformed by a licensed physician), Alaska and Washington soon followed.

2009: Dr. George Tiller is murdered because of his standing as one of the few doctors in the United States to perform late-term abortions. His murder came after years of threatened violence, witnessing his clinic being bombed, being shot in both arms and facing multiple law suits against his operation.”

Check out the whole post here!

Attack Ads, Circa 1800, by ReasonTV.

From Historiann.

Wow, my summer is flying by.  In addition to working, I’ve been taking a class in archival practices at the Archives Center at the National Museum of American History with the former President of the Society of American Archivists, John Fleckner.  The course is fun and interesting, and I am working on John F. Grace’s papers of the Worthington Corporation collection, which was a 19th and 20th century industrial manufacturing empire that created steam pumps, engines, and other hydraulic machinery.  I’ve found some interesting anecdotes within the papers, including the fact that one of the presidents of the corporation drowned on the Titanic and the elevators at the Eiffel Tower were constructed with Worthington machinery in 1900 at the Exposition Universelle.  The photos of 19th century machine shops and workers are also fun to look at.

(The photo was taken with a phone – sorry about the quality!)

Another thing I get to do in the class is be crafty!  Sink mats are used to protect fragile artifacts while providing researchers access to them.  I made this sink mat out of  layers of cardboard, mylar, canvas and tape.   The items being displayed in this mat are paper, flower, metal and glass notecards, maybe late 19th c?, that say “I love thee” and “Forget me not.”  I’m so spending the rest of the summer dorking out and making these for my stuff.

Posting may be scattered while I’m finishing up my coursework, but I will try to post some images, advertising, and other visual odds and ends.

(Also – shameless plug: check out Smart Chicks Commune for more fun stuff from a band of three awesomely smart chicks.)

From Stuff White People Do, Chauncey DeVega (cross-posted at We Are Respectable Negroes) wrote a hilarious (and frightening) revisioning of American history, as would be brought to us by the fools folks who are rewriting the history curriculum in Texas and Arizona.

Some gems:

The Essential Dates and Events of U.S. History
as Approved by the States of Arizona and Texas

1860s-1900s–The Gilded Age of prosperity. American capitalism provides opportunities for all people to grow wealthy, secure, and happy. Liberals and Progressives begin working against American freedom and capitalism by forming unions, demanding unfair compensation from their employers, limiting the rights of children to work in factories, and imposing restrictive regulations for the “safety” of employees. Many brave men die fighting Communist-influenced unions as they riot in America’s cities.

…

1906–Using the Antiquities Act, Theodore Roosevelt establishes the National Park System. In one bold stroke Roosevelt establishes Socialist policies that steal land from the American people.

1913–More Socialism and class warfare ushered into the U.S. with the federal income tax system.

1917–America enters and wins World War 1 singlehandedly because the French are cowards.

…

1955-1968–George Wallace and Martin Luther King Jr. lead a Civil Rights Movement to ensure that all Americans are judged by “the content of their character and not the color of their skin.”

That last one cracks my history-lovin’ self UP.

Check the rest of the post out here.