Our Canada, My Story welcomes you to make a connection with different people across the country. Meet Ali, Widia, Kevin, Sylvia, Thomas, Shawn and Mona as they share their experiences with human rights through short films. These stories explore what it means to work towards equality, inclusion and dignity for all Canadians.
Read more about this exhibition here. Another ongoing exhibition at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is A Perilous Crossing, which focuses on refugees.
The Human Rights Center— winner of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions—conducts research and investigations on war crimes and human rights violations. Using evidence-based methods and innovative technologies, we support efforts to hold perpetrators accountable and to protect vulnerable populations. We also train students and advocates to document human rights violations and turn this information into effective action.
Read the 2016/2017 Report here.
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 April newsletter, please send you submission April 20, 2017.
On March 16, 2017, President Trump sent an outline of his proposed FY 2018 budget to Congress, to be followed by a more detailed proposal in the spring. The budget, known as “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again,” proposes a $54 billion increase in defense and public safety spending that is offset by equivalent cuts in discretionary non-defense programs. Included in those cuts are reductions in, or the total elimination of, funding for federal agencies with a history...
War crimes files revealing early evidence of Holocaust death camps that was smuggled out of eastern Europe are among tens of thousands of files to be made public for the first time this week.The once-inaccessible archive of the UN war crimes commission, dating back to 1943, is being opened by the Wiener Library in London with a catalogue that can be searched online.Read the full article here.
[T]his article describes the joint effort of community organizers and professional archivists who collaborated to establish a community archive for victims of police violence in Cleveland, Ohio. The archive, A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, provides a sustainable, autonomous means for Cleveland residents to share their first-hand accounts of police violence in the region. The authors will narrate the archive’s conception and development as well as advance the archive as a...
Produced in 1970 as a collaboration between Newsreel filmmakers and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Finally Got the News paints a picture of race, class, and labor issues in Detroit while exemplifying the ways cinema at the time was used by filmmakers as a means for liberation and a tool for worker struggles.This film screening accompanies Interference Archive’s public exhibition of the same name, which reflects on print publications from across the radical left in the 1970s. We will...
Canadians call it the most important symbol of national identity –above the maple-leaf flag or even hockey. And today it turns 35 years old. All this week, visitors to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights (CMHR) can receive their own copy of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in English, French, Ojibway, Oji-Cree, Central Cree, Inuktitut, Mi’kmaq or one of 24 other languages.The anniversary celebration of this watershed human rights legislation begins today and runs through Sunday,...
As many of your know, I'm the editor of the Human Rights Archives Section Blog. I'm currently looking for writers to cover conference presentations relevant to human rights. A big thank you to the writers who have already come forward!
If you happen to be attending one of the following conferences and would be interested in summarizing a session, please drop me an email at hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. As an example, I covered a session at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference last year...
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 April newsletter, please send you submission May 24, 2017.
The steering committee has completed the revisions for the Human Rights Archives Section Standing Rules, formerly known as by-laws. The attached document shows the changes that have been made including the new required language approved by the Council. There will be a referendum on the election ballot in June.
The latest post over at the HRA Section blog summarizes a presentation by three archivists at the Archives Association of Ontario conference. They related how archivists in the province are responding to calls by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada to improve access to records about residential schools specifically and records related to Indigenous communities more broadly.
Read the post here.
To kick off LGBT Pride Month, the Schomburg Center is proud to present the third annual First Fridays: LGBT Pride social gathering, in honor of our In the Life Archive, a collection of materials of and by black LGBT people throughout history preserved in our Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division. Complementing the party will be a special pop-up exhibit culled from our collections highlighting the life and work of LGBT activist Storme DeLarverie, who's credited as having thrown the...
The National Security Archive’s Chiquita Papers collection represents key evidence behind a “communication” calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate officials from Chiquita Brands International for facilitating crimes against humanity committed by armed groups the company paid in Colombia.
The Archive provided more than 48,000 pages of internal Chiquita records to the ICC as part of the communication, including financial records, legal memoranda, handwritten notes, and...
Up to one and a half million Armenians were killed. Turkey has always rejected the term genocide, saying the violence against Armenians was part of widespread conflict in the region. Taner Akcam has spent his career documenting the targeted killing of Armenian Turks at the start of World War I. He's a Turkish historian at Clark University. And he recently found a document that he calls the smoking gun.
Listen to the interview here.
Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, the independent U.S. national organization among Anne Frank organizations worldwide, has obtained commitments from 26 state legislators across 20 states, including Republicans and Democrats, to introduce legislation that would require education in public schools on the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and other genocides.Those 20 states are among the shocking 42 U.S. states that do not already require education on genocide awareness and prevention. The 20...
Archives can connect to activism and activist movements in a number of ways, however this connection often falls into two main categories: 1) Archival material being used as evidence in activism campaigns and 2) Archives disrupting social norms by collecting and archiving the work of those outside of mainstream society.
The act of preserving the voices of oppressed groups, marginalized communities, and social movements can be a form of activism. For example, the community driven archival...
If you happen to be attending SAA and would be interested in summarizing a session, please drop me an email at hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. As an example, I covered a session at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference last year for the Issues & Advocacy blog. It can be a simple summary of the issues discussed, or you can get a little opinionated and say what you thought was most productive about the session or not as productive.
Here is one session I would like to have covered: ...
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 June newsletter, please send you submission June 23, 2017.
In the latest post at the HRA Section blog, Bailey E. Hoffner covers a session at the Society of Southwest Archivists conference about disability records. Disability rights are an often overlooked aspect of human rights and I'm thrilled to publish this post highlighting the Texas Disability Rights Collection at the University of Texas Arlington. Bailey also covers some basics of disability sensitivity training.
Read the post here.
If you'll be in Portland, mark you calendars! The Human Rights Archives Section meeting will be on July 27 from 2 to 3:15 pm. Sign in and save the meeting to your schedule. We'll see you there!
Democracy Now! recently reported that there might be an effort to bury or even destroy full, non-censored, confidential copies of the notorious 2014 torture report. Some of you may remember that a shorter, redacted version was released to the public, but the longer original has never been released.
I think this could be a great subject for a post on the Human Rights Archives Section blog. I'd like to see a post explore the retention schedule for a document like the torture report that goes...
More than 40 photographs taken by Willman are now on exhibit in Mandela: The Journey to Ubuntu at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. It takes visitors on a journey through Mandela’s life and South Africa’s route to racial equality. Willman came to Cincinnati for the exhibit’s recent installation.
The photographic journey begins in Mandela’s birthplace in the village of Mvezo and follows him to the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria, where Mandela and other anti-apartheid...
The State Department released a long-awaited “retrospective” volume of declassified U.S. government documents on the 1953 coup in Iran. The volume includes fascinating details on Iranian, American and British planning and implementation of the covert operation, as well as information about U.S. contacts with key figures such as Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, and insights into U.S. concerns about the growing influence of the communist Tudeh Party.
The publication is the culmination of decades...
These award-winning images are among 70 photographs chosen from almost 1,000 submissions received from across Canada for an exhibition featuring widely diverse expressions of human rights issues. Points of View opened June 23 at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) and runs until February 4, 2018. It includes 3D tactile versions of the five award-winning photographs, enabling visitors who are blind to “see” the art through their fingertips. Each photo in the exhibition is accompanied by...
