Daily Archives: March 16, 2021

Saturday, March 20 at 11:30 am

Posted: Mar 9, 2021 / 04:55 PM EST / Updated: Mar 9, 2021 / 04:55 PM EST

Shaping the Future: The Underground Railroad, Abolition and Women in Central New York

ONEIDA COUNTY, N.Y. (WUTR/WFXV/WPNY-TV) Women in Oneida County played an active, but often untold, part in the Abolition movement and theUnderground Railroad. On Saturday, March 20 at 11:30 am, the Oneida County History Center will host Mary Hayes Gordon who will speak about Women & the Underground Railroad in Oneida County. This program will be offered virtually via Zoom.

Organized abolitionism began in Oneida County in the early 1830s. Local activists were inspired by the words and examples of Beriah Green and his students at the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, the first school in the country at which black men were just as welcome as whites. By 1835 there were 17 anti-slave societies throughout Oneida County and numerous Underground Railroad stations as well.

This is an important chapter in the nations history. Black and white men and women involved with the Underground Railroad did so at their peril, for federal law could punish anyone who assisted an escaped slave. But in both the rural and urban areas of Oneida County, people and communities sheltered fugitives, and encouraged some of them to settle in the area.

Mary Hayes Gordon is co-chair of the Oneida County Freedom Trail Commission, which researches and documents Underground Railroad and Abolition activity in the region. Her interest in this subject developed when she documented the history of her home in New Hartford, which was a station on the Underground Railroad. She is currently working on a county-wide study, led by Dr. Judith Wellman in conjunction with Fort Stanwix, for the National Park Service. She and co-chair Jan DeAmicis give guided tours of Underground Railroad and Abolition sites in Utica, which they have also developed into a self-guided walking tour. Hayes Gordon presents the history of the everyday people who did the work to change our world.

This online program takes place on Saturday, March 20, 2021 starting at 11:30 am. The event is free and open to all. Advanced registration is required and can be completed at https://www.oneidacountyhistory.org/programs.html. Registrants will receive a link and instruction on how to join this online event after registration is complete.

The Oneida County History Center is a private 501(c) (3) not-for-profit educational institution dedicated to preserving the history, heritage, and culture of the Greater Mohawk Valley for present and future generations. Admission to this program is free for the general public; donations are encouraged. Please contact the History Center at 315-735-3642 or visit the OCHC website (www.oneidacountyhistory.org) for additional information.

Registration Link: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcvcOiprTMoGNIcAvdnBQxMBAnjmKnuJHYm

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Oneida County History Center Virtual Learning Event on The Underground Railroad, Abolition and Women in Central New York - WUTR/WFXV - CNYhomepage.com

Stressing on the importance of credibility in political life, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said that every word a leader spoke carried a weight and it was his responsibility to fulfill that promise because this gave credibility to the person and the party to which he belonged.

"Bharatiya Janata Party has emerged as a people's party because it has credibility. In our earlier election manifestos we used to talk about abolition of Article 370. People used to chide us when the BJP government will abolish this Article. When we got an opportunity we repealed Article 370 and brought Jammu and Kashmir at par with other states of the country," Singh said while inaugurating the one-day BJP state working committee meeting here on Monday.

Singh said, "The BJP had always talked about the ills of the triple talaq system and we abolished it. Similarly, we promised construction of Ram temple at Ayodhya and Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation of the temple last year. It is a coincidence that when the (Babri) Mosque was demolished BJP was in power and when construction of the temple started, BJP again was in power in Uttar Pradesh," he said.

"People now know that what the BJP says, it fulfills its promise. This is the credibility which the party has earned in the last many decades of hard work and now responsibility is on the young party leaders to carry that mantle forward," he said.

In his over an hour long speech, Rajnath Singh talked about the importance of being a BJP worker.

"The BJP is different from other parties as in BJP hard work is always appreciated. It is the only party in which the stature of a leader is not because of the post he/she is holding but because of the hard work he/she has put in. The BJP increased its base through Ram Janmabhoomi agitation and since then it is growing in stature and volume," said Singh, who is also the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.

He said the BJP was the only party which had an ideology. He said this ideology had prevented divisions in the party while other political parties had seen divisions one after another.

Elaborating on this ideology, Singh said that serving humanity formed the core of BJP's ideology and its manifestation was witnessed during COVID-19 pandemic when both the Central and the state governments joined hands to provide relief to the poor. "Free food grains were distributed so that no one had to sleep empty stomach," he pointed out.

"Our scientists did wonder when they manufactured vaccines to fight the novel coronavirus. Now, we are supplying vaccines to 70 countries. India has been globally appreciated for its role in providing Covid vaccines to the world. Even US President Joe Biden appreciated India in a recent Quad meeting," he said and added that when India was giving vaccines to other countries at a price, the countrymen were getting it free.

Singh said the BJP government had worked hard to eradicate corruption and had introduced cleanliness in public life.

"The Swachhata Abhiyan has even been lauded by the WHO (World Health Organisation) by saying that the health scenario has changed in India because of the cleanliness drive undertaken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi," Singh said.

Singh also hailed the Yogi Adityanath government, saying there was tremendous improvement in the law and order situation while the unemployment figures had come down from 17.5 per cent to 4.5 per cent.

BJP State President Swatantra Dev Singh also spoke on this occasion.

Earlier, the one-day BJP state working committee meeting was inaugurated by Rajnath Singh along with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath by lighting the traditional lamp.

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Rajnath stresses on credibility in political life - Daily Pioneer

Theoretical physics is supposed to be about pure, crisp ideas. But physics is done by humans, and human society brings messiness to any endeavor.

That reality means that every aspect of physics is marked by the social constraints of who is allowed to do physics in harmony with their identity and who is not. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist at the University of New Hampshire, tackles the implications of that reality in her new book, "The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred" (Bold Type Books, 2021). (Read an excerpt from "The Disordered Cosmos.")

Space.com sat down with Prescod-Weinstein to discuss her new book, the state of physics and how to dream up a better world. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Related: Best space and sci-fi books for 2021

Space.com: Could talk a bit about your research on axions as a dark matter candidate?

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: The axion is a hypothetical particle that actually was first theorized to solve a problem in the standard model that has nothing to do with dark matter. And it was realized soon after people started playing with this idea that it could also solve the dark matter problem, potentially.

When I started working on the axion, it was taken seriously as a dark matter candidate, but really, I feel like most of the people who were working on it from a theoretical point of view, at the point in time that I started with were in Europe.

It's interesting to see how the axion has evolved socially over the last seven years. After the announcement by the Large Hadron Collider that there was no evidence for supersymmetry, a lot of people who had been thinking about supersymmetry started looking around for what other viable dark matter candidates there were that dreams of finding it hadn't yet been crushed, and so a lot of people turned to the axion. So now it's like this really hot, happening field.

Space.com: Can you talk a bit about how the book came to be and what you wanted to pull into it?

Prescod-Weinstein: I had been writing a lot online [my agent] said, "You already have this body of work that certain audiences aren't seeing. Let's get it to a different audience." The original idea was that it would be an essay collection, and clearly the book became more than that and developed a throughline that kind of evolved as I wrote it.

I think I'm naturally a holistic thinker who likes to draw connections between the things that interest me. For me, it's a very natural thing that I started thinking about, like, how is this chapter connected to this one? I really started to think, there are clear themes here and those themes are readily organizable. That was how the four phases came about, is that I realized that they were really reflecting these different ways of looking at physics and the doing of physics.

What I think of the book as, it's a holistic look at the doing of physics. It's kind of like taking physics and rotating it and looking at where the symmetries are, but also where the asymmetries are.

Space.com: There's this beautiful phrase you write, "I wanted to be normal, but I felt I had to be extraordinary." Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Prescod-Weinstein: The book remains an essay collection of personal essays, that I would strongly argue, at the end of the day, aren't memoir, but certainly use my story as a springing point for exploring ideas about how science should be done and how science is currently done. We have this saying in the Black community that you have to be 200%, because people are going to assume that because you're Black, that you're less competent that you're just gonna have to work 200% harder to get half as far.

I think that's something that we're all taught as kids, and we're not taught that because people are trying to abuse us or anything like that. Our families are trying to prepare us for a world that doesn't accept us as human in the same way.

If we're thinking about things that motivate me, I want Black children to have childhood. And you can't have a childhood in the same way white children have childhood if at the very beginning you're having to say to your kids, like, "Look, I know at schools they're telling you that the police are there to protect you, but they're not," if you're already having to do this kind of like double thinking.

Related: NASA astronaut Victor Glover explains why sometimes we can't just stick to space

And so there is an element of like, I just want to be and not have to spend a lot of time fighting to make space for myself, fighting to make space for others, I want other people to just be able to be so I don't have to fight for them, they don't have to fight for themselves. So that's definitely one element.

Queerness and queer theory is like, a huge throughline in the book. Because so much of what queer theory teaches us is that we're always going to be on the edge of normal, pushing what that even means. Blackness can be framed as a queer way of being, and my experience as a queer person can inform how I am negotiating the world as a Black person.

I want everybody to be able to push those boundaries in a way that is safe and uplifting and nourishing, rather than in a way that feels like you're allowing yourself to get stabbed over and over again and you're just saying yourself, it's just a flesh wound. And you know, to be able to make Monty Python references and be like, "Yes, I also like Monty Python."

Space.com: And that's actually a great segue to my next question, which was going to be what was the most joyful part of the book for you to write?

Prescod-Weinstein: I had a lot of fun hiding the Dear Mama part from my mom. [The afterword of the book is addressed directly to her mother, Margaret Prescod.] My mom didn't know about that until October, when I had like a week before the copyedits had to be returned. I sent it to my mom and I was like, "You have a week to tell me if you have a problem with us before nothing can be done about it."

I was really excited to surprise my mom with that. It was fun, having this secret from my mom. I really felt like she put so much of herself into making me and therefore the book possible that I wanted to make sure that part of the book turned around, and said, "You are in this." And it was fun and exciting to be able to do that for my mom.

Space.com: In the final chapter, you write about your vision of physics and on building a physics that's grounded in Black feminism. For you, what are the principles that would make up that vision?

Prescod-Weinstein: I think what I do toward the end of the book is signposting, rather than definitive statements like, "This is how it's gotta be." Because my hope is that it starts a conversation where we start articulating, as members of a community together, how do we have this conversation with each other?

I think we have much to learn from queer theory and from some of the discussions that trans theorists have been having about what does liberation look like as a trans person? There are lots of different ways to be trans in the world, there are lots of different ways to relate to gender or lack thereof in the world. So I definitely think that part of it has to be unpacking how we saddle ourselves with the burden of having to fit into slots. Another signpost there is mutual aid. Prison abolition, I think, is tied up in pretty much everything that I talked about. I don't spend a lot of time talking about prison abolition, but for me, it's an undercurrent.

Something that my mom said to me many times when I was growing up, she's a women's and caretakers' rights campaigner, is that when money went into the hands of women and I think now she would say caretakers when money and resources go into the hands of caretakers in the community, the entire community benefits. So one very clear theme there is that we put resources into the hands of the people who do caretaking, and then we allow them to do the kind of caretaking that involves saying, like, have you looked at the sky, and thought about your place in the universe? We allow people to have that kind of room to have that care for each other, for themselves?

We can talk about diversity in science until we're blue in the face. But until we're talking about the conditions that we live in, we're not really having a real conversation about how we make change happen.

Related: 16 amazing dark sky preserves around the world that protect the night sky

Space.com: That makes me think of that phrase that comes up so often, "Space is for everyone."

Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. I love the idea that space is for everyone.

I think the International Dark-Sky Association is actually one of the most important scientific organizations out there, because they're really attending to what is our ecosystem in relation to the night sky? That is an astronomy question, it's an ecological question, it's a sociological question.

But I think that we have to take that seriously. It's great if a park gets designated as a dark sky park and I'm so glad that there's an organization that's working with national parks and with cities to address light pollution. But then the question I still have, is how do we get people to those national parks? How does everyone get to Joshua Tree in a way that's sustainable for Joshua Tree and for the actual Joshua trees but is also nourishing for us, spiritually, not in a supernatural sense, but in like the very human spiritual sense.

Space.com: That story in the book is so lovely. What do you give a little bit of a sort of teaser version of it?

Prescod-Weinstein: One of the stories that I tell in the book is my mom driving me to Joshua Tree to see I think it was Comet Hyakutake. To this day, I still have questions about how my mom paid for the gas to do that. That's not a simple expedition from Los Angeles.

It was one of my first times seeing a proper night sky. It was one of my first hints that there was something wildly different about growing up in Los Angeles and growing up somewhere that didn't have the problems of pollution that we have in Los Angeles.

Space.com: Could you talk a little bit about the op-ed in Scientific American that you recently co-authored about James Webb and why naming a telescope for him is problematic, and then talk a bit about Harriet Tubman and her role in how you think about space?

Prescod-Weinstein: The op-ed is about what is called the next-generation Hubble Space Telescope, set to launch later this year. It's named after James Webb, who was a State Department official in the late 1940s and early '50s who played a very big role in the development of psychological warfare as a Cold War tool and then in the 1960s. And it is clear from historical records that he, like many of his contemporaries and pretty much everyone who was working in the presidential administrations of the time, was involved in the development of anti-LGBT policy that would eventually become hardwired government policy under Eisenhower.

Under Kennedy, he became NASA administrator, so he's remembered in the astro community for his contribution to leading NASA through the Apollo program, etc. So he was not a scientist, nonetheless, the telescope is named after him. We essentially say in this op-ed that there's no reason the telescope should be named after someone whose legacy is, at best, complicated.

Let's let looking at the sky be part of our future, and what that guy stood for just be part of our past.

We propose at the end that rather than naming the telescope after someone like him, why not Harriet Tubman? There's an autobiography of Harriet Tubman she couldn't read or write, so we're relying on maybe unreliable third parties where she talks about using the North Star to escape to freedom. We know that there are other documented instances of people of her era using the North Star to run to freedom.

Harriet Tubman represents like everything that anyone has gotten right on this continent in the last 500 years. So why not literally put her up amongst the stars? I can't think of a more powerful use of astronomical information then using it to escape violent chattel slavery. If science does nothing else, that is what we should use scientific information for liberation. So I want to send that message up into the sky. Why not put her out there with the stars that represented freedom?

It's going to be an incredible telescope, it's going to give us such incredible information, and I just love the idea of Harriet Tubman being associated with it. I don't know what's going to happen with the name, I don't know if it's possible to change it, if we do change it whether they will pick Harriet Tubman.

Space.com: Science people don't always want to talk about the social side of science, and your book really tackles that head on. Could you give the pitch for reading your book to someone who is coming from that perspective of, "I just want to focus on the science"?

Prescod-Weinstein: I just want to focus on the science, too! At the end of the day, the book is about how do we get to the point of being able to just enjoy science?

I, too, would like life to be simple; it is not. Some of us have the freedom to be like, "I'm going to look away," and some of us don't have the freedom to look away. In some sense, this book exists because people make the choice to look away and do nothing when they could do something to make the world better.

You can buy "The Disordered Cosmos" on Amazon or Bookshop.org.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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In 'The Disordered Cosmos,' a physicist explores how physics and society intersect - Space.com

Did you know the Senate filibuster as it is currently comprised came to exist because of a sloppy mistake made by an iconic killer some 207 years ago?

Its true. A few months after putting Alexander Hamilton into the ground with a shot from a Wogdon & Barton dueling pistol, Aaron Burr decided the Senate rule book required revision. In a careless effort to remove what he thought was redundant language, writes David Litt for The Atlantic, he cut the previous question motion, which would have allowed a majority of lawmakers to end debate and force a vote on a bill.

Not until Woodrow Wilson raised a ruckus in 1917 were any changes made to Burrs calamitous alteration, and those changes proved to be marginal at best. The filibuster remains the same dangerous tool Burr blundered into existence more than two centuries ago.

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How perfectly American, that: A dodgy power move behind closed doors unleashes centuries of galling consequences. It puts one in mind of another perfectly American legal calamity from the same century. The granting of personhood rights to corporations in the 1886 Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Supreme Court decision only came to pass because of recklessly unethical behavior by some railroad lawyers, journalists and a justice.

Put them together and what do you get? Corporations with the same 14th Amendment rights as breathing humans able to buy senators who can filibuster to death any and all legislation vital to the people merely by saying, I object. Perfect.

That really is all there is to it these days. People think filibuster and Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington might come to mind. For me, its The Stackhouse Filibuster episode of The West Wing: A politician stands alone in the Senate, holding forth on the righteousness of their cause, or maybe reads aloud some recipes for dip. It doesnt matter, so long as they hold the floor, do not stop speaking, and do not sit down.

In 2013, Ted Cruz graced us with a faux filibuster against the Affordable Care Act which involved his very public failure to comprehend the moral behind Green Eggs & Ham. A more proper version of what people think the filibuster is came that same year from another Texas politician named Wendy Davis. Seeking to derail a ruinous abortion bill, Davis deployed a catheter and stood the gaff for 11 hours non-stop to shout the bill down. Though it went on to passage, the bill did not pass that day.

Another prime example of the practice came in 2010, when Bernie Sanders rose in opposition to a deal between then-Vice President Biden and then-Majority Leader McConnell to extend the massively damaging Bush-era tax cuts. You can call what I am doing today whatever you want. You can call it a filibuster. You can call it a very long speech, Sanders said that day. I am simply here today to take as long as I can to explain to the American people the fact that we have to do a lot better than this agreement provides. Sanders spoke for almost nine hours before yielding the floor, and his performance made him a politician of national standing.

That is the filibuster as I understand it from TV and movies, but the Senate aint TV and movies. In the Senate, all you have to do is notify the leadership of your party that you intend to filibuster a bill. When the moment arrives, you speak the magic words: I object.

If the bill is not being passed by way of reconciliation, as this most recent COVID relief bill was, everything stops. If there are not 60 votes for cloture to shut down the filibuster, thats the ballgame. Worse, the senator doing the filibuster does not even have to be in the room, much less be required to hold the floor. They can simply drop the buster, walk out the door, and grab a steak at the Capital Grille.

The filibuster gruesomely abused by senators laying siege to the civil rights movement for decades, then abused again to tie down virtually every piece of legislation offered by the Obama administration has come under intense scrutiny of late. Democratic President Joe Biden has a thin but very real Democratic majority to work with in the House and Senate, a gift from the great state of Georgia that could not be timelier in the aftermath of the Trump administration.

Beyond the vivid horror of an ongoing pandemic that has killed more than half a million people in this country alone, Biden is faced with an unprecedented avalanche of immediate crises. The ocean is coming, the right to vote is under national assault, cops are still regularly murdering people of color, people need jobs and our national infrastructure needs rebuilding, the crisis at the southern border will never end without a radically different immigration policy, and thats just the first page of a very long to-do-NOW list.

The filibuster as it currently exists cannot be allowed to stand if real progress in these great struggles is to be made. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his cohort of Trump hostages simply cannot be allowed to wield such unspeakable power from the minority, and a growing chorus of Senate voices is rising to agree.

The filibuster must go, said Sen. Ed Markey in January. Its something thats rooted in a racist past, and its used today as a way of blocking the progressive agenda which President Biden is proposing [including] environmental justice, racial justice, economic justice.

Americans should not be robbed of a living wage by archaic Senate rules and procedures including the filibuster, said Sen. Chris Van Hollen last month. We must increase the minimum wage, and Ill keep pushing until we get it done.

The sort of filibuster usage we see makes it impossible to do some very basic things that the American people demanded of us, said Sen. Martin Heinrich last week.

Im in favor of abolishing the filibuster, said Sen. Alex Padilla this past Sunday. There are a couple Democratic senators who have said they are not there yet. If we continue to see obstruction from our Republican colleagues as we saw through this COVID relief package, I think the patience is going to wear thin, even on moderate Democrats. But we will see.

We must pass a comprehensive agenda to guarantee the rights and dignity of everyone in this country, said Sen. Bernie Sanders in July. And that means, among other things, reauthorizing and expanding the Voting Rights Act, for which Congressman John Lewis put his life on the line. As President Obama said, if that requires us to eliminate the filibuster, then that is what we must do.

The fate of this effort lies squarely in the hands of two Joes: Manchin and Biden. The senator from West Virginia has sworn a mighty oath to keep the filibuster because, he says, it inspires bipartisanship. Im not going to change my mind on the filibuster, Manchin told Meet The Press on Sunday. I will change my mind if we need to go to a reconciliation to where we have to get something done, once I know they have process into it. But Im not going to go there until my Republican friends have the ability to have their say also. And Im hoping they will get involved to the point where we have 10 of them that will work with 50 of us.

And as for President Joe? His preference is not to make changes to the filibuster rules, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said of Bidens wishes on the matter. And he believes that with the current structure that he can work with Democrats and Republicans to get work and business done. Hes also happy to hear from Sen. Manchin and others who have ideas about how to get the business done for the American people.

Kinda makes you want to roll around in some broken glass for a while, doesnt it? Even now, after everything that has gone down, after the Republican Party has shown the world exactly what it really is more times than can be counted, even now, calcified Democrats like Manchin and Biden still cling to the long-departed dream of bipartisan glory.

They do so at their own expense. Absent filibuster reform or outright abolition, none of President Bidens priorities will see the light of day. Every Republican senator just voted against a bill that a massive majority of the country favors true bipartisanship among the people, that! and reconciliation was the only reason that bill survived the process. They cant do everything that way, and with the filibuster as easy as an I object to deploy, that relief bill may well be the only legislation that gets passed this year.

Worst of all, lawmakers nuzzle up to the departed fiction of possible bipartisanship at the deep expense of the people. Im so old, I remember when a mob of Republican voters sacked the Capitol and sought to murder the House speaker and vice president because they didnt like the outcome of an election. These are the voters McConnell and his ilk cleave to now, because they feel they have to in order to survive the ongoing influence of Trump. The ongoing, infuriating futility of these attempts to reach out to the unreachable must stop. Most Republicans are not going to compromise, not now and not ever. Progress requires they be defeated by simple majority vote, and eliminating the filibuster is the only way that can happen.

In the face of increasing pressure, Manchin threw out an interesting lifeline over the weekend. He will not support the elimination of the filibuster, but he could be convinced that it needs to be more painful to use. To wit: No more I object and out the door nonsense. If youre going to filibuster a bill, you have to do it the old-fashioned way. You have to want it, and you have to stay there and do it until youre done.

Manchins idea received some tepid support from colleagues. I think a common refrain that youve heard from so many members is: If theres going to be a filibuster it needs to actually be a filibuster that those who want to obstruct actually should make their case before the American people, said Sen. Jeff Merkley on Monday. They should have to spend the time and energy to show up and hold the floor.

Its a mildly fun idea, if only because it forces McConnells caucus to sing for its supper for a change. Manchins idea does not eliminate the 60-vote threshold created by a filibuster, however, and an already sludgy process would be slowed even further if everything had to stop for interminable speeches from intolerable people.

No, the filibuster must be destroyed if any good is going to come from this Congress. Can it happen? Can Manchin and his cohort be convinced to change that old, bloody error of a rule?

I feel like things change on a dime here, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Monday. And when we have several defeats of things that President Biden has promised and that we must deliver, like HR 1 voting rights, I think that that will move him. And were keeping up the pressure.

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Abolish the Filibuster... - Truthout

Ann Hurst took over The Wakefield and Halifax Journal following her husbands death in 1823.

Having worked at the heart of her community for years, Ann used her newspaper as a platform to call for radical change, issuing propaganda calling for the abolition of slavery and suffrage for women.

Anns work has been directly linked to the election of Daniel Gaskell, the citys first liberal MP, whose political platform included calling for the abolition of slavery and reform of the Church.

Backed by the Express, the grassroots project is seeking to tell the stories of the women who helped shape Wakefields past.

Anns blue plaque, which will be hung close to her former home on Westgate, is one of more than a dozen that the FWW team have secured.

Sarah Cobham, founder of Dream Time Creative, the company behind the project, said: Ann was known for being radical and liberal.

She wasnt frightened to lead by example and took people with her.

The whole idea of this was to elect Daniel Gaskell MP. She influenced the way the voters moved.

When I first set out on this I just wanted it to be normal for womens achievements to be known about, seen and heard.

And I feel as if we are very much getting that now.

With the help of funding from Wakefield Council, Historic England and Wakefield Civic Society, the FWW team have been able to lead a number of community projects, both before and during lockdown.

Their latest scheme, which involved working with local community groups, saw the creation of dozens of peg doll figurines for an exhibition at Wakefield Library.

It will stay in place, visible from the Burton Street windows, until April 12.

The rest is here:

'Visionary' Wakefield editor Ann Hurst who campaigned for women's rights and abolition of slavery honoured with blue plaque - Wakefield Express