The second phase of the University Libraries’ Transgender Oral History Project has begun. Led by Myrl Beam, the project will feature interviews that highlight transgender social movements and organizing.
Beam, Oral Historian for the project — housed in the Libraries’ Tretter Collection — will build on the work of Andrea Jenkins, who interviewed almost 200 trans and gender non-conforming people as they narrated their life stories.
Beam is currently on a two-year scholarly leave from his role...
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see.
Please submit newsletter items about archives and human rights (writ broadly) to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. These can be recent publications, upcoming events or exhibitions, opportunities and scholarships, or something else entirely as long as it connects to archives and human rights. For the January newsletter, please send you submission by January 24, 2020.
Happy...
What worries you most about the state of the world now?
I worry about what I think is a real decline in the teaching of good history. History majors are down more than any other major. Humanities are already down compared to STEM, which I can understand — STEM is important. But I believe the humanities are incredibly important if we want to create an engaged, responsible citizenry.
I just thought about that word “humanity.”
Yeah. It’s the study of what it means to be human. Nazis didn’t fall...
This document is a set of guidelines for granting agencies, grant writers, and grant reviewers supporting the ethical creation of contingent positions in digital library work. We encourage granting agencies and grant reviewers to endorse and integrate these guidelines into application requirements, and urge institutions creating contingent positions to consult these guidelines when developing such positions.
Grants are opportunities to request and receive funding and other support that treats...
A national organization based in Minnesota is kicking off a new 10-year plan to bring attention to a dark chapter in U.S. history — and it’s just gotten the funding to put the plan into action.
Between 1869 and the 1960s, it’s estimated hundreds of thousands of Native American children across the country were removed from their families and sent to government boarding schools.
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition formed in 2012 to seek justice and healing for those...
The Latino Museum Studies Program (LMSP) provides a national forum for graduate students to share, explore and discuss the representation and interpretation of Latino cultures in the context of the American experience. It provides a unique opportunity to meet and engage with Smithsonian professionals, scholars from renowned universities, and with leaders in the museum field.
Created in 1994 as Smithsonian Institute for Interpreting and Representing Latino Cultures (SIIRLC), LMSP seeks to...
MATTHEW CONNELLY: But in this case, it was fascinating, because what I found and what others have found is that records relating to the death, the sexual assault of undocumented immigrants had been designated as temporary. In other words, these were records they decided had to be deleted after sometimes three years, five years, 10 or, at most, 25 years, in this case.
So there was a big outcry. A lot of people — in fact, tens of thousands of people — spoke up in protest. Dozens of members of...
Building on the collaborative, community-engaged work of the American Philosophical Society’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR), the APS Library & Museum launched The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative (NASI) in 2016 to foster the development of the next generation of Indigenous and allied students and scholars.
As part of its NASI initiative, CNAIR will host a three-day conference in Philadelphia on September 24-26, 2020. The...
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the forced evacuation and relocation of all people in “military areas” who might pose a threat to national security. Since the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor had occurred just months earlier, many believed that people of Japanese ancestry posed that threat, and the entire West Coast was deemed a military area.
Over the next six months, 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent were taken...
On January 26, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved the sale of the 157,000 square foot National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Seattle facility, which holds permanent federal records for Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. This decision raises the question: which is more important, access to historic records or selling a public facility in a high-value real estate market? There has been fierce opposition from historical societies in Alaska and Seattle, historical...
This year will be the First International Meeting of Museums of Memory and Human Rights, which will take place in Santiago de Chile on November 12 and 13, organized in the context of our 10th Anniversary.
The meeting seeks to foster critical reflection and enhance the coordination of collaborative initiatives that highlight the role of these spaces with respect to the duty to remember that it is the responsibility of the states, and the right to memory that is characteristic of people, peoples...
On February 1, 2020, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience suspended the membership of the National Center for Historical Memory in Bogotá, Colombia, of its worldwide network of more than 275 historical sites, museums and initiatives of memory. To be clear, only the National Center for Historical Memory has been suspended; the Coalition continues to fully support its other Colombian members, including the Center for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation, the Casa de la Memoria Museum...
The official exhibition, in Sandton City until July, begins with a series of large paintings by John Meyer, one of hills, presumably in the Eastern Cape, where three young boys are seen running through rays of sunshine and blades of tall grass. The entrance engulfs the viewer, enabling them to fully immerse themselves in what is about to be an excellently curated narrative of Nelson Mandela. The first gallery invites viewers to feel the power and emotion of one of the most dramatic and...
The archives of the Museum of Chinese in America may be in better shape than feared, after a five-alarm fire destroyed part of the Chinatown building where they were kept.
City workers began the process of recovering the museum's boxes from the building at 70 Mulberry Street on Wednesday. The archives, which boast 85,000 items of historical and cultural significance, were stored on the second floor of the five-story building, where a fire on January 24th destroyed the top floors and roof. Nine...
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see.
Please submit newsletter items about archives and human rights (writ broadly) to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. These can be recent publications, upcoming events or exhibitions, opportunities and scholarships, or something else entirely as long as it connects to archives and human rights. For the March newsletter, please send you submission by March 24, 2020.
In case you haven't had a chance to read our interview with StoryCorps Union Bargaining Committee member Maura Johnson, you can read it here. It has been updated with new informational links by author Claire Bennett.
StoryCorps is an American nonprofit founded in 2003 by David Isay with a mission to preserve and share the stories of people from all backgrounds. Modeled after the oral history projects conducted by the WPA in the 1930’s, the organization places recording booths and facilitators...
Our organization and mission depends on donations, admissions, education program fees and event sales to operate. Our closure will have a significant impact on our operating budget and your support is needed now more than ever.
Our effort to reveal stories of freedom’s heroes and to challenge and inspire everyone to take courageous steps of freedom today has not been diminished and our light of freedom will shine brighter than ever. Rest assured that, with your contributions during this time,...
New light will be shed on one of the most controversial periods of Vatican history on Monday when the archives on Pope Pius XII – accused by critics of being a Nazi sympathiser – are unsealed.
A year after Pope Francis announced the move, saying “the church isn’t afraid of history”, the documents from Pius XII’s papacy, which began in 1939 on the brink of the second world war and ended in 1958, will be opened, initially to a small number of scholars.
Critics of Pius XII have accused him of...
In August 1992, in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo, nearly 2 million books went up in flames.
Fragile, 500-hundred-year-old pamphlets and vibrant Ottoman-era manuscripts disintegrated into ash as the building holding them, the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was shelled and burned. It was not the first act of cultural destruction by Serbian forces against other ethnic groups in the Balkans, and it certainly wasn’t the last: Over the next seven years, Serb nationalists led by dictator...
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) has accelerated the launch of a new online feature in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, inviting people to share their human rights stories by video.
Initially envisioned as a way to collect personal stories about contemporary human rights issues,“Share Your Story” now creates an opportunity for people to connect and relay their experiences during the pandemic. Participants aged 18 and over are invited to record and upload short videos (up to two...
The site sits hundreds of miles from any major city. There are no statues to admire, no gift shops to buy postcards, and no cheery activities for the kids. To get there, one must drive through hours of farm and dirt roads amid potholes and sometimes ice patches in winter littering the journey like land mines.
And when you arrive at the Sand Creek Massacre site, you’ll find open plains and a few markers. The rest is up to you.
This quiet piece of land tucked away in rural southeastern Colorado...
In 1995, when the Willard Psychiatric Center, located in the Finger Lakes region of N.Y., closed its doors, an incredible discovery was made in the attic: hundreds of suitcases, untouched for decades, filled with the most important belongings of their former owners.
These suitcases tell the stories of the lives that were left behind when patients entered the center, many of whom never left. They tell of dreams and aspirations. Of futures unfulfilled. Of incredible accomplishments. Of love...
Created in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020, the Archival Workers Emergency Fund was established to provide financial assistance for archival workers experiencing acute, unanticipated financial hardship due to the crisis.
The number of recipients and award amounts will be determined by the SAA Foundation AWEF Grant Review Committee in collaboration with the SAA Foundation Board of Directors based on need and available funds. During the initial period (April 15 to December 31,...
In case you missed our second Rights & Records webinar last month, you can view the recording on SAA's PathLMS platform here.
For human rights defenders, witnesses, and those caught in between some of history’s most violent and difficult moments, video footage functions as a mechanism for seeking justice, accountability, and hopefully, one day, peace. Join WITNESS (a global organization that helps people use video and technology to protect and defend human rights) as representatives share...
Sites of Conscience is hosting a series of free webinars in response to the COVID-19 pandemic on a range of social, political and cultural heritage topics including memorializing the pandemic, civil liberties, and refugee communities. There are upcoming webinars in May and June, and you can view previous webinars from earlier this month.
Read more and register here.
