Category Archives: History

Few people in the U.S. know much Asian American history beyond Chinese migrants building railroads and Japanese American detention during WWII. Advocates hope attention to an 1898 Supreme Court ruling changes that.

Why it matters: The Wong Kim Ark case affirmed that American-born people of Asian descent were U.S. citizens giving protections to millions of Asian Americans, Latinos, and even Native Americans decades later. It's an overlooked example of how Asian American civil rights fights transformed the nation.

Driving the news: Connecticut lawmakers are considering a bill to make Asian American history a requirement in public schools.

The intrigue: The push to integrate Asian American history into public school classes comes as some states including some of the same ones debating the new requirements are passing bills to limit diversity education under the guise of banning critical race theory.

Details: The San Francisco-born Wong Kim Ark returned to the city of his birth in November 1894 after visiting family in China, but was refused re-entry.

What they're saying: "It's a hallmark case in Asian American history because it establishes the activism that the Asian American community had been waging for decades," Jason Oliver Chang, an Asian American studies and history professor at the University of Connecticut, told Axios.

Between the lines: The Wong Kim Ark case established the Birthright Citizenship clause and led to the dramatic demographic transformation of the U.S.

The Wong Kim Ark ruling is a gateway to open students up to more Asian American history for a complete picture of the U.S., Lynn Lin, a teacher of Chinese languages of 4th graders to middle schoolers in New York City, told Axios.

What's next: Lin and Bae are part of the growing chapters of Make Us Visible, seeking to build classroom curriculum around AAPI contributions.

Continue reading here:

The 1898 moment: How one Asian American transformed the U.S. - Axios

Tom Adamich| Special to the Monroe News

The Monroe County Historical Commission and the Monroe County Museum have joined forces since 2019 to update and install new versions of Michigan Historical Markers throughout Monroe County.

This effort included a review of the content of each marker to allow for appropriate updating of content as well as the logistics associated with removal of the old markers, procurement of the new markers, and new marker installation.

A marker that I often passed by quickly on my way to work at Monroe County Community College was the Old Burial Ground marker located on N. Monroe Street near West Grove Street. The cemetery was the 1830 successor to the original cemetery of St. Antoines Catholic Church officially established on November 16, 1794, according to "The Cross Leads Generations On: A Bicentennial Retrospect," which is a history of Monroes St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception Church from 1788 to 1988.

A letter dated that day from the first pastor of St Antoines wrote, On November 16, 1794, the parishioners of the River Raisin unanimously chose St. Anthony of Padua as their patron, and consequently, Mr. Joseph IRAC donated to the parish a piece of land measuring three arpents less 1 perches long by eighty arpents deep, bounded by the land of Mr. Irac on one side, the land of Joseph Belleaire on another side, and the land of the abovementioned donor Mr. Joseph Irac on the other side; which donation of three arpents less 1 perches by eighty arpents deep, the chief trustee Joseph Jobin and the two other trustees Jacques Prudent and Antoine Campeau accepted in the name of the parish with consent of all parishioners present.

An arpent is an old French unit of land area equivalent to 3,420 square meters (about 1 acre), the standard measure of land in those areas settled during the French regime and still used in Quebec, Canada, some parishes in Louisiana and other French territories. A perch is considered to measure just over 30 square yards or .00625 acre.

The second pastor of St. Antoines, French-born Sulpician Father Jean (John) Dilhet -- who was installed as pastor on July 1, 1798 by Father Michael Levadoux, Pastor of St. Anne Catholic Church, Detroit, and Vicar-General of the Bishop of Baltimore discovered that the donated land had never been formally and legally transferred to St. Antoines. As a result, titles need to be secured, as well as the acknowledgment of quit claim deeds (releases of a partys interest in a property without reason) and registering this information at the area civil office of the territory.

The area was officially known as Claim 648 and encompassed 99.98 acres known as St. Antoine Church Farm located off N. Custer Road. It was one of the River Raisins French ribbon farms farms which had some river frontage (to facilitate water transportation for shipping) and extending in a narrow strip away from the water, sometimes for miles.

A new small brick church for St Antoines was built in 1828 on the former Vincent Soleau property north of the river and existed on the property until the dedication of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception Church in Monroe in 1845. It was identified as the Fairgrounds Church because of its Noble Avenue location. This property was near the future site of the original county fairgrounds located behind the current St. Mary Church (Monroe County had been established in July, 1817). It was never fully completed and razed in 1845.

In 1832, the Old Burial Ground served as a burial site for all faiths and nationalities during the cholera epidemic of that year.

See the original post:

Monroe County history: The history of the Old Burial Ground - Monroe Evening News

Even as a young adult, Shannen Dee Williams who grew up Black and Catholic in Memphis, Tennessee knew of only one Black nun, and a fake one at that: Sister Mary Clarence, as played by Whoopi Goldberg in the comic film Sister Act.After 14 years of tenacious research, Williams a history professor at the University of Dayton arguably now knows more about Americas Black nuns than anyone in the world. Her comprehensive and compelling history of them, Subversive Habits, will be published May 17.Williams found that many Black nuns were modest about their achievements and reticent about sharing details of bad experiences, such as encountering racism and discrimination. Some acknowledged wrenching events only after Williams confronted them with details gleaned from other sources.For me, it was about recognizing the ways in which trauma silences people in ways they may not even be aware of, she said.The story is told chronologically, yet always in the context of a theme Williams forcefully outlines in her preface: that the nearly 200-year history of these nuns in the U.S. has been overlooked or suppressed by those who resented or disrespected them.For far too long, scholars of the American, Catholic, and Black pasts have unconsciously or consciously declared by virtue of misrepresentation, marginalization, and outright erasure that the history of Black Catholic nuns does not matter, Williams writes, depicting her book as proof that their history has always mattered.The book arrives as numerous American institutions, including religious groups, grapple with their racist pasts and shine a spotlight on their communities overlooked Black pioneers.Williams begins her narrative in the pre-Civil War era when some Black women even in slave-holding states found their way into Catholic sisterhood. Some entered previously whites-only orders, often in subservient roles, while a few trailblazing women succeeded in forming orders for Black nuns in Baltimore and New Orleans.Even as the number of American nuns of all races shrinks relentlessly, that Baltimore order founded in 1829 remains intact, continuing its mission to educate Black youths. Some current members of the Oblate Sisters of Providence help run Saint Frances Academy, a high school serving low-income Black neighborhoods.Some of the most detailed passages in Subversive Habits recount the Jim Crow era, extending from the 1870s through the 1950s, when Black nuns were not spared from the segregation and discrimination endured by many other African Americans.In the 1960s, Williams writes, Black nuns were often discouraged or blocked by their white superiors from engaging in the civil rights struggle.Yet one of them, Sister Mary Antona Ebo, was on the front lines of marchers who gathered in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 in support of Black voting rights and in protest of the violence of Bloody Sunday when white state troopers brutally dispersed peaceful Black demonstrators. An Associated Press photo of Ebo and other nuns in the march on March 10 three days after Bloody Sunday ran on the front pages of many newspapers.During two decades before Selma, Ebo faced repeated struggles to break down racial barriers. At one point she was denied admittance to Catholic nursing schools because of her race, and later endured segregation policies at the white-led order of sisters she joined in St. Louis in 1946, according to Williams.The idea for Subversive Habits took shape in 2007, when Williams then a graduate student at Rutgers University was desperately seeking a compelling topic for a paper due in a seminar on African American history.At the library, she searched through microfilm editions of Black-owned newspapers and came across a 1968 article in the Pittsburgh Courier about a group of Catholic nuns forming the National Black Sisters' Conference.The accompanying photo, of four smiling Black nuns, literally stopped me in my tracks, she said. I was raised Catholic How did I not know that Black nuns existed?Mesmerized by her discovery, she began devouring everything I could that had been published about Black Catholic history, while setting out to interview the founding members of the National Black Sisters' Conference.Among the women Williams interviewed extensively was Patricia Grey, who was a nun in the Sisters of Mercy and a founder of the NBSC before leaving religious life in 1974.Grey shared with The Associated Press some painful memories from 1960, when as an aspiring nurse she was rejected for membership in a Catholic order because she was Black.I was so hurt and disappointed, I couldnt believe it, she said about reading that rejection letter. I remember crumbling it up and I didnt even want to look at it again or think about it again.Grey initially was reluctant to assist with Subversive Habits, but eventually shared her own story and her personal archives after urging Williams to write about the mostly unsung and under-researched history of Americas Black nuns.If you can, try to tell all of our stories, Grey told her.Williams set out to do just that scouring overlooked archives, previously sealed church records and out-of-print books, while conducting more than 100 interviews.I bore witness to a profoundly unfamiliar history that disrupts and revises much of what has been said and written about the U.S. Catholic Church and the place of Black people within it, Williams writes. Because it is impossible to narrate Black sisters journey in the United States accurately and honestly without confronting the Churchs largely unacknowledged and unreconciled histories of colonialism, slavery, and segregation.Historians have been unable to identify the nations first Black Catholic nun, but Williams recounts some of the earliest moves to bring Black women into Catholic religious orders in some cases on the expectation they would function as servants.One of the oldest Black sisterhoods, the Sisters of the Holy Family, formed in New Orleans in 1842 because white sisterhoods in Louisiana, including the slave-holding Ursuline order, refused to accept African Americans.The principal founder of that New Orleans order Henriette Delille and Oblate Sisters of Providence founder Mary Lange are among three Black nuns from the U.S. designated by Catholic officials as worthy of consideration for sainthood. The other is Sister Thea Bowman, a beloved educator, evangelist and singer who died in Mississippi in 1990 and is buried in Williamss hometown of Memphis.Researching less prominent nuns, Williams faced many challenges for example tracking down Catholic sisters who were known to their contemporaries by their religious names but were listed in archives by their secular names.Among the many pioneers is Sister Cora Marie Billings, who as a 17-year-old in 1956, became the first Black person admitted into the Sisters of Mercy in Philadelphia. Later, she was the first Black nun to teach in a Catholic high school in Philadelphia and was a co-founder of the National Black Sisters Conference.In 1990, Billings became the first Black woman in the U.S. to manage a Catholic parish when she was named pastoral coordinator for St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in Richmond, Virginia.Ive gone through many situations of racism and oppression throughout my life, Billings told The Associated Press. But somehow or other, Ive just dealt with it and then kept on going.According to recent figures from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, there are about 400 African American religious sisters, out of a total of roughly 40,000 nuns.That overall figure is only one-fourth of the 160,000 nuns in 1970, according to statistics compiled by Catholic researchers at Georgetown University. Whatever their races, many of the remaining nuns are elderly, and the influx of youthful novices is sparse.The Baltimore-based Oblate Sisters of Providence used to have more than 300 members, according to its superior general, Sister Rita Michelle Proctor, and now has less than 50 most of them living at the motherhouse in Baltimores outskirts.Though were small, we are still about serving God and Gods people. Proctor said. Most of us are elderly, but we still want to do so for as long as God is calling us to.Even with diminished ranks, the Oblate Sisters continue to operate Saint Frances Academy founded in Baltimore by Mary Lange in 1828. The coed school is the countrys oldest continually operating Black Catholic educational facility, with a mission prioritizing help for the poor and the neglected.Williams, in an interview with the AP, said she was considering leaving the Catholic church due partly to its handling of racial issues at the time she started researching Black nuns. Hearing their histories, in their own voices, revitalized her faith, she said.As these women were telling me their stories, they were also preaching to me in a such a beautiful way, Williams said. It wasnt done in a way that reflected any anger -- they had already made their peace with it, despite the unholy discrimination they had faced.What keeps her in the church now, Williams said, is a commitment to these women who chose to share their stories.It took a lot for them to get it out, she said. I remain in awe of these women, of their faithfulness.

Even as a young adult, Shannen Dee Williams who grew up Black and Catholic in Memphis, Tennessee knew of only one Black nun, and a fake one at that: Sister Mary Clarence, as played by Whoopi Goldberg in the comic film Sister Act.

After 14 years of tenacious research, Williams a history professor at the University of Dayton arguably now knows more about Americas Black nuns than anyone in the world. Her comprehensive and compelling history of them, Subversive Habits, will be published May 17.

Williams found that many Black nuns were modest about their achievements and reticent about sharing details of bad experiences, such as encountering racism and discrimination. Some acknowledged wrenching events only after Williams confronted them with details gleaned from other sources.

For me, it was about recognizing the ways in which trauma silences people in ways they may not even be aware of, she said.

The story is told chronologically, yet always in the context of a theme Williams forcefully outlines in her preface: that the nearly 200-year history of these nuns in the U.S. has been overlooked or suppressed by those who resented or disrespected them.

For far too long, scholars of the American, Catholic, and Black pasts have unconsciously or consciously declared by virtue of misrepresentation, marginalization, and outright erasure that the history of Black Catholic nuns does not matter, Williams writes, depicting her book as proof that their history has always mattered.

The book arrives as numerous American institutions, including religious groups, grapple with their racist pasts and shine a spotlight on their communities overlooked Black pioneers.

Williams begins her narrative in the pre-Civil War era when some Black women even in slave-holding states found their way into Catholic sisterhood. Some entered previously whites-only orders, often in subservient roles, while a few trailblazing women succeeded in forming orders for Black nuns in Baltimore and New Orleans.

Even as the number of American nuns of all races shrinks relentlessly, that Baltimore order founded in 1829 remains intact, continuing its mission to educate Black youths. Some current members of the Oblate Sisters of Providence help run Saint Frances Academy, a high school serving low-income Black neighborhoods.

Some of the most detailed passages in Subversive Habits recount the Jim Crow era, extending from the 1870s through the 1950s, when Black nuns were not spared from the segregation and discrimination endured by many other African Americans.

In the 1960s, Williams writes, Black nuns were often discouraged or blocked by their white superiors from engaging in the civil rights struggle.

Yet one of them, Sister Mary Antona Ebo, was on the front lines of marchers who gathered in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 in support of Black voting rights and in protest of the violence of Bloody Sunday when white state troopers brutally dispersed peaceful Black demonstrators. An Associated Press photo of Ebo and other nuns in the march on March 10 three days after Bloody Sunday ran on the front pages of many newspapers.

During two decades before Selma, Ebo faced repeated struggles to break down racial barriers. At one point she was denied admittance to Catholic nursing schools because of her race, and later endured segregation policies at the white-led order of sisters she joined in St. Louis in 1946, according to Williams.

The idea for Subversive Habits took shape in 2007, when Williams then a graduate student at Rutgers University was desperately seeking a compelling topic for a paper due in a seminar on African American history.

At the library, she searched through microfilm editions of Black-owned newspapers and came across a 1968 article in the Pittsburgh Courier about a group of Catholic nuns forming the National Black Sisters' Conference.

The accompanying photo, of four smiling Black nuns, literally stopped me in my tracks, she said. I was raised Catholic How did I not know that Black nuns existed?

Mesmerized by her discovery, she began devouring everything I could that had been published about Black Catholic history, while setting out to interview the founding members of the National Black Sisters' Conference.

Among the women Williams interviewed extensively was Patricia Grey, who was a nun in the Sisters of Mercy and a founder of the NBSC before leaving religious life in 1974.

Grey shared with The Associated Press some painful memories from 1960, when as an aspiring nurse she was rejected for membership in a Catholic order because she was Black.

I was so hurt and disappointed, I couldnt believe it, she said about reading that rejection letter. I remember crumbling it up and I didnt even want to look at it again or think about it again.

Grey initially was reluctant to assist with Subversive Habits, but eventually shared her own story and her personal archives after urging Williams to write about the mostly unsung and under-researched history of Americas Black nuns.

If you can, try to tell all of our stories, Grey told her.

Williams set out to do just that scouring overlooked archives, previously sealed church records and out-of-print books, while conducting more than 100 interviews.

I bore witness to a profoundly unfamiliar history that disrupts and revises much of what has been said and written about the U.S. Catholic Church and the place of Black people within it, Williams writes. Because it is impossible to narrate Black sisters journey in the United States accurately and honestly without confronting the Churchs largely unacknowledged and unreconciled histories of colonialism, slavery, and segregation.

Historians have been unable to identify the nations first Black Catholic nun, but Williams recounts some of the earliest moves to bring Black women into Catholic religious orders in some cases on the expectation they would function as servants.

One of the oldest Black sisterhoods, the Sisters of the Holy Family, formed in New Orleans in 1842 because white sisterhoods in Louisiana, including the slave-holding Ursuline order, refused to accept African Americans.

The principal founder of that New Orleans order Henriette Delille and Oblate Sisters of Providence founder Mary Lange are among three Black nuns from the U.S. designated by Catholic officials as worthy of consideration for sainthood. The other is Sister Thea Bowman, a beloved educator, evangelist and singer who died in Mississippi in 1990 and is buried in Williamss hometown of Memphis.

Researching less prominent nuns, Williams faced many challenges for example tracking down Catholic sisters who were known to their contemporaries by their religious names but were listed in archives by their secular names.

Among the many pioneers is Sister Cora Marie Billings, who as a 17-year-old in 1956, became the first Black person admitted into the Sisters of Mercy in Philadelphia. Later, she was the first Black nun to teach in a Catholic high school in Philadelphia and was a co-founder of the National Black Sisters Conference.

In 1990, Billings became the first Black woman in the U.S. to manage a Catholic parish when she was named pastoral coordinator for St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in Richmond, Virginia.

Ive gone through many situations of racism and oppression throughout my life, Billings told The Associated Press. But somehow or other, Ive just dealt with it and then kept on going.

According to recent figures from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, there are about 400 African American religious sisters, out of a total of roughly 40,000 nuns.

That overall figure is only one-fourth of the 160,000 nuns in 1970, according to statistics compiled by Catholic researchers at Georgetown University. Whatever their races, many of the remaining nuns are elderly, and the influx of youthful novices is sparse.

The Baltimore-based Oblate Sisters of Providence used to have more than 300 members, according to its superior general, Sister Rita Michelle Proctor, and now has less than 50 most of them living at the motherhouse in Baltimores outskirts.

Though were small, we are still about serving God and Gods people. Proctor said. Most of us are elderly, but we still want to do so for as long as God is calling us to.

Even with diminished ranks, the Oblate Sisters continue to operate Saint Frances Academy founded in Baltimore by Mary Lange in 1828. The coed school is the countrys oldest continually operating Black Catholic educational facility, with a mission prioritizing help for the poor and the neglected.

Williams, in an interview with the AP, said she was considering leaving the Catholic church due partly to its handling of racial issues at the time she started researching Black nuns. Hearing their histories, in their own voices, revitalized her faith, she said.

As these women were telling me their stories, they were also preaching to me in a such a beautiful way, Williams said. It wasnt done in a way that reflected any anger -- they had already made their peace with it, despite the unholy discrimination they had faced.

What keeps her in the church now, Williams said, is a commitment to these women who chose to share their stories.

It took a lot for them to get it out, she said. I remain in awe of these women, of their faithfulness.

Read the original here:

The overlooked history of Black Catholic nuns - WDSU New Orleans

Now that the pandemic is almost history, travelers are poised to discover their own. After two years of being locked down and quarantined, Americans are embarking on ambitious trips to discover history and it's taking them to some remarkable places.

A survey by Priceline predicts a banner year for historical tourism, also called heritage tourism. If you've ever traveled anywhere to experience artifacts and activities representing the stories and people of the past and present, then congratulations you're a heritage tourist. (And by the way, that's the textbook definition given to heritage tourism by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, an independent federal agency.)

One-third of Americans say heritage travel is a meaningful way to travel, according to Priceline. Interestingly, the younger crowd (18-34 years old) shows the highest interest in heritage tourism this year.

I've met many of them in the last few weeks as the tourism season gets underway in Europe. I'm traveling through Turkey in April and I'll be in Greece next month, both known for their rich histories.

The Forbidden City in Beijing, the most visited historical attraction in the world.

If you've ever been to a place that deepens your understanding of world history, then you've been a heritage traveler.

If you want more than sun and fun on your next getaway, you can find a quick list of the best historical tourism sites by visiting the UNESCO World Heritage List. Of course, there are many more sites worth seeing, but this list is one of the best starting points.

Ancient Lycean tombs along the Dalyan ay River in Dalyan, Turkey.

Although places of interest for heritage tourism are everywhere, some areas especially Turkey are experiencing a particular surge in demand.

At the Dalyan Resort & Spa Hotel, for example, history frames your entire experience. From the banks of the Dalyan ay River, visitors can see the famous Lycian Rock Tombs. These impressive facades, built in the 4th century, are all that remain of a once-thriving civilization. Fulya and Yucel Okutur, the resort's owners, say the region has attracted an increasing number of history enthusiasts who charter boats to sail down the curving river and take pictures of the crumbling rock facades.

Olympos Lodge, a boutique hotel on the Mediterranean coast, is also a stone's throw from Mt. Olympos, another Lycian city. Co-owner Ayen zkan imek says the pandemic has given visitors an opportunity to consider a deeper meaning behind travel, so visiting a place that has a rich history makes it all the more appealing. Properties like Olympos Lodge tend to get a fair number of visitors from Eastern Europe, but with the war going on, she says Western Europe and North America are picking up the slack this summer.

In Antalya, the Tuvana Hotel is also in the right place at the right time. Its location, in the central district of Kaleii, puts guests within walking distance of the city's main historical attractions. These include the famous Tekeli Mehmet Paa Mosque, the ancient harbor and Hadrian's Gate, according to Nermin Tankut, who manages the Ottoman-style boutique hotel.

"People are looking for an experience," she says. "They want to take a walking tour and see the gates but they are also looking for more from their vacation."

The restored amphitheater in Aspendos, an ancient Greco-Roman city in Turkey's Antalya province.

If you haven't booked your summer vacation yet, and are looking for a heritage vacation, there's still time, although you're cutting it close. International airfares are still down from 2019 levels they were 19 percent below pre-pandemic levels during spring break but some destinations have more than bounced back. The average roundtrip economy class airline ticket to Italy costs over $1,300. Maybe the Colosseum can wait until the summer of 2023.

Airlines are scrambling to meet demand. European airlines, eager to serve hot Turkish Riviera destinations like Antalya, haven't been able to find enough staff to add new flights, according to tourism insiders. Turkish Airlines will operate 388 direct weekly flights to 47 cities in 29 countries from Antalya, Dalaman, Bodrum-Milas and zmir, according to the carrier.

For all the interest in heritage tourism, there's still plenty of room for more visitors. But it depends where you want to go. Ali afak ztrk, president of Regnum Carya Golf & Spa Resort, an all-inclusive resort in Antalya, recalls a recent conversation with director Guy Ritchie, who was visiting his property to make the upcoming movie Operation Fortune. Ritchie, like many visitors, was captivated by the ancient city of Aspendos, with its well-preserved Roman amphitheater. "He was saying that it's so beautiful and we have so much history, but it's not well known," he says.

That's the dilemma faced by destinations with historical attractions. If you improve marketing, you risk being overrun by visitors. For now, properties like Regnum are happy to have their guests stay there for the golf and take a day tour of the Roman ruins. But what if they all came for the history? That would fundamentally change the way these historical destinations operate.

Pelin Tanca, the co-founder of TAY Istanbul, a travel and event management company, says historical tourism is more complicated than it looks. Most visitors come with more than one thing on their to-do list. They're here for a destination wedding and they want to see the Roman ruins. Or they want to play nine holes and then see Hadrian's Gate. Pulling that off takes some expertise.

"Within the same trip, you can hike on The Lycian Way, visit ancient ruins, taste delicacies, and at the end, lie on the beach," she says.

Find a qualified travel advisor. You'll probably need an expert to help you plan a heritage vacation. Check the American Society of Travel Advisors site and look for someone who specializes in the destination you plan to visit.

Consider a tour. Historical tours are difficult to plan and execute. There are so many moving parts, and there are often language barriers. A tour operator can help you cut through that, and you might also get a better deal since tour operators buy their trip components in bulk. You can find a list of vetted tour operators at the United States Tour Operators Association site.

Get a guide. If you don't join a tour, then at least consider hiring a professional guide. You can stroll around the ruins on your own and Google every site, but you're better off finding someone who can show you around. That's particularly true for sites that could be dangerous, with rock outcroppings or cliffs. You can check Viator or Getyourguide for details. But find a pro. Seriously.

One thing is clear: The summer of 2022 will be one for historical discovery. And for many Americans, it isn't a question of if they will take a heritage tour in the coming months, but which one.

See the article here:

Your History: Heritage Tourism Is Poised To Take Off This Summer - Forbes

Chinas Xi Jinping and Russias Vladimir Putin strode out to the Gate of Heavenly Peace in the center of Beijing. The sky overhead was perfectly blue. The crowds waved their red flags in perfect unison. This was the entrance to the Forbidden City when Chinas last emperors ruled, and it was where Mao Zedong declared the foundation of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949. But that wasnt why they were here. They had come to commemorate Victory Day, the anniversary of the end of World War II in Chinaor as it was known there, the Chinese Peoples War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and World Anti-Fascist War.

In that devastating war, the Chinese Peoples War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression started first and lasted longest, Xi said in his speech on Sept. 3, 2015. The unyielding Chinese people fought gallantly and finally won total victory over the Japanese militarist aggressors, thus preserving the achievements of Chinas 5,000-year-old civilization and defending the cause of peace for mankind. Then, to celebrate that peace, there was a massive military parade.

Twelve thousand troops marched into Tiananmen Square in perfect lockstep. When they reached Xi, their heads snapped right, a sea of resolute faces turning to salute their commander in chief. From the crowded press pen, I squinted up at the tiny figures of Xi and Putin on the balcony high above us as the soldiers goose-stepped past below. Most of all, I was struck by the sound, the boots stamping out a relentless drumbeat on the pavement and then the low guttural growl of the tanks. They rumbled past in a cloud of engine smoke, and they were so heavy I could feel the ground shaking beneath my feet. Next came a procession of the countrys latest, most formidable weaponry. There was the new long-range strategic missile, the Dong Feng (East Wind) 5B, designed to carry a nuclear warhead and capable of reaching targets in Western Europe and the United States, and the Dong Feng 21D anti-ship missile, dubbed the carrier killer for its purported ability to sink an aircraft carrier.

Chinas Xi Jinping and Russias Vladimir Putin strode out to the Gate of Heavenly Peace in the center of Beijing. The sky overhead was perfectly blue. The crowds waved their red flags in perfect unison. This was the entrance to the Forbidden City when Chinas last emperors ruled, and it was where Mao Zedong declared the foundation of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949. But that wasnt why they were here. They had come to commemorate Victory Day, the anniversary of the end of World War II in Chinaor as it was known there, the Chinese Peoples War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and World Anti-Fascist War.

In that devastating war, the Chinese Peoples War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression started first and lasted longest, Xi said in his speech on Sept. 3, 2015. The unyielding Chinese people fought gallantly and finally won total victory over the Japanese militarist aggressors, thus preserving the achievements of Chinas 5,000-year-old civilization and defending the cause of peace for mankind. Then, to celebrate that peace, there was a massive military parade.

Twelve thousand troops marched into Tiananmen Square in perfect lockstep. When they reached Xi, their heads snapped right, a sea of resolute faces turning to salute their commander in chief. From the crowded press pen, I squinted up at the tiny figures of Xi and Putin on the balcony high above us as the soldiers goose-stepped past below. Most of all, I was struck by the sound, the boots stamping out a relentless drumbeat on the pavement and then the low guttural growl of the tanks. They rumbled past in a cloud of engine smoke, and they were so heavy I could feel the ground shaking beneath my feet. Next came a procession of the countrys latest, most formidable weaponry. There was the new long-range strategic missile, the Dong Feng (East Wind) 5B, designed to carry a nuclear warhead and capable of reaching targets in Western Europe and the United States, and the Dong Feng 21D anti-ship missile, dubbed the carrier killer for its purported ability to sink an aircraft carrier.

Putin shaded his eyes from the sun on the balcony. Xi looked straight ahead. His face was impassive, even slightly bored. Fighter jets roared through the sky above us, followed by a thunderous swarm of attack helicopters that made downtown Beijing look like a scene from Apocalypse Now. Clearly this was as much about demonstrating the countrys growing strength as it was about remembering the past. But then, both leaders insisted the two were inextricably linked.

Xi was then midway through his first term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while Putin, his increasingly close friend, had been in power for 15 years. Putin said they had first bonded over family memories of World War II while they shared a late-night shot of vodka and sliced some sausage at an Asia-Pacific leaders summit in 2013, and they evidently also shared an understanding of the conflicts wider resonance. The two leaders deployed their extensive security forces to crush dissent and silence their opponents, but they also both appealed to the history of the war to rally public support.

In Russia, Putin exploited the sacred myth to frame the countrys contemporary challenges and cast his enemies as traitors, and in China, too, Xi was intensifying focus on the conflict and turning to the past to serve his contemporary needs. The Victory Day celebrations in 2015 were a case in point. While the extraordinary scale and seamless choreography made this look like a long-held tradition, it was not. In fact, this was the first time the victory parade had ever been held. Victory Day was one of three new national holidays that had been created the previous year, along with an annual day to commemorate the Nanjing Massacre, which was carried out by Japanese troops during World War II, and Martyrs Day, which was dedicated to all those who had given their lives to defend the country.

It is not unusual for a country to designate memorial days to honor its fallen, but this was all happening 70 years after the end of the war. It had taken long enough for the Soviet leadership to reinstate Victory Dayalmost two decades after Joseph Stalin canceled the holiday therebut it took the CCP another half-century to come around to the idea.

The new memorial days were just the beginning. Xi called for a renewed effort to study the history of the conflict, although on the partys terms, and while Chinese suffering during the war with Japan had played an important role in the partys post-Tiananmen patriotic education campaign, he now turned up the volume and shifted the emphasis. As well as remembering the countrys suffering during the conflict as part of the broader century of humiliation China had endured before the party came to power, he said the war should also be remembered as the beginning of the end of that humiliation and the start of the journey to what he called the China Dream of national rejuvenation.

The victory over Japan was the first complete victory won by China in its resistance against foreign aggression in modern times, Xi said in his Victory Day speech in 2015. Not only did it put an end to the national humiliation of China, he said, but also this great triumph represented the rebirth of China, opened up bright prospects for the great renewal of the Chinese nation, and set our ancient country on a new journey. What was more, the victory reestablished China as a major country and won the Chinese people the respect of all peace-loving people around the world.

This was an important part of Xis narrative of the war and another point on which he and Putin agreed: that as the nations that had sacrificed the most to save the world from fascism, the war had earned them the right to respect. They presented themselves as the founders and guardians of the postwar international order, instead of its greatest threat. Putin had illegally annexed Crimea a year earlier, and he was fighting a covert war in Ukraine at the time, while Xi was installing surface-to-air missiles and military facilities on artificial islands in the South China Sea. But both leaders claimed they were the ones upholding world peace and it was U.S. hegemony that posed the real danger.

All countries should jointly uphold the international order and system underpinned by the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter [which China was the first to sign], Xi said. They should build a new model of international relations based on mutually beneficial co-operation and advance the noble cause of global peace and development. In his telling, Chinas growing military strength was simply to defend its interests and ensure the country would never again be pushed around. Even as the tanks and the intercontinental ballistic missiles rolled through Tiananmen Square, the official commentary assured viewers that Chinas rise would always be peaceful.

Our generation is lucky to be born at a time when the country will not be bullied by others, remarked one student at Beijings prestigious Tsinghua University after watching the military parade. Now we will show the world how strong China is, said an 8-year-old girl.

***

When Xi was unveiled as the CCPs new general secretary in November 2012, there were some predictions that he would unleash a series of pragmatic reforms. Maos body will be hauled out of Tiananmen Square on his watch, wrote Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times in January 2013. And Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning writer, will be released from prison. Xis father, Xi Zhongxun, who had served under Mao as one of the first generation of Chinese Communist revolutionaries, had supported economic reforms, Kristof pointed out (he was not alone in his optimism), and Xis mother had elected to live in the capitalist enclave of Shenzhen. His daughter was studying at Harvard University in the United States. But as with Kim Jong Un, who took over across the border in North Korea the previous year, those early predictions turned out to be wrong. Instead of loosening his grip, Xi consolidated power and reasserted the partys role in the economy and across all aspects of society. Liu died in detention in 2017, with Mao still firmly ensconced in his mausoleum.

Like Putin and Kim, Xi saw history as a crucial tool for maintaining power. It was the foundation on which the party built its claim to rule and framed its appeals for public support. It was the basis on which they attacked their opponents and the answer to the question as to why China needed the Communist Party at all. As Deng Xiaoping had urged in the aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown, they needed to continually remind people what China was like in the old days and what kind of country it was to become before the rise of the CCP.

Also, like Putin, Xi had seen for himself what happened when a communist regime lost power. Xi was a midranking party official in the southeastern province of Fujian when he watched the Soviet Union collapse. All it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone, he reportedly later said. He had given considerable thought to how the CCP could avoid the same fate, and it was one of the first issues he raised after becoming general secretary. Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? he asked party members in a closed-door speech in December 2012, less than a month after taking office. An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered, he said. In the end, nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist.

He repeated that message a few weeks later when he returned to the Soviet collapse during a seminar for senior officials. The struggle in the ideological sphere was extremely fierce, Xi said of the situation in the Soviet Union at the time. There was a complete denial of Soviet history, denial of Lenin, denial of Stalin, pursuit of historical nihilism, confusion of thought. With discipline breaking down and the partys history under attack, he said, the great Soviet Communist Party scattered like birds and beasts. The great Soviet socialist nation fell to pieces.

Xi was determined not to repeat those mistakes. As he saw it, national security was not just a physical or a material concept. They also had to guard against threats in the ideological sphere. And already there were signs of some of the same looming dangers for the CCP as there had been in the Soviet Union. Organizational discipline had collapsed, corruption was spiraling, and ideological control was failing. If they wanted to avoid the same fate, they would have to act fast. Public support, Xi warned, was a matter of the partys survival or extinction. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, he intended to put up a fight.

In the spring of 2013, a secret communique known as Document No. 9 circulated among senior officials. The party faced a complicated, intense struggle in the ideological realm, the document warned, setting out a series of false ideological trends that must be confronted. These included efforts to promote Western constitutional democracy, universal values, civil society, and historical nihilism, which meant denying the partys version of history. The goal of this historical nihilism, the document explained, was to undermine the partys legitimacy and challenge its long-term political dominance. In other words, if the party wanted to hold on to power, it would have to strengthen its grip on the countrys history. Officials were urged to wage a perpetual, complex, and excruciating struggle, making ideological work a top priority in their daily schedules.

A select group of historians convened for a special conference at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government-affiliated research institute, in Beijing the following year and concluded that historical nihilism was one of the main tactics hostile international forces were using to try to Westernize and divide China. They called for a more disciplined approach to the study of history that would safeguard ideological security and create a positive image of China.

Just as the partys focus on the countrys past national humiliation after the Tiananmen crackdown had seen a sudden surge of scholarship on the subject, so too now did historical nihilism became a hot topic for research. New papers and initiatives proliferated. Qiushi (Seeking Truth), the partys ideology journal, devoted a special section on its website to the battle to combat historical nihilism, complete with a banner quote from Xi: History is history, truth is truth, and no one can change history or truth.

This wasnt true. The Communist Party had rewritten plenty of the countrys history. The extent of the human-made famine under Mao had been erased, as had the scale of the violence during the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen massacre. It would be more accurate to say that history and truth were whatever the leadership said they were at that moment, and no one was allowed to challenge that version of events. But the party presented its campaign against historical nihilism as a patriotic mission, and the hunt for historical nihilists was on.

This article is adapted from Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia and North Korea, by Katie Stallard, Oxford University Press, 304 pp., $29.95, May 2022.

Excerpt from:

Xi Jinping Thinks Unapproved History Is The Enemy Within - Foreign Policy

Iowa Starting Line will be sharing historical photos of our state and our communities every morning on our Facebook page. Sometimes theyll just be one-off interesting photos we find in archives, sometimes theyll be a series on a specific topic. When we do a series, well put all of them together in a post like this after its done so you can easily see them all in one place in case you missed a day.

Also, if you have any suggestions of future photo history topics we should look at, send them to Nikoel Hytrek at Nikoel@IowaStartingLine.com (and preferably include where specific photos on the subject might be found).

Heres our series from this past week on the Civilian Conservation Corps in Iowa:

Several facilities in Ledges Park were built by workers in the Civilian Conservation Corps, the program started by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 under his New Deal agenda.

After flooding in 1935 much of the camps work was devoted to clean-up. However, Company 2723 of the CCC also planted trees, designed and constructed trails and mapped Ledges topography.

Photo: Workers in the CCC Mess Hall, Hampton, Iowa camp. (Dec. 4, 1936)

The Civilian Conservation Corps was started by President Franklin Roosevelt, March 31, 1933, as part of his New Deal Program. It was a voluntary government work program for unemployed, unmarried men between 18 and 25, which eventually expanded to include 17-26-year-olds. It lasted from 1933 to 1942 and was meant to teach skills and provide the men with jobs.

Photo: CCC Rec room, Hampton, Iowa. (Dec. 4,1936)

Members of the Civilian Conservation Corps worked on more than 80 state parks in Iowa and 46,000 Iowans were enrolled when the program was discontinued. Camps were maintained by the army, and most men came to the program with little other than the clothes they were wearing.

Photo: Workers in the CCC Mess Hall, Hampton, Iowa camp. (Dec. 4, 1936)

Company 2717 of the Civilian Conservation Corps, stationed in Hampton, was popular with the community. In December 1937, they were ordered to ship out to another park, but members of the community wrote to the Iowa governor in protest. Those protests led to the company staying until September 1938 to complete their various projects.

Photos: Beeds Lake dam, Nov. 26 1936 at Beeds Lake State Park, Hampton, Iowa

The property containing Beeds Lake was converted into a state park by Company 2717 from summer 1934 to 1938. This limestone dam, as well as other structures, was constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Beeds Lake dam is one of the most photographed dams in the Midwest. Officially, the park opened to the public on June 5 1938, but it had seen visitors as early as the 1936-37 season.

Photos: Then and Today Ledges State Park CCC Oak Woods Shelter

The Oak Woods Shelter was constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the Lower Ledges part of Ledges State Park near Boone, and is now reservable for events. Its one of a few structures built at Ledges. Company 2723 worked primarily at Ledges, but Company 780 was stationed in the same place and did a lot of work in Ames with the State Forest Nursery, Lake LaVerne, and land erosion projects.

by Nikoel HytrekPosted 4/29/22

Iowa Starting Line is part of an independent news network and focuses on how state and national decisions impact Iowans daily lives. We rely on your financial support to keep our stories free for all to read. You can contribute to us here. Also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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Iowa History In Photos: The Civilian Conservation Corps - Iowa Starting Line

Sitting in the basement of a community center in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, listening to shells being dropped all around us, I watched as a young woman sought to explain the violence to her son. Who is bombing us? she asked in Russian, before prompting, Is it fascists? The 4-year-old nodded vigorously. Yes, yes, he said. Yes, it is fascists.

It was January 2015. Russian-backed separatists had taken control of the city nine months earlier, declaring it the capital of their new Donetsk Peoples Republic. Yet fighting continued and the truth is, when we were in that basement, none of us knew who was responsible for the shelling: The Ukrainian army was dug in on the citys outskirts, and separatists were firing from positions close to us.

None, that is, but for the mother I saw speaking with her boy. By fascists, she later told me, she was referring to Ukrainian government forces.

If you got your news from Russian state television, which many people in that predominantly Russian-speaking city and about 90 percent of Vladimir Putins domestic audience did, there was no doubt about who was to blame: Viewers were told that the conflict in Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk was the fault of a fascist junta that had seized power in Kyiv and the Western intelligence agencies who were pulling the strings. Russian media published innumerable stories about how these forces had plunged Ukraine into violence and chaos.

President Vladimir Putins announcement this February that he was ordering Russian troops into Ukraine to carry out a denazification campaignan absurd claim, given that, for a start, Ukraines leader is Jewish and had relatives killed in the Holocaustdrew on those lies from years prior, lies that I saw warping reality in that basement in 2015. Then, I was Moscow correspondent for Britains Sky News. Now I am based in Washington, D.C., for The New Statesman, but the memory of that moment has lingered. Listening to Putins speech on the morning of his invasion, when he declared that he was saving innocents from genocide and compared his actions to the heroic struggle Russians waged during World War II, my initial response was disbelief. Then I realized I had heard this argument before.

The Russian president is the latest in a long line of dictators to manipulate history and manufacture enemies to rally the population against and secure his own hold on power. Past Soviet leaders have drawn on the same core themes, and I have seen this playbook in action in China and North Korea, where Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un insist that they too are defending their nations against hostile foreign adversaries.

Yet we must not assume that this autocratic rewriting of history, driven largely by a desire to consolidate power, affects only a dictators domestic population (though it does). In fact, these retellings matter far beyond, encompassing expansive territorial ambitions and aggressive foreign policies that threaten neighboring democracies, such as Taiwan, South Korea, Japanand Ukraineand whip up nationalist fervor against the United States and its allies.

As Putin is currently demonstrating, these questionable historical narratives in faraway autocracies are a problem for democracies too.

During his re-education in 1984, George Orwells protagonist, Winston Smith, is asked to repeat the Partys slogan about the past. Who controls the past controls the future, he responds obediently. Who controls the present controls the past. Though their individual approaches to controlling that past differ significantly, Putin, Xi, and Kim share an obsession that Orwell would have recognized.

Since he first came to power more than two decades ago, Putin has elevated the memory of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is referred to in Russia, to the status of a national religion and positioned himself as the heir to that legacy, and the tireless defender of Russia and Russians everywhere against their contemporary threats. He calls the Ukrainian leadership fascists to remind his compatriots of the enemy they faced, insisting that they are confronting a resurgent menace.

He does not, however, invoke the terror and the strategic blunders that the countrys wartime leader Joseph Stalin committed. Instead, Putin has sealed off the official version of history from scrutiny, passing new laws that make it a criminal offense to challenge the authorities account or to question the true scale of Soviet heroism. He has also closed down independent organizations that sought to preserve the memory of Soviet-era atrocities. He is interested in remembering only the aspects of history that serve his current political needs.

In this, Putin shares the same outlook as Xi. They clearly both understand World War IIs wider resonance, and the importance of maintaining firm control over their countries histories more broadly. Xi has identified historical nihilism, which essentially means anything that challenges the regimes version of history, as a crucial factor in the Soviet Unions collapse, and he has made plain that keeping a tight grip on history is essential to ensuring the future of the Chinese Communist Partys rule.

Like Putin, Xi has passed new laws to protect the partys version of history from scrutiny and silenced dissenting views. He has introduced new memorial days to commemorate World War II and followed the Russian leaders example in 2015 by staging a bombastic Victory Day military parade to mark the anniversary of the end of the war, the first time such an event had been held in Beijing, with Putin as his guest of honor. He has also extended the length of the war, moving the start date back to 1931 to incorporate what had previously been treated as a separate regional conflict with Japan. Though the change has a credible historical basis, the longer time frame also serves a useful political function by including the earlier period when Communist troops played a more active role in the fighting.

As Xi tells the story now, China fought first and for the longest of any of the Allied nations in the war. According to this version of history, Mao Zedong and his Communist revolutionaries are the ones who rallied the population to fight back against the foreign aggressors and demonstrated why the party must always be in power, and why China must build up its military strength. I saw this weaponization of history in person while reporting from China: During a visit to a high school in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui in March 2018, 16-year-old Yang Yuzheone of an array of thoughtful, genuinely emotional teenagers in a history class I sat in ontold me of how she had thought China was always a very strong country, but I didnt know the recent history. After studying Chinas modern history, however, Yang continued, From then on, I knew that China must be strong again. Those views are echoed across much of Chinese social media today, as the countrys rivalry with the United States grows and the leadership amplifies the idea that modern China must once again be prepared to fight back against its enemies.

Though Chinas version of history is at least credible, if tailored to serve the Communist Partys needs, across the border in North Korea, the Kim regime relies on an absurd fiction and outright lies. For three-quarters of a century, it has claimed victory in two great wars, insisting that its first president, Kim Il Sungthe grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong Unliberated the country from Japanese colonial rule at the end of the Second World War, when in fact he was in the Soviet Union at the time. He then apparently secured a subsequent brilliant victory, over the United States in the Korean War in 1953, which in this version of the past, the U.S. and South Korea are said to have started.

The Kim familys fiction dominates daily life in North Korea. On a reporting trip there in 2016, I saw the enormous Arch of Triumph built in the heart of the capital, which is engraved with the date 1945 to commemorate the first Kims purported victory over Japan. His grandsons top officials drive around in a fleet of gleaming black Mercedes with the prefix 727 on their license plates to mark the supposed victory over the U.S. on July 27, 1953, the date the Korean War armistice was signed. Even as many of his citizens regularly go hungry in his impoverished and isolated country, Kim has invested ample resources in rebuilding and substantially expanding the countrys war museums. Preserving the regimes version of the past is evidently more important than providing for the populations basic needs.

But how can you stop people remembering things? asks Winston in 1984. How can you control memory? One might well ask the same question of Putin, Xi, and Kim and their own efforts to control the past. They cannot determine what individual citizens think or the individual memories they hold, but they can decide what is presented on the evening news and the information that is available on the internet, and they can make it dangerous to challenge the official line in public.

In Russia, now, it is illegal to call the war in Ukraine a war. Russian schoolchildren are being taught that their soldiers are defenders of peace who are liberating grateful civilians. Putin quotes from the Bible and invokes the Great Patriotic War to underline the righteousness of his cause as he insists that he is fighting for a world without Nazism. There is evidence that this approach is working. The mayor of the Ukrainian town of Melitopol has recounted how, in March, he was abducted by Russian troops who told him they had come to free Ukraine from Nazis. Russian soldiers scrawled the words for the children on a missile that hit the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorska grim irony, as that very strike killed children among the many evacuees who were waiting for a train. Xi and Kim must be encouraged by how well Putins popular support and his propaganda have held up. And that could set a very dangerous precedent, not just for those who live in these societies, but for those on the receiving end of more aggressive policies abroadpeople who live in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the countries that surround the South China Sea.

The impulse to rewrite history and appeal to glorious myths to rally popular support is not limited to autocrats. But the real danger arises when the official account becomes the only permitted version of history, as is now the case in Russia, China, and North Korea. Though the leaders of these regimes differ in their approach to the past, all three claim that it is their nation that is under threat, and that they must strengthen their military capabilities and ramp up their political control to defend their citizens.

Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth, Winston is told in Orwells novel. The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea take a similar view, and that has consequences for all of us.

Read more from the original source:

Putin Isn't the Only Autocrat Misusing History - The Atlantic

The century-long history of the University of Illinois Athletic Association (AA), predecessor to the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics, brimmed with highlights, but ended in tumultuous fashion in the late 1980s.

Americas interest in athletics initially formed around the end of the Civil War in 1865, concurrent to the UIs founding two years later in 1867. The student bodys attentiveness to physical well-being evolved from boating, racing and cycling to a new team sport called baseball which history shows originated a couple of decades earlier. It soon became the king of American sports, including Champaign-Urbana. The first record of an athletic contest at the University occurred on May 8, 1872 when a group of UI students defeated the Eagle Baseball Club of Champaign by a score of 2-1. The game eventually progressed into intercollegiate competition seven years later.

By the 1880s, athletics had eclipsed oratorical competitions as the students favorite non-academic diversion. On April 20, 1883, UI students combined their original baseball and football organizations to form the Athletic Association, a group that was responsible for caring for the campuss gymnasium and for organizing the annual Field Day activities. All male students were eligible for membership.

In 1891, the AA obtained land on the north end of campus, and on May 15, 1892, Athletic Park was inaugurated. Its name was changed to Illinois Field in 1896. That same year, UI trustees directed by-laws of the Association to be subject to the approval of the faculty. At the turn of the century, an Athletic Advisory Council assisted in the management of the AA and, shortly thereafter, faculty, alumni and student managers comprised an Athletic Board of Control and Athletic Council to form policy. In 1965, the AAs by-laws were amended to transfer oversight of the intramural and recreation programs to UIs College of Physical Education.

On the heels of Title IX legislation, the athletic administration assumed responsibility for administering the new womens intercollegiate athletic program in 1974. Two years later, UIs Board of Trustees approved plans to change the organizations name to the Athletic Association of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. By 1982, a total of 19 board members oversaw the group.

During the decade of the 1980s, the AA experienced both triumph and tragedy. The football and basketball programs enjoyed monumental success, but overall administration of the AA began to unravel.

When word leaked out to the media that embarrassing scandals and improprieties were taking place inside Director of Athletics Neale Stoners administrative staff, a thorough investigation by the university resulted in dissolving the Association.

Stoner and two aides resigned in July 1988 amid allegations of mismanagement and a plan to reorganize the AA was approved six months later. Chancellor Morton Weir brought the athletic departments business within the jurisdiction of the university administration, an action with which both the states legislature and the Auditor General strongly concurred. By July 1989, new athletic director John Mackovic reported directly to the chancellor, being treated similarly to deans of the engineering and business colleges.

Sunday: Steve Holdren, basketball (36)

Monday: Prince Green, football (19)

Tuesday: Lucas Johnson, basketball (42)

Wednesday: Connor Milton, baseball (20)

Thursday: Calvin Brock, basketball (36)

Friday: Ted Niezyniecki, baseball (55)

Saturday: Joey Gunther, wrestling (25)

By Mike Pearson, author of Illini Legends, Lists & Lore (Third Edition now available in stores). Get more Illini birthdays, trivia and historical tidbits daily on Twitter @IlliniLegends and @Spartifacts2022. His website is http://www.SportsLLL.com.

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Illini Legends, Lists and Lore: History of UI's Athletic Association - News-Gazette

May Day demonstrators march through downtown Los Angeles last year. Thousands of people took to the streets across the nation that May 1 in rallies calling for immigration reform, workers' rights and police accountability. Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP hide caption

May Day demonstrators march through downtown Los Angeles last year. Thousands of people took to the streets across the nation that May 1 in rallies calling for immigration reform, workers' rights and police accountability.

May Day, celebrated by workers across the globe as International Labor Day, falls on May 1.

But you'd be forgiven if that's news to you. While the day traces its origins to an American laborers' fight for a shorter work day, the U.S. does not officially recognize International Labor Day.

Like other countries that mark Labor Days on different dates, the U.S. and Canada celebrate their Labor Day in September.

U.S. resistance to celebrate International Labor Day also called International Workers' Day in May stems from a resistance to emboldening worldwide working-class unity, historians say.

"The ruling class did not want to have a very active labor force connected internationally," said Peter Linebaugh, author of The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day. "The principle of national patriotism was used against the principle of working-class unity or trade union unity."

That hasn't stopped American workers from commemorating the day, which in recent years has ranged from marching for labor rights to reading literature about Marxism.

"The meaning of that day keeps changing," Linebaugh said.

Before we consider how May Day has evolved in the U.S., let's dive into how it all began.

If you instead associate May Day with baskets of flowers, dancing around maypoles, or simply, the start of summer, those May Day celebrations recall the holiday's much earlier origins. Before May Day was adopted as a day to champion workers, its roots belonged to pagan tradition.

The springtime tradition was inherited from pagan tribes in Ireland and Scandinavia, said Linebaugh, borrowing ancient Roman practices celebrating the Earth's flowering season. When the first Europeans came to North America and erected a maypole in Quincy, Mass., they imbibed copious amounts of beer and danced with the Indigenous people, he said.

"The Puritans of Boston put an end to it by military force," Linebaugh said. "And yet this tradition of May Day as a time of dancing and play and pleasure persisted right into many parts of the U.S. today."

At the end of the day, no matter your version of May Day, it remains a time meant to celebrate togetherness. Inevitably, history shows, that May Day comradery has been met with suppression.

May Day in America was born out of the 8-hour workday movement in 19th-century Chicago. At the time, as the capitalist system gained a foothold in industrial-era America, working-class conditions had worsened. A 16-hour shift wasn't unusual for workers at the time.

Decades before the 8-hour work-day became the country's norm, the organization now known as the American Federation of Labor set May 1, 1886, as the date that workers nationwide should go on strike to demand the 8-hour workday.

"The reason was that the decade before there had been terrible unemployment ... and yet new technology had made the employer richer," Bill Edelman, a professor of labor studies, previously recounted on Talk of the Nation.

The workers followed through. On that May date, anarchists and labor activists in Chicago began a multi-day strike in what became known as the Haymarket affair of 1886. By May 3, the protests turned violent when police "which were basically the armed force of the capitalist masters," according to historian Linebaugh attacked workers demonstrating near the McCormick Reaper plant. The following day, a meeting held in the city's Haymarket Square turned even bloodier. Again, the police intervened, said Linebaugh, triggering clashes that killed both officers and civilians.

A bomb exploded among police ranks in the melee, but historians say it's unclear whether it was intended for the police or the crowd of civilians.

"There was a trial of eight men who were found guilty of conspiracy to murder," Linebaugh said. "Even though no evidence was ever produced that any of them had any relationship to this bomb, and four of them were eventually hanged despite a worldwide campaign in England, Europe, Mexico to save their lives."

Linebaugh points to the influential words of August Spies, one of the convicted men, who just before his execution cried out the famous words: "There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today."

His words "swept the globe," Linebaugh said. "Throughout Latin America, throughout Europe and in North America, to many, the day became this holiday to celebrate working people."

To honor the Chicago workers, the International Socialist Conference in 1889 named May Day a labor holiday, birthing what many nations now call International Workers' Day.

But in the U.S., anti-communist attitudes during the Cold War, as well as opposition to working-class unity, led authorities to suppress May Day's association with labor movements.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower instead declared May 1 "Law Day" dedicated to the principles of government under law and Labor Day is now celebrated in September.

Despite International Labor Day's U.S. origins, said Linebaugh, many Americans, still view May Day as strictly a holiday enjoyed by "communist countries."

In the former Soviet Union, May Day was an occasion to honor workers' contributions with giant parades in Red Square, a tradition that has dwindled in the decades since a fading remnant of the Bolshevik Revolution that's lost its meaning in modern Russia.

"Some of the workers of Czarist Russia also celebrated May Day, but quickly within 10 years, say by the 1930s, it becomes [for] the Soviet Union a day to display military hardware, military weapons," Linebaugh said.

As for Americans this year, he mused, "How it will be celebrated this day?"

"I'm not sure. I think it'll be exciting to pay attention to see the ways in which its history is remembered."

For a day that celebrates reform and revolution, political discussions and petitions, said Linebaugh, there's something in it for everyone. Well, maybe not.

"There's nothing in it for the capitalist class," he said.

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The changing meanings of May Day - NPR

By Amanda Haffele

Did you know plastic was a word that originally meant pliable and easily shaped?

Today plastic refers to a type of material, the polymer. Polymers are long chains of atoms arranged in repeating patterns. Synthetic or manmade polymers are made from carbon atoms provided by petroleum and other fossil fuels. The length and patterns of each polymer are what makes them strong, lightweight, and flexible, in essence, plastic.

In 1869, John Wesley Hyatt, invented the first synthetic polymer to reduce the demand for ivory used in billiards. The creation of different types of plastics expanded throughout the 1900s. However, the production of plastic didnt really take off until World War II. During this time period, the need to preserve scarce resources is what drove the production of plastic to an all-time high.

According to the Chemical Heritage Foundation, plastic production increased by 300 percent during the war. In 1935, Wallace Carothers created nylon to replace silk, making it a big player in plastic production during this time. Nylon was used to make ropes, parachutes, body armor, helmets, and other items.

Fast forward to 2021 and plastic is everywherefrom our electronics to appliances to dishes to our vehicles. Plastic has shaped the way we function as a society. It is lighter weight than other materials, therefore, reducing transportation costs and greenhouse gas emissions. Its strong, durable, and relatively inexpensive to make.

However, we must keep in mind that plastic is a manmade material which means it cant break down into anything Mother Nature can utilize. It takes approximately 450 years for a plastic bottle to break down into tiny pieces of plastic, but it never truly goes away.

What can we do? Now thats simple. Buy plastic that we know can be reused or recycled or try to avoid it altogether.

In our community, we can recycle plastic bottles, jugs, and tubs curbside.

Why do we only recycle bottles, jugs, and tubs? Markets and equipment are why. These types of plastic containers have the highest resale value, are the easiest materials to process at a Material Recovery Facility or recycling facility, and have reliable and available markets (meaning a company will buy these in large quantities to be made into new items).

This is due partially to their uniform shape, streamlining of modern technology, and the fact that these materials have been recycled for a longer period of time, therefore, making equipment more efficient and widely available.

Not sure if an item can be recycled? Give us a call and well help you determine the best disposal solution, (715) 346-6297.

Amanda Haffele is the solid waste director for Portage County

See the rest here:

Column: The history of plastic will likely surprise you - Point/Plover Metro Wire