history

Videos for finding some hope 2

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged history hope video YouTube on by

Bad news gets more attention than good news, and the year 2025 has seen a lot of it. We need to know about things that could hurt us, but we also need hope. Without it, we don’t have the motivation to stop the harmful things. By way of offering a little hope, I’ve put together a YouTube playlist titled “Hope”, with a dozen videos that can offer encouragement. The research for the list proved my point; it was hard to find videos that fit the theme. I wanted ones that presented a real positive, not just the negation of a negative. Winning World War II or killing Bin Laden wouldn’t fit, even if the world is better off for those things happening. The topics of the videos I picked are:

  • The Bill of Rights
  • Fall of the Berlin Wall
  • William Lloyd Garrison
  • Abolition of Ireland’s blasphemy law
  • Penicillin
  • Rediscovery of lost films
  • Averting World War III
  • Sears Catalog vs. Jim Crow
  • Nichelle Nichols and Martin Luther King
  • Rhode Island and religious freedom
  • Limiting the English monarchy
  • World War I Christmas truce

Enjoy them!

Bothsidesism now   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged history liberty on by

In a world dominated by political tribalism, you’re expected to condemn things the other group does while excusing your group for doing the same thing. If you apply the same standards to both, you’re mocked for “bothsidesism.” Hypocrisy is an obligation.

Many of the things which Trump has done have precedents in previous administrations; he’s just carried them to their outer limits. Democratic and Republican presidents alike have conducted wars not declared by Congress. After a mysterious meeting in the Biden White House, Amazon put some books on the “Do Not Promote” list. The ACLU actively supported Biden’s attempt to write off student loans, which would have been a federal expenditure by executive decree.
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Abolitionism tour: Boston, Cambridge, and Portsmouth

This entry was posted in History Personal and tagged abolitionism history Massachusetts on by

Sometimes I overdo things. When I visited Boston on Wednesday for the next part of my abolitionism tour, I walked to exhaustion and had to skip one destination. It was worth the effort anyway. Here’s the start of a Flickr album for the tour, which is incomplete as I’m writing this.

The first post about the tour is here.
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An abolitionism tour?

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged abolitionism history Massachusetts New Hampshire on by

After my enjoyable tour of the libraries of Rockingham county, I started thinking about doing something similar to follow it. My first thought was sites relating to American independence; there are plenty of them in my area. Then an idea that’s more off the beaten track came to me: a tour of abolitionist sites. William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport and conducted much of his activity in Boston. John Greenleaf Whittier was from Haverhill, just across the border from me. Frederick Douglass moved to New Bedford after escaping slavery, and today I’ve learned how much other anti-slavery activity was based in New Bedford. (Sign up with Captain Ahab, and you’ll be out of the slave-catchers’ reach!) Also today (that is, Sept. 11, when I’m writing this), I found out the MBTA has renamed a ferry after Frederick Douglass. It isn’t obvious how to tell where the boat will be at any time, but it’s at least worth knowing.
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Don’t call it “Alligator Auschwitz” 1

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged history language liberty on by

The new ICE confinement facility in Florida, semi-officially called “Alligator Alcatraz,” is by all accounts brutal, unsanitary, and degrading. It’s a showpiece of the Trump administration, whose followers admire it for its sheer viciousness. Some people, including plenty on Bluesky, have taken to calling it “Alligator Auschwitz.” The term trivializes the Nazi extermination camp. Bad as the Florida facility is, it isn’t designed to kill people systematically. Equating the two implies that Jews in the Nazi camps merely had a very rough time of it.

Alligator Alcatraz is a concentration camp, a place where many civilians are involuntarily moved to and confined in without charges or due process. The Japanese-American internment camps of World War II were concentration camps in the same sense, and I’ve used the term repeatedly for them. But it isn’t a death camp. Trump is evil, but he hasn’t reached that level of evil yet.
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Evaluating Charles Chaplin

This entry was posted in History and tagged history liberty movies on by

Charles Chaplin was a complicated person, formerly accused for being a Communist. (I use “Charles” rather than “Charlie” because this article focuses on the man rather than his movie persona.) These accusations had no merit, but the Wikipedia article on Chaplin echoes some of the charges against him. It claims that “he feared that capitalism and machinery in the workplace would increase unemployment levels” and that this view influenced his film Modern Times. It asserts that his late film Monsieur Verdoux presented views “criticising capitalism and arguing that the world encourages mass killing through wars and weapons of mass destruction.” (Wikipedia articles regularly change, so you might see something different at a future date.)
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Coming to Plaistow July 22: The General

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged history music silent movies on by

It’s just two weeks till my next live silent movie show at the Plaistow Library: The General, made by and starring Buster Keaton. I know most of you aren’t local, but if you can spread the word among silent movie fans, it will help. This is the first time I’ll be presenting an evening show, and getting eight sign-ups so early is encouraging.
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Yearning to Breathe Free

This entry was posted in History Music and tagged history immigration music YouTube on by

In my latest YouTube video, Yearning to Breathe Free, I try something new. Rather than accompanying an existing silent film, I’ve created a ten-minute history of immigration to the US in still images and added my improvised accompaniment. It’s been a learning experience in a lot of ways. First was the selection of images to combine into a coherent story. It consists of several sequences, each covering a different historical period from 1607 to the present. The first version didn’t make the structure nearly clear enough. Thanks to Virginia Taylor for catching this problem. I thought about inserting a summary before each segment and adding captions and ended up doing both. Then there was the timing. Before adding the music, the pacing felt slow, yet some images hold a lot of text, and test viewers didn’t always spot the important parts in time. I lengthened the time for some images and drew visual attention to the important text in one image.
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