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30 stories tagged ‘Civil Rights’
The Rev. Jonathan Walton, Harvard’s Pusey Minister of Memorial Church and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, galvanized Boston’s 43rd annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Breakfast with a keynote speech that contrasted the present-day ”sanitized and sterilized” version of the civil rights leader’s dream for America with the real message of economic inclusiveness that he left behind
Historian Diane McWhorter, a Harvard fellow, finds a surprising nexus between the racial segregation of Birmingham, Ala., in the early 1960s and some of the attitudes of the Third Reich.
Ethics and genetics in the digital age
Two panel discussions, organized by the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, examined the “promise and perils” of creating digital repositories of genetic records and considered the policy implications of an individual’s right to access, control, and interpret his or her own genetic data.
When the Berlin Wall fell, student Mary Lewis knew she should study the past. Now a professor, she is an authority on how France evolved.
Slavery in the North, and more
Du Bois Institute hosts a book party celebrating former and current fellows’ recent publications, including a title that examines little-known slavery in the North.
The Civil Rights Movement spurred Harvard President Drew Faust to youthful activism and influenced her choice to become a historian of the American South, Faust told the Harvard Business School’s first-year class, urging students to keep their desire to make a difference at the forefront of their minds.
Rebels to some, achievers to others
For two lecturers, the achievements of American radicals have been too long ignored. They argue that a reappraisal is due.
Movie night at the Schlesinger Library uses lesser-known films to cast a cinematic light on women’s issues.
Radcliffe Fellow and artist Leslie Hewitt brings “the undeniable physical presence of objects’’ to photography.
Eight receive W.E.B. Du Bois Medals for aiding African-American culture, including Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Hugh M. “Brother Blue” Hill, Vernon Jordan, Daniel and Joanna S. Rose, Shirley M. Tilghman, Bob Herbert, and Frank H. Pearl.
New research from Harvard University traces the history of how human resource managers, not legislatures or courts, have defined equal opportunity and anti-discrimination policies in the workplace.
Locke: More enlightened than we thought
English political philosopher John Locke died nearly a century before the American Revolution, and in his time parliamentary democracy was in its infancy. But his Enlightenment ideas — including the right to life, liberty, and property — went on to inspire American revolutionaries.
Radcliffe Fellow tells tale of first woman to play professional baseball
In 1991 the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., paid homage to players from the Negro Leagues, an artifact of segregated America that had faded away three decades earlier.
Going South for service and civil rights
Experience the stirring sights and plangent sounds of a singular Spring Break, during which Harvard students worked to renovate Katrina-ravaged houses, tutored children in afterschool programs, and met — and sang with — pioneers of the Civil Rights Movement, like Hollis Watkins (harmonizing, above from left with students Diane Ghogomu '10 and Sumorwuo Zaza '11).
Harvard conference on gender and law looks at past, present, future
It was a homecoming of sorts when Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, spoke at a conference on gender and the law today (March 12) at a conference at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Beauvoir as intellectual, politico, sexual theorist
Simone de Beauvoir would likely have had a lot to say at a slightly belated 100th anniversary of her birth on Feb. 20 at the Barker Center as a collection of great minds gathered to discuss her great ideas.
Civil rights legend recognized for years of service
At times, the best way to truly honor those who have selflessly and tirelessly served is with a simple “thank you.”
Panel of experts addresses Lincoln’s legacy
On Monday (Feb. 9), a team of experts assembled at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (HKS) to examine the history and profound impact of the tall, awkward, self-taught man from rural Kentucky who is credited with bringing about an end to slavery and saving the nation’s cherished founding principle of democratic rule.
Du Bois Institute gives Houghton Library Masonic certificate
The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University recently gave a Masonic membership certificate signed by Prince Hall, a minister, abolitionist, and civil rights activist known as the father of Black Freemasonry in the United States, to Houghton Library.
‘Nation-shaking’ racial, ethnic changes
Real earthquakes are slow to build and fast to erupt. Other, metaphorical, quakes, can follow the same pattern — and be just as earthshaking.
At GSD, UPenn’s Thomas Sugrue talks about ‘civil rights and the metropolis’
For the first time in a generation, urban policy is back on the national agenda. Advocates for the nation’s cities have been thrilled by the announcement that the Obama administration will include a White House Office of Urban Policy.
Self discusses gender, feminism, privacy
Brown University cultural historian Robert O. Self — a Radcliffe Fellow this year — made a name for himself with his book “American Babylon” (Princeton University Press, 2003). He was the first scholar to connect the civil rights struggle with postwar white flight to the suburbs, and the tax incentives that made suburbanization possible.
African American National Biography launched
From Aaron, a former slave without a last name, through Paul Burgess Zuber, a 20th century lawyer and professor, the recently published African American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2008) is the most extensive and inclusive collection of biographical information about African American lives ever published. The African American National Biography (AANB), co-edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Higginbotham, is an eight-volume series that includes biographies of more than 4,000 African Americans throughout 500 years, dating back to the arrival of Esteban, the first recorded African explorer to set foot in North America.
The first civil rights movement
Most of us think of the Civil Rights movement as something that took place in the transitional 1950s and the tumultuous 1960s. It’s seen as a cultural artifact squeezed between the defiance of Rosa Parks (1955) and the demise of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968).
Exploring tangled legacy of slavery
Certain adages exist about historical repetition: those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, for example, or history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. Walter Johnson doesn’t necessary believe in these old chestnuts, but he does see how the past and the present can illuminate one another in order to provide each greater context, urgency, and understanding.
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