https://youtu.be/czGijmoy_S4 In this week’s episode of Eyes on Events, we interviewed Dr Marie Molloy (Manchester Metropolitan University) and the award-winning creative producer, historian, and theatre-maker Pamela Roberts about an outreach screening of the play ‘An Evening With Mrs Terrell and Friends.’ Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was a celebrated Black women… Continue reading
This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies Visiting People’s Park in Berkeley, California, for the first time, as I did in September of last year, is a visually arresting experience. As I walked through the park’s entrance on Dwight Way, just south… Continue reading
In this dual biography, Sarah Haviland traces the political and intellectual career of activist couple James and Esther Cooper Jackson. Utilising a combination of personally-conducted oral history interviews and archival material, she argues that an analysis of the couple demonstrates that communist-affiliated activists of the 1930s Popular Front era were able to adapt their activism and influence the trajectory of the modern civil rights movement that emerged in the 1960s. Continue reading
Soldiers returning from the battlefields of World War II were treated as heroes and their sacrifice was celebrated long after their homecoming. By contrast, Vietnam veterans were not similarly welcomed home as champions of democracy. Indeed, some veterans felt there was not any honour in their participation in Vietnam. In 1967, a small group of likeminded veterans – simultaneously upset about the treatment of Vietnam veterans when they returned home and the particularly violent nature of the war – founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Continue reading
A 1971 Army study suggests that over 50% of active duty soldiers engaged in some form of dissent during their service. Rejecting popular Cold War patriotic mythology, these activist soldiers deemed the military an authoritarian institution and a tool of oppression wrought by an imperialistic America. In doing so, they challenged the official Cold War depiction of the United States as the protector of global democratic ideals against an evil, totalitarian communist ideology. Continue reading