Censoring Imagination: Why Prisons Ban Fantasy and Science Fiction LitHub
"As PEN America’s new report Reading Between the Bars shows, #books banned in prisons by some states dwarf all other book censorship in school and public libraries. Prison censorship robs those behind bars of everything from exercise and health to art and even yoga, often for reasons that strain credulity"
The strangest category of bans however, are the ones on magical and fantastical literature.
Europe & the rest of the world are good at #publishing works from around the world. Only 3% of US books are translations. Ilan Stavans of Amherst College wanted to rectify this imbalance. His Restless Books, founded in New York around a decade ago, has brought out c. 150 books by 120 authors from 40 countries.
"a conversation to help teachers, at the K–12 & college levels, develop strategies to teach the #Palestine – #Israel conflict & many of the attendant sensitive historical topics it entails. It might seem that this history is a minefield worth avoiding, but thoughtful & engaged teachers have been teaching such difficult topics in a civil & empathetic way for decades"
Today being #Thanksgiving, we can enjoy being treated to a host of historical commentaries & corrections
Gifted for you from behind the paywall, this important piece from 2021
Thanksgiving anniversary: Wampanoag Indians regret helping Pilgrims 400 years ago: Long marginalized and misrepresented in U.S. history, the Wampanoags are bracing for the 400th anniversary of the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving in 1621 Washington Post
#Massachusetts again: my colleague Professor Emerita of Photography Sandra Matthews & Nolumbeka Project President David Brule recently published their Occupying Massachusetts: Layers of History on Indigenous Land a photobook of historical & contemporary structures to make us think about the land of the Commonwealth
Teaching about #Thanksgiving & the #Pilgrims & #Puritans epitomizes the goals @AHAHistorians set for #history students, e.g. learning to see people of the past as both like us & very different, the latter demanding an act of sensitive imagination
V. interesting to compare obituaries of the great French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Both NY Times & Le Monde stress his popular success as a pioneer of the microhistory & "return to narrative" with Montaillou & Carnival in Romans. Yet NYT leaves out the fact that he & the Annales School were first known for serial collective history, quantitative methods (e.g. his Peasants of Languedoc https://eh.net/book_reviews/the-peasants-of-languedoc/) @Mareike2405 addresses this https://historians.social/deck/@[email protected]/111460434515549276
first a quick stop at the 1817 Athenaeum (closed today, but sister-in-law is a member). Once there were many of these loca institutions devoted to #education and #reading. Only 16 remain.
Outstanding talk today by @erik_kwakkel on the unique combination of intuition and rational analysis that allow the expert paleographer to identify the time and place when a #medieval#manuscript was produced.
'The Hidden Voice of the #Medieval Scribe' with Erik Kwakkel, University of British Columbia : Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies : UMass Amherst
Five-College Seminar in the #History of the #Book, hosted by the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
'The Hidden Voice of the Medieval Scribe' with Erik Kwakkel, University of British Columbia : Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies : UMass Amherst
Five-College Seminar in the #History of the #Book, hosted by the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Five-College Seminar in the History of the #Book hosted by Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of #Massachusetts-Amherst
Re: authentic & fake #Jews: the tragic #Gaza war has predictably led to bad #history going viral:. European Jews are descendants of medieval #Turkic converts--#Khazars-- thus have no #historical & #genetic connection to the land of #Israel
A myth, promoted by a combination of the cynical or stupid, sadly embraced by the naive & uninformed
Sadly relevant, as I will give a virtual talk about this at Indiana Uni this week.
@CitizenWald@Podophyllum@histodons though I will note a trend in recent years that when I do refer to the genetic data disproving the Khazar myth, the reply is along the lines of “so now you’re validating Hitler by using race science, huh?” #headsiwintailsyoulose
Indeed. When I teach about this stuff I do note the irony of use of genetic research among minority populations. But as I explain: it is so important to Jews & African Americans because their histories were taken away: lives and written records destroyed, so genetics fills in these historical gaps.
It is a historical-scientific research tool. Religion and identity will always remain personal and cultural. But one needs to have a brain in order to grasp this.
Things October 31 is besides #Halloween: #Reformation Day, celebrating the date in 1517 when Martin #Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg--or did he?
Modern scholarship long tended to dismiss the episode as fictional, citing lack of contemporary evidence. 1/n
Things October 31 is besides #Halloween: #Reformation Day, celebrating the date in 1517 when Martin #Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg--or did he?
In 2018, 2 historians from the historical Luther sites set forth the case for the authenticity of the tradition that he nailed the 95 theses to the church door OTD 1517:
Things October 31 is besides #Halloween: #Reformation Day, celebrating the date in 1517 when Martin #Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg--or did he?
Book historian Andrew Pettegree, who accepts the tradition, makes the key points in Brand Luther (2017):
Even Luther did not see the Theses as extraordinary