Category Archives: History

History is best told through relatable human stories.  Monterey County Weekly

Read more from the original source:

History is best told through relatable human stories. - Monterey County Weekly

History made in China as Xi Jinping to serve third term - breaking decades-long precedent  Sky News

See more here:

History made in China as Xi Jinping to serve third term - breaking decades-long precedent - Sky News

No matter who wins, the next Governor of Arkansas will make history  KNWA

Read the rest here:

No matter who wins, the next Governor of Arkansas will make history - KNWA

Ole Miss vs. LSU history: Last time they played, who has won the most games, best moments  DraftKings Nation

Read the original here:

Ole Miss vs. LSU history: Last time they played, who has won the most games, best moments - DraftKings Nation

Broomsticks, cauldrons and pointy hats oftencome to mind when someone says the word "witch."Around Halloween and spooky season, famous characters and specific imagerysurfaces when witches are mentioned.

From the Wicked Witch of the West to the Sanderson Sisters from "Hocus Pocus," women using magic for evil (and in some cases, good)hasshaped cultural understandings of the craft.Butthese, among other stereotypes,are far from the truth for real-life practitioners.

Here'sa breakdown on the history of witchcraft and an answer to the age-old question, "Are witches real?"

Read more: 13 witch books that cast a spell on us, including 'Hour of the Witch,' 'The Ex Hex'

The perfect place to visit this Halloween: Salem, Massachusetts, is 'Witch City'

Witchcraft is anebulous term and is hard to distinctly define as it is open to interpretation depending on the practitioner or scholar.

As a practice, witchcraft dates back as early as the 10th century. However,it grew in prominence asa Renaissance phenomenonaround the 15th century, said Fabrizio Conti, Ph.D.,historian and lecturer in history at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy.

"We can define witchcraftas a series of beliefsthat were put together by intellectual means," he said.

According to Conti,historicalinterpretations of witchcraft depend oncertain scholars. For instance, some believe all witchcraft sharesthe same elements and beliefs everywhere. However, others take an approach similar to historian Richard Kieckhefer, who stated certain mythologies in witchcraft are found in specific geographical locations and not in others, defining witchcraft as more individual, cultural and regional.

"We can have a degree of a shade of differences," said Conti. "In northern Italy, for instance, you have,according to Kieckhefer, different mythologies of witchcraft: the Umbrian type of witchcraft,central Italian type of witchcraft, the French (type of witchcraft) and so forth."

Additionally, witchcraft is often solelyassociated with black, or darkmagic but this is not the case. Not all practitioners of witchcraft use it with "bad"intentions. In fact, most practices are benign and often used as a form of empowerment.

Just Curious?More of your everyday questions answered

Negative images of witches within Western society came into view when religious leaders, particularlyDominican inquisitors, took askeptical approachtowardwitchcraft, thus beginning "the process of diabolization," said Conti.

In the 15th century, the "Malleus Maleficarum," translated to "The Hammer of Witches," by Heinrich Kramer popularized theidea that witchcraftis to perform evil acts and spells, particularlyagainst men.

The first visualof witches flying on broomsticks came through "Le champion des dames," which depicted two women, one riding a broom and the other riding a stick. These women were "Waldensians," who were later accused by the Churchof practicing witchcraft and holding illicit Sabbath celebrations.

From there, the condemnation of witches continued to grow as witchcraft became a heretical crime. The"Malleus Maleficarum" spurred centurieslong witch-hunts and trials within Europe, codifying folklore into fact.

Additionally, gender played a large role in shaping the stereotypesof witchcraft. Religious clergymendepicted thatonly women could be witches. These men saw women to be weaker,thus perpetuatingmisogynistic ideals.

"It was areligious intellectual traditionclaiming women were particularly prone to fulfill the desires of the death of Satan," said Conti. "They were consider to be weak: weak in their mind, weak in their own behavior, weak in their own body, limbs and so forth."

Back then, men were seen as smarter and more clever, being able to resist the so-called demonic temptations women could not. As a result, even the crime of heresy was gendered.Heresy isa doctrinal, theological component meaning tocontradictreligious beliefs. Generally, men wereaccused of being heretics, but not witches.

"In order to become a heretic, you need it to be smarter," said Conti. "On the contrary, in order to become a witch,(you could be) a simple woman from a village scatteredin the middle of nowhere."

In the U.S., these same principles applied to the vilifying of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials whichoccurredbetween 1692 and 1693. More than200 people were accused of practicing "Devil's magic," and20were condemned to execution.

Fact check: Witches weren't burned at the stake in American colonies, historians say

Yes, witches are real, and they are no different than anyone else.

"Witches are your neighbors," said Jason Mankey, author and Wiccan-Witch. "And more and more of them are becoming your neighbors aswe're in the middle of this witchmoment right now."

As of 2021, the numberof Americans who identify with Wicca or paganism has risen over the last two decades withapproximately 1.5 million witches in the U.S.

For Pam Grossman,author of "Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power," witchcraft is a spiritual and creative practice of personal changeand bringing about change in the world. Grossman had been interested in magic, mythology and fairy tales since childhood, and with age, her connection grew deeper.

"I often say that most people grow out of their magic phase, and I just grew more deeply into mine," she said.

Everyperson's experience with witchcraft is different.In its current state, there are many different types of witchcraft, ranging from kitchen witchcraft andgreen witchcraftto crystal witchcraftand cosmic witchcraft.

"Depending on what people are attracted tothat often defines what kind of witchcraft they practice," said Mankey. "If you love herbsand you love playing in your garden, you might identify as a green witch. If you love cooking and you find magic in food and drink, you might identify as a kitchen witch."

Witchcraft can also be a spiritual or religious practice. For instance, certain sectors of witchcraft, such as Wicca, centeraroundmodernized Pagan traditions and beliefs.

"Paganism is a spiritual path which honors the divinity of nature and the cycles of the seasons, the cycles of the body," said Grossman. "For me, celebrating the Pagan holidays has helped me be more in tune with nature."

This includes Halloween, or in the Pagan community, "Samhain."It is seen as the time when the veil between the physical and spirit worlds is thinnest."So, it's a time of honoring our ancestors and connecting with the spirit world," said Grossman.

Additionally, magic and witchcraft is an opportunity for people to take control over their own circumstances, said Mankey.

"Over the last six years, for many of us, things have been a little topsy turvy," he said. "Magic andwitchcraft provide a way to feel as if you're in control of this situation and what's going on in the world."

For EmilyRamirez, a green witch and kitchen witch, practicing has given her a sense of freedom.

"Witchcraft is to me is self-empowermentand attunement with the divine," she said. "I've been able to find strength and courage."

What's the deal with WitchTok? We spoke to creators bringing magic to TikTok.

Anyone can be a witch.Witches can be from any background, identity or gender.

"I don't think there are any barriers to being a witch," said Mankey. "If you say you are a witch, I think that you are a witch."

There are not specific tools you need to become a witch. Practitioners can choose what to use, whether it be candles and crystals or tarot cards.

Grossman uses altars to engage with the physical realm to elevate her practice. She also uses herbalism and plants, as well as talismans and amulets tobring protective energy.

Ramirez said one of themost amazing thingabout witchcraft is its self-direction. "There is no wrong path. There is no wrong move," she said. "You do what feels good to you and that is the craft; that is you practicing."

Being a witch is about using the power and intuition from within to better yourself and those around you.

"Witchcraft is also an incredibly creative act, and the more personal one gets with their practice, the more powerful the results are," said Grossman. "There's an art fullness to it. There's a playfulness to it. There's a joyfulness to it, and I think we all need more of each of those things in our lives."

"There are a lot of people who like to put barriers up when it comes to the practice of witchcraft. I'm not one of them," said Mankey. "If it calls to you,find out about it, embrace it, research it, and then most of all, start doing it."

'We're in the middle of a witch moment': Hip witchcraft is on the rise in the US

There are still many misconceptions and stereotypes when it comes to witchcraft. Namely, people believe all modern witchcraft is associated with the devil. But, this is not the case.Mankey said early modern witchesdistanced themselves from this idea entirely.

There is also the general misconception that witchcraft is related to anything demonic, said Ramirez.

"The most obvious one is just this association of witchcraft with evil," said Grossman. "I often say that darkness is not evil.Witchcraft honors shadow and light;it honors life and death."

As for the stereotype of the black-clad, green-skinned, warty-nosedwitches, that is not the reality for modern witches either.

"All of that really came from the 'Wizard of Oz'in 1939," said Mankey. "There's a direct line to the 'Wizard of Oz' to that stereotype of the Halloween witch."

Follow this link:

What is witchcraft? The definition, the types and the history. - USA TODAY

This text was originally published in Persian on the Iranian feminist platform Harass Watch, on September 28, 2022. The first English translation of the text was published on the Arab ezine Jadaliyya on October 5, 2022.

This anonymously written text isnt so old. It is probably three weeks old as we write this collective introduction on why we, a non-organized group of feminists in Iran, felt that it must travel beyond the borders of Iran, beyond the limits of the Persian language. There are texts throughout history that become pivotal for a people. Women Reflected in Their Own History is a cornerstone, an achievement in articulating a collective desire and a collective consciousness that secures it a place in the history of Persian writing. It is a prominent text in the history of all struggles throughout the longue dure of revolutions and movements in the region.

The text at hand resonates across multiple registers: the history of protest movements; creativity; identity; and the modes of production of historical agency. One witnesses a historical collision of videos taken by mobile phones, a phenomenon that was present at the zenith of the Arab Spring and the Iranian Green Movement, here folded back onto the history of photography yet revolving around the unfolding history of citizens choreographed performances in the street.

What makes this text a groundbreaking piece of intersectional feminist revolutionary writing? It is in the way the author interweaves feminine sexual drives and female sexualitya feminine identification that stimulates and invites other women into its chain of becomings. It presents and brings forth the cultivation of nervous systems that spread out quickly, beyond the borders of Iran, back and forth, weaving mourning and celebration, militant struggle and discourse.

L, the anonymous author of the text, claims to be a resident of a little town outside Tehran. She must be between her late twenties and early forties. In an almost total absence of fair and unbiased journalism in the Islamic Republic, and due to the difficulty of translating between contexts in which the protests are moving ahead, the poetic prose and theorizations of L, her personal, sensual, and affective articulations, resonate with what other individuals have experienced.

For Zhina, Niloufar, Elaheh, Mahsa, Elmira, and those whose names I havent yet uttered.

What follows is an attempt to understand what one intuits about a gapthe gap between watching videos and photographs of the protests and being in the street. This is an attempt to elaborate the short circuit between these two arenas, those of the virtual space and the street, in this historical moment. I must stress that what I have witnessed and been inspired by might not necessarily apply to other cities. I live in a small town that differs from bigger cities or even other smaller ones in terms of the location where protests usually take place. This text is not intended to universalize this situation towards a general conclusion, but to elaborate on this particular situation and the influence it has had on me.

The protests reached my little town after breaking out in Kurdistan and Tehran. For some days I encountered videos of protests on the streets, passionate songs, photographs, and the figures of militant women, and on Wednesday eventually I found myself in a street protest. It was very strange: the first moments of being there, on the street, surrounded by the protesters whom until yesterday I had watched and admired on the screen of a phoneastonished by their courage, I had grieved and cried for them. I was looking around and was trying to synchronize the images of the street with its reality. What I saw was very similar to what I had watched before, but there was a gap between my watching self and my self on the street, and I needed a few moments to register it. The street wasnt the bearer of horror anymore, but just an ordinary space. Everything was ordinary, even when those with batons, guns, and shock prods were attacking to disperse us. I dont know how to describe the word ordinary, or what better synonym to use in its place. The distance between myself and those images that I was desiring had decreased. I was that image, I was coming to my senses and realizing that I am in a ring of women burning headscarves, as if I had always been doing that before. I was coming to my senses and realizing I was being beaten a few moments ago.

Being beaten in reality is much more ordinary than what I had seen before. The pain wasnt like what I had imagined from watching the videos. While being beaten, the body is warm, as the [Persian] saying goes, and pain is not felt as expected. We had watched bodies struck by pellet bullets several times before, but those who have experienced it say pellets are not that painful or scary either. On the street, you suddenly think you must run, and the next moment you see that youve already started running. You tell yourself you must light a cigarette, and you see yourself there among the people and you are smoking. The body moves ahead of cognition and doesnt synchronize. I think even death isnt that scary for one who has experienced the street. The experience of the street suspends death and thats the real fear. This is exactly what scares the viewers: watching people who are ready to die. We are ready to die. No, we arent even ready. We are freed from thinking about death. We have left death behind. Proximity and encountering fears and overcoming them while your body is warm: the realm of the real.

When I got away from the scuffle with the anti-riot forces and escaped into the crowd, I heard lots of cheers. After the protests, walking back home late at night, every now and then a delivery guy would pass by and show me the victory sign, or would shout, Bravo! I was still elated and couldnt register the cheers and the bravos. The next day, when I saw the bruises in the mirror, suddenly the details of the struggle appeared to me. As if I had remembered a dream that up to that point I wasnt aware of having experienced. I was reminded of the details, one by one, for the first time. My body had cooled down and my mind had started working. I wasnt only beaten, I had also resisted and had punched and kicked too. My body had unconsciously executed what I had watched the other protesters do. I remembered the surprised faces of the anti-riot police who had me in their hands. Only after this momentary interval did my memory reach my body.

The tangible difference between the protests I had experienced in the past and the current ones is the shift from an inclination to mass and move in crowds towards a tendency to create situations. The group of protesters, right before the arrival of the anti-riot forces, would gather to create something around a situation, and would disperse with the arrival of the anti-riot police after a short struggle, according to the parameters of the street and the neighborhood, and then take shape in another spot. These situations were created by blocking the street, setting dumpsters on fire, and making a traffic jam. In this short time, the small yet active group would quickly attempt to create a situation: Now lets burn our headscarves. A woman would jump on top of a dumpster, raise her fist towards the cars, and hold that figure for a few seconds. Another woman would get on top of a car and wave her head scarf. A few middle-aged women accompanied the core protesters from the beginning to the end, and as soon as the police would try to carry the protesters away, they would rush to free them. Everyone wanted to join the flood of images that they had watched in the videos of the protests the days before. Rarely would one hear any slogans and the chanters wouldnt exceed more than a handful. The desire to become that image, the image of resistance that the people of my town had witnessed, was clear to me. Now I want to answer the question of why this is a feminist revolution and elaborate on this desire.

As I mentioned already, the current uprisings do not revolve around masses but around situations, not around slogans, but around figures. Anyonetruly anyoneas we witnessed these days, can create an unbelievably radical situation of resistance on her own, so that watching it will leave one astonished. The faith in such capacity has spread widely and quickly. Everyone knows that with that figure of resistance, one creates an unforgettable situation. People, and especially womenthese obstinate pursuers of their desiresare chasing this new desire fervently day by day. This desire in turn drives a chain of desires for creating new situations and new figures of resistance: I want to be that woman with that figure of resistance, the one I saw the picture of, and I create a figure. These unrehearsed figures were in the unconscious of the protestors, as if they had been rehearsing them for years. This figure of resistance, this body recorded in photographs, stimulates the desire for other women to create a figure, in the next link of the chain. What desires were released from the prison of our bodies during these days!

I want to contrast the force vector that during the 2009 Green Movement, for instance, was constituted by the masses with these stimulation nodesdispersed and diverse nodes on the street. The stimulation points, similar to female orgasm, arent determined and concentrated in any point of the street/body. Besides the slogan Woman, Life, Freedom and the feminist activists call to the first demonstrations being the starting point of the protests, I would say its precisely these figurative stimulation points of the protesting bodies that has made this uprising a feminist one, extending it in a feminist and feminine form and arousing womens desires all around the globe.

Turning into those figures is one of the most apparent desires of the protestersnot posing as one of those insurgent, disobedient, militant bodies is impossible. Its no longer possible to go on the street without taking the figure of one of those insurgent, disobedient, militant bodies: whether on top of a dumpster, or burning a headscarf, or freeing a detained person, or just engaging in a stubborn face-off with the anti-riot forces.

The images that weve seen of other womens resistance have given us a new understanding of our bodies. I think the singularity of this feminine resistance and its figural nature enabled the iconization of the screenshots and photographs, in contrast to the videos. Proud photographs reproduced and circulated en masse were immediately inscribed in our collective memory, so much so that one could draft a chronological account of this uprising based on the publishing date of these pictures. The images that aroused this uprising and carried it forward: the picture of Zhina on the hospital bed, the picture of her relatives embracing each other at the hospital, the picture of the Kurdish women in the Aychi cemetery waving their headscarves. What do we want to see from all those events? That moment, that frozen moment when the scarves are flying high, whirling in the sky. The photo of Zhinas gravestone, the figure of the woman with the torch in Keshavarz Boulevard, the solo figure of the woman facing the water cannon truck in Valiasr Square, the figure of the sitting woman, the figure of the standing woman, the figure of the woman with a placard in Tabriz standing face to face with the anti-riot forces, the figure of the woman tying up her hair, the photo of the ring of dancers around the fire in Bandar Abbas, and several other figures.

What permeates a photo with such a tremendously more stimulating force than a video? The time that is encapsulated in the photo. The encapsulated time condenses into the photo; it carries the entire history that the body is subjugated to. The womens uprising in Iran is a photocentric one. What extends from this feminist footprint and doesnt allow it to get lost? After Zhinas name, after Woman, Life, Freedom, while the scale of repression is such that gathering is no longer possible and protests are not reliant on slogans, its the figures of womens struggles that turn this uprising into a still-feminine uprising. This encapsulated time problematizes the linear historical narrative and highlights instead the topology of the situation: the gestures, the moments, that same incremental everyday fight we are occupied with. #for that moment and all those moments. Not for a totalizing narrative, but for any small thing. For those incremental moments that slip away, for reclaiming them, for that lump in the throat, for that fear, for that fervor, for that word, for that moment that has extended til now, that has dragged itself til today, under our skin, under our nails, camouflaging inside the lump in our throat. The present perfect tense, the photos time is in the present perfect tense: it arouses desires, brings the past into life, extends it to a moment before now and, in the now, hands over this marathon of moments to the moment, to the photo, and to the next figure.

In truth, what makes this uprising a feminist one, and differentiates it from the others, is its figural essence: the possibility for creating images that are neither necessarily representative of the severity of the conflict and the brutality of the repression, nor of the course of an event. A possibility that carries the history of bodies: a pause, a syncope, Look at this body!, Watch this history all the way through!, Here. The figure of the woman holding the torch, something that is self-sufficient and carries history in isolation, without reference to the moment before or after. Rather than the linear temporal continuum of video, expressing and representing the situation of confrontation, action, or repression, the history of this body is crystallized in a moment, in a revolutionary moment. Pausing on the moment when the woman is raising the torch and making a victory sign. The movement of the eyes across the frame, the shimmering light of the car behind, the raised arms, the profile of the man standing by, the trees on the street, the figure, pause. There is no need for the moment after or before in the video, because the figure is created in a historical syncope, in a pause, rather than a chronological continuum. Where the heart of history stops for a moment.

These moments and these figures are self-sufficient for representing the history of the repression of womens bodies. And this is the idiosyncrasy that sets this uprising apart. The feminist uprising of bodies and figures. The feminist essence of these protests lies in opening the space of possibility for the creation of figural images. These images-turned-icons reciprocally affect the wish to charge the space with such images. I observed this exhibitionist drive. The bodies that wanted to be that figure, that had seen that their bodies have the potential to become that figure and, consequently, had endangered themselves and showed up on the scene. They were seeking to create moments of resistance within a scene where the potential to situate oneself is transient.

We have seen images of militant women before, photos of the Womens Protection Units [in Rojava]. The difference between those photos and womens figures from recent protests is the face-centrism of the former and the facelessness of the latter. The uniqueness of the former in armor and with weaponry and the genericity of the latter in everyday attire. The close-ups of beautiful faces in resistance uniforms (the photographers desire) were transformed into images of figures of resistance (the subjects desire). I want you to see me like this: let-down hair with clenched fists, figures of bodies standing over dumpsters and cars.

These figures remind me of Vida Movaheds figure and the other girls of Enqelab Street. As if Vida is the disruptive pinnacle of representing womens struggles in Iran. The turning point away from the message-and-face-centric videos of the White Wednesdays, mostly selfies, of women who would walk down the street and record something of their circumstances and demands on video. Vida Movahed became the intensive figure of all those videos that preceded her of women without compulsory hijabs strolling down the street. Silent and steady. The transition point from video to photo. The transition from the narration of everyday conditions to the creation of a historical situation. The transition from a person who talks about herself and her demands to a silent and steady figure: the figure of resistance. Here, the image of the defiant woman removed itself from the temporal continuum of video, and leapt from representing everyday conditions onto the intensive platform of historical performativity. Vida Movahed, that obscure woman, was not Vida Movahed but a photo of a revolutionary figure. The figure of all women before her, and the catalyst of all women after.

The image and the figure collapse into one another in an infinite loop. Images are published and are reproduced, and they in turn stimulate the imagination of other bodies. Individuals go to the street with the bodies they want and the bodies they can be, rather than the ones they are: with their imagination. Their revolutionary act is to interpret this image. In fact, in the intersection of the image and the street, representation and reality reciprocally guide one another.

A dream/representation/interpretation of a dream can easily impose itself on the realm of the real. To transform into that image and simultaneously inspire the desire of other bodies, the chain of images: The short circuit of the virtual space and the street.

Next to these individual figures, we also witness collective figures: the ring where women set their scarves on fire. The dancing ring around the fire spreads from Sari to other cities. We see the propagation of collective figures without it being clear where they come from. In the early days of the protests, a video circulated of a small group of women protesting in Paveh. The video showed a small and solitary group of women approaching from the end of a street. This small group, whose gathering seems extremely perilous, is reminiscent of the demonstrations by Afghan women. That historical situation links two images, two groups. There are many images that are never born (are not taken) and many images that dont become operational (dont cause a protest). Many self-immolations or deaths.

How did these figures become operational (instead of being a photo thats merely taken)? The figures were operational because they were the historical reflections of women. I think instead of the original statement I could also be Zhina, the image of the woman holding a torch on top of a car strongly provoked a different desire: I want to be that figure too. The desire to be that promissory figure. And it was that figure that could compel womens bodies to express themselves and to polish the rust off the mirrors in front of them. Even though that desire was provoked through the channel of an image, it became a revolutionary and blossoming desire by means of the history which that body was impregnated with. This figural desire is the idiosyncrasy of this feminist uprising. The upsurge of repressed history. Giving birth to a body weve been carrying for years.

The figures we have seen in activist women so far, though not all of them, the ones who were accused of exhibitionism, the figures whose mediatized faces and much-publicized names obstructed the activation of their political force and circulationthe face and the name sterilize the figure from evoking other womens desire, since they separate that figures condition from the common condition of women. Now this figure is relieved of the shackles of the face and has become a faceless public one, covered with a mask, obscured due to security concerns: an image from the back, without a name, anonymous. The body politic of women is spreading across every street.

From the beautiful body to an inspiring figure. From the body confined in beauty to the body freed in the figure. This is not a transformation of the self to an ideal body, but every time and in each body, its the creation of a new figure of struggle. While being inspired and provoked by previous figures it has observed in virtual space, the body creates new figures and, in return, inspires future figures. The chain of stimulation and inspiration. This figure has liberated women from confinement in the body and its historical subjugation, and their bodies have flourished in its wake. A body that has just discovered the possibility and the beauty of resistance: yet another maturity.

Translators Afterword

Why did we feel the urge to translate, and translate yet again, and proliferate the translations of Ls text? Translation is integral to Jin, Jian, Azadi (Women, Life, Freedom). The term revolution acquired its insurgent connotation in its translation from the science of astronomythe gravitational revolution of astronomical objects around large masses. However, this decentering dimension of revolution went astray several times throughout history when it had the capacity to decentralize humankind or egocentrism in the constellation of living beings by acknowledging the seductive forces of you.

Jin, Jian, Azadi is born from the statelessness of the Kurdish struggle; in essence, it undermines the phallocentric aspects of revolutionary language. It continuously decentralizes the imaginaries of the nation-state. By putting the freedom of the other at the center of its existence, it brought to light the interdependence of the struggle of subjugated peoples. We trust that by addressing our imagined allies, immediate neighbors, and faraway comrades alike we will benefit from cultivating neural networks that bridge the bodily and the mentalsimilar to how Arabs, Gilaks, Baluchis, and Persian speakers have socially endorsed and translated the Kurdish Jin, Jian, Azadi as the emblem of their ongoing intersectional protests across Iran.

To amplify and extend Ls text, we wish to add multiple voices who responded to two questions: Why do you think this text is so significant? How does your own experience resonate with what is expressed in these lines? The answers to the first question are gathered here, and the answers to the second question are documented in an open-source document to which more people can add their personal notes. The respondents come from several small and bigger cities, in both the socioeconomic centers and peripheries of the country, as well as the Iranian diaspora living abroad.

One of the respondents gives an account of remembering the 2009 uprising and the struggle of a young woman with her protective father who didnt want to allow her to join the protests. Her father, having lost a beloved to the Iran-Iraq war, was afraid of losing another. Its my turn, she said. You did your revolution, now its my turn! Yet the respondent also asks how the nature of the death-driven allure of honor, which prevailed in the Iran of the early eighties, had changed in 2009, and to what extent it has changed in the recent uprisings, where swarms of high school teenage girls are on the front line, occupying the streets and their classrooms. L writes about the struggle between the fear of death, overcoming that fear, and the life-driven enunciation of bodily pleasure, the pleasure of a freed choreography of women on the street whose exhibitionism for each other stimulates other women, in Iran and beyond.

What is clear in most responses to Ls text is a sense of generational continuity for revolutionary thought. From the everyday struggle of our mothers and all the other women of our lives, towards our fresh imaginations of womxnand, in between, long periods of faith in reformism, ongoing life, and the experience of hidden and more obvious forms of oppressionthe future remains unclear, the dead ends of the past have cracked up, and we encounter the flooding anger and hope of the becoming of women. In its multiplicities, what became clear for this respondent is that for once, we are not the minority within a minority, and we are not rebels; we are not exceptions.

Another respondent points out the hysteric structure of the situation and how it must be difficult for those with an obsessive psychic structure to bear the unrests: there is no idea for them to hold onto without it already being coupled with the bodily and the affective, a fearful condition for obsessive minds that survive by decoupling the body, with its pleasures and pains, from words, theories, and ideas.

Ls text brings about a network of sensations and recognitions, and many of the respondents acknowledge that it evokes the very nature of the collective registration of each other, the true becoming of women reflected in their own history. For once, the experience of being outsidethe diasporic experienceis taken out of the usual register of melancholia: the loss of ones self to oneself, in its asphyxiating relationship to misogynistic self-resentment. The image of womens upsurge on the street shocks the body out of its melancholic lassitude, a freedom that many of our bodies in so-called liberal settings have not yet incorporated despite years of migration. In this mirroring relationship to the image, our diasporic bodies are also freed. As one of the respondents writes:

From the start of this revolution, Ive been grappling with experiencing. The experience of being freed. Like the image Ive seen of becoming freed. I come to my senses and I realize Im reenacting in my head, being there and ripping off and burning my scarf. Its strange, because Ive been freed from the hijab for years, but its become clear to me that the imperative of freedom hasnt happened to me yet. I only feel the freedom from the hijab when I imagine myself in the context of being on the street, taking off the scarf from my head and being scared by staying with my fear, staying with the others. Reading this text and Ls description eased out the cognition of this feeling.

Ls text is experiential reportage, oscillating between the bodily and the mental, an expansion of the momentary gap between the body and what it translates or transfigures into the mentaland, in that very gap, calcified theories and pillars of our old language are deconstructed and restructured and, through cuts and twists and subversions, are turned into an orgasmic sensibility: a space for self-recognition, an auto-erotic moment of coming of age, the age of pride and exuberance, no matter how painful, no matter how dangerous.

The bodily experiences expressed within the text refer to identifications with the still photographs and moving images capturing the brutalities. As one respondent writes from the streets of Gohardasht, upon encountering the police her body immediately moved and stood in front of her younger cousin before she could even think. In that moment, she could see the image of this new body reflecting back in the eyes of the people in the street witnessing what was happening. The photographic becomes the medium of self-determination on the street. In turning bodily experience into a crossroads of seeings and showings, hearings and sensations of being beaten, gatherings and dispersals, and the retrospective recognition of the masses transmuting into more formalized crowds, the text becomes a crossroads of art history and media theory.

L enfolds the experience of watching videos back on the history of photographs, and both in relation to the choreography of the bodies who move ahead of their minds. Art history lags behind this demolished and restructured experience of performance with each other and for each other. The history of photography, of video art, and of choreography meet on the streets of a little town in Iran and they are received by the identification of women who move back and forth to distill a figural monument of themselves out of the endless hours of recorded videos, into unforgettable fleeting moments of photographs that last forever. Dispersed and unpredictable, the multiverse of such triumphs are truly described as the female orgasm, no specific spot of the street/body is there to be recognized as the center, neither for the protestors nor for the forces of repression.

Those forces are the most exhausted, the worst nightmare of anyone with a phallic fixationperformance anxiety has struck them, as is obvious in their faces and their lack of determination, and pathetically put in the cries of their social media attempts to accuse Woman, Life, Freedom of being the enemys cultural war, a sexual revolution. Ls love letter makes those nightmares come true, she verbalizes and analyzes the fusions of our sexual and militant life-driven dances: in our identification with each other, we become who we become.

L is ahead of language, but by breaking with the older language of disciplinary forms, by reminding us of the continuum of innovations, condensations, displacements, reformulations, and renamings, she gives language to something that is experienced collectively but turned into a collectivity named afresh. Not mothers to children, not sisters to brothers, not daughters to fathers: women, reflected in their own history. Sisterhood triangulated with the words of a refreshing, recognizable trinity: Jin, Jian, Azadi!

This open-source document gathers responses to Ls text. It contributes to this everyday, ongoing activity of naming, naming in the mirror of our own history. This document is an invitation to everyone to multiply these articulations by adding your own link to this Jian-driven chain: your experience, responses, and translations into your own language.

Original post:

Women Reflected in Their Own History - Notes - E-Flux

Annette Wells is the new director of the Wood County Museum.

J.D. Pooley | Sentinel-Tribune

Everything in Annette Wells history has led to her new job as director of the Wood County Museum, started in August.

Her first job was at the Edison Birthplace Museum in Milan, the former home of inventor Thomas Edison.

That was my job on the weekends in high school. I was a docent and I gave tours, and then I cleaned the place, Wells said. I dont know how many times I did that tour, but I could tell it in my sleep.

Ive always loved history, but that got the ball rolling.

While attending college at Mercyhurst in Pennsylvania, Wells visited the Niagara, a tall ship that is a replica of Oliver Hazard Perrys flagship from the War of 1812s Battle of Lake Erie. There was a museum attached to the ship.

One of my professors was a former director of the Erie Maritime Museum. He not only knew the history, but he knew what makes a good museum and the kind of elements that goes into what makes a good exhibit, and what attracts children and how do you make history important to people.

How do you get them to take pride in their heritage by doing exhibits and programs that feature things about their ancestors?

After graduating with a degree in public history, she was hired as the Edison Birthplace Museum director. That led to the directors job at the Maritime Museum of Sandusky.

It had a venue to rent, and there were many more exhibits and programs, including a lecture series, Wells said.

That was really the next step up. It was like a whole other world, she said. It was a smaller, local museum. But it had so much potential. I really loved that place.

Her husbands career, though, took the family away from Ohio and her work. At the end of 2018, they relocated to Georgia after Dominic finished his doctorate and was hired at Clayton State University.

Wells settled into mom mode, raising her two boys, who are now in preschool and first grade, but the family missed Ohio.

Two years later, Dominic, who graduated from Bowling Green State University, was hired at the university in the political science department, and the family moved back to Northwest Ohio.

With her boys a little older, Wells started looking for work and ended up as site manager for the North Baltimore Senior Center.

They do programs for seniors, in addition to serving lunch everyday, she said. I liked the program aspect of it. And, a few times, we actually had the (Wood County Museum) educational coordinator, Mike McMaster, come down and do a history program on Wood County. Those were the best.

Wells heard about the opening of the history museums director job and decided to apply.

Id been to the site a few times, but Id never had a tour, she said. I knew it was a large, historical, working farm at one point and that it was a partnership between the historical society and the county. And that is something I had never experienced.

Wells, who started in August, said that she is appreciating the robust staff at the museum. That includes McMaster, a curator and events publicist.

Together, they are planning the next big exhibit at the museum. It will be on World War II with a 2025 debut.

Its going to take a full year to build it, and it probably next year to plan it, Wells said.

They are also planning a smaller exhibit on development disabilities and its history in Wood County.

Music and the Museum, an outdoor event that was a hit this summer, will be expanded in 2023, Wells said.

In addition to the staff, she also appreciates the museum grounds, with a log cabin, oil derrick and cemetery, and all it has to offer the community.

I see people enjoying it in different ways. You have the people who read every (informational) panel word for word. It takes them all day to go through the museum.

And then you have families with young kids that come through. And, yes, they kind of breeze through, but they get something out of it.

More:

History in the making: Wells is new museum director - Sent-trib - Sentinel-Tribune

Friday, Oct 14, 2022 8:34Updated Friday, Oct. 14, 2022 8:34

There is a lot to take in from this photo from the mid-1960s. The D&RGW train is returning to the station and crossing 12th Street between Main Avenue and Camino del Rio. The lumber yard in the foreground is about where Natural Grocers is located today. The Phillips 66 station is where Durango Joes Coffee is now. If you look closely, you can see the Smiley Building in mid-picture, the 9-R Administration Building in the top right corner, The Durango Herald Building just above the train cars and a Texaco sign advertising Brennans Firestone located at the corner of 12th and Main Avenue. Across the street, todays Buckley Park is obscured by trees. It is in this area that the proposed Animas River Trail underpass to downtown may be located. Ed Horvat for Animas Museum, edhorvat@animasmuseum.org (Catalog Number: 22.13.4 from the La Plata County Historical Society Photo Collections)

More here:

And the West is History: Train Crossing 12th Street - 1966 - The Durango Herald

(Fotoreport Quelle AG / AP Images)

Thank you for signing up forThe Nations weekly newsletter.

Where should a history of the Internet begin? If you asked this question to a Zoomer or one of the ever-growing groups of digital natives who can recall viral videos as vividly as awkward school dances, you might expect social media as an answer. Among millennials, a more common response might be the World Wide Web. This image-rich system of pages and hyperlinkspopularized by easy-to-use browsers like Mosaic in the 1990s and Google Chrome todaycontinues to shape the everyday experience of browsing the online environment.

In the 1970s, before the invention of Facebook and Twitter, millions of American computer hobbyists, activists, and entrepreneurs across the country connected with one another using electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs). This largely forgotten technology was central to the popularization of the Internet. In The Modem World, a new book by Kevin Driscoll, we encounter the diverse ecosystem of digital communities that sprung up in this wave of popular use. Using dial-up modems, personal computers, do-it-yourself microcomputer kits, and shared computer labs on college and high school campuses, BBS administrators and users created a remarkably open and collaborative online culture. In his history of these platforms, Driscoll offers a sober portrait of an older digital world whose warts will be familiar to any Twitter user today.

For inhabitants of an Internet designed to capture our full attention, where doomscrolling feels less like a leisure activity than a perverse metaphor for a never-ending kiddie ride into the metaverse, this book affords the odd experience of reading about the digital past and recognizing something worth rescuing for the digital future. I spoke to Driscoll about this phenomenon, the uniquely decentralized online social world of the 1980s, how technology shapes societal change, and the history of diversity in digital communities. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jacob Bruggeman

Jacob Bruggeman: Obviously, many people have written about the Internet, and I imagine youve read many of them. When do histories of the Internet typically begin, and what do you think the most common among starting points miss?

Kevin Driscoll: Depending on who you ask, you might hear about early ARPANET connections in 1969, or about a bread van kitted out with electronics driving around the Bay Area in 1977, or about the ARPANETs official adoption of the Internet protocols in 1983, or maybe even the privatization of the National Science Foundationfunded backbone in the early 1990s. If you look up history of the Internet on Google or Wikipedia, these are the stories you tend to find.

And yet, despite disagreeing about the start date, these stories [all] tell a rather narrow version of Internet history. They each call back to the same family of experimental networks funded by the US Advanced Research Projects Agency: an office within the Department of Defense. This history is not wrong, but it is limited in its explanatory power. It can tell us about the protocols and policies that made the Internet of 1995 possible, but it cant tell us how the Internet became a medium for everyday life. Current Issue

Subscribe today and Save up to $129.

To understand the popularization of the Internet, we need to look beyond Silicon Valley tech firms and US research institutions. The Internet that we use today grew out of countless pre-existing systems coming together. These pre-Internet networks included amateur bulletin boards, commercial telecom services, public data networks, and private e-mail providers. It was this process of convergence that made the Internet a network of networks.

JB: As you mention, your book recovers a history of communities built on electronic bulletin board systemswhat you call the modem world. What was the modem world? Can you introduce us to some of the people who inhabited it and explain how it was created?

KD: The modem world refers to the universe of dial-up bulletin boards and online services that began in the late 1970s and flourished for nearly two decades. Initially, very few people had ever used a computer and hardly anyone owned a computer of their own. At universities and other large institutions, computing involved sharing access to a single powerful machine. Meanwhile, a growing number of electronics enthusiasts were rallying around DIY kits and early PCs. Computer clubs and magazines began to spring up around the US. This hobbyist community created the first grassroots bulletin board systems by connecting home-brewed machines to the telephone network.

JB: The connection between BBSs and the local telephone network tied these virtual communities to specific places. Why was this so, and how did this rootedness affect the evolution of specific BBSs and the modem world writ large?

Readers like you make our independent journalism possible.

KD: The practical explanation for the local focus of BBSs was the cost of dialing the telephone. Most Americans paid a flat monthly fee for unlimited local calls and a per-minute rate to call long distance. But the sense of place was about more than the cost of calling.

Most BBSs were hosted on regular PCs out of the homes of volunteers. When you connected to a BBS, you could be dialing directly into someone elses bedroom. These were small-scale, intimate experiences. System operators customized their BBSs like a host decorating for a house party. This was not the cloud.

One side effect of the local focus of most BBSs is that the boundary between online and offline was quite blurry. The people you met online were likely to live close by. They could be classmates or neighbors. Many BBS communities organized local get-togethers for users to hang out in person.

The outcome of all this local activity was a different configuration of privacy and visibility than we later find on Internet services and cloud platforms. BBS users knew where their data was held. They could call the system administrator on the phone or meet them in person. Further, since each BBS operated independently, user data was not aggregated into vast storehouses to be aggregated and mined for targeted advertising. The trade-off was in a different form of privacy. Users could not easily hide. The modem world lacked the anonymity you might feel in a crowd.

JB: I think of John Madill and Tom Jennings, the founders of FidoNetan important BBS network you describe that decentralized its administration and formed a model for what a BBS community could be. In many ways, Madill and Jennings are emblematic members of the modem world. How does your history account for the irreducible importance of the idiosyncratic minds of individuals without becoming a mere recounting of their actions?

KD: One of the goals of this book was to expand the stories we tell about the past. Its not about myth-busting so much as myth-making. Unique individuals did amazing things. If were looking for more compelling stories about the past, there are great protagonists.

At the same time, I see the modem world as a period of widespread experimentation, bigger than any one user or system. There were over 100,000 BBSs operating in North America at one time or another. From big cities to small towns, they reached millions of computer owners during a time when the Internet was still closed off to the general public. The sheer scale means that there are countless stories yet to be told.

Early on, the demographics of the modem world reflected the biases of other techie hobbies that overtly excluded others from participation. But by the late 1980s, BBS technology had been taken up by a more diverse population of people seeking to build alternative media systems. Other writers have dug even more deeply into these histories. For example, Charlton McIlwain writes about a network of Black-oriented BBSs (AfroNet). Avery Dame-Griff has mapped a network of transgender BBSs (TGnet), and Kathryn Brewster has explored the archives of [BBSs that provided] supportto people affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

JB: You talk about the text file as a uniquely well-suited medium for sharing ideas on the early Internet. Using text files, groups like the Cult of the Dead Cow created a literary scene in the computer underground. In this case, or others you might pull from the book, how should we interpret the relationship between specific technologies and social change?

Get unlimited access: $9.50 for six months.

KD: Radio was another technology with a profound social influence on the modem world. In the 1970s, radio amateurs, or hams, were instrumental in reimagining the personal computer as a technology for communication. At the same time, the citizens band or CB radio brought telecommunications within reach of everyday people. The participants in these radio hobbies valued tinkering, experimentation, and play: values that echoed around the modem world of the 1980s.

But the generative culture of radio might not have survived into the 1970s were it not for telecom policy that protected the interests of amateurs and grassroots experimentation. When the government first stepped in to regulate the airwaves, amateur stations were included. As we puzzle out the regulatory demands of the present moment, I wonder if the same consideration is being extended to the amateurs of todays Internet.

JB: How did privatization play out in the decentralized world of the BBS during the 1990s? Does the story of privatization in the modem world complicate the often critical narrativeexemplified in books as divergent as Ben Tarnoffs Internet for the People and Gary Gerstles The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Orderof telecom deregulation and corporate capture as a pivot in the Internets history?

KD: The modem world didnt require privatization, because most dial-up BBSs were owned by individuals or organizations. Crucially, even the smallest BBS incurred costs, and sysops adopted a range of strategies to pay the bills. Some treated the BBS like an expensive hobby, comparable to restoring a vintage car. Others ran their systems like a social club or small business, charging membership dues or per-minute access fees. Absent, however, were the streams of speculative venture capital that pumped the dot-com bubble and became normalized during the social media era. The spirit of experimentation that drove BBS technical and social innovations also extended to its financial cultures.

Yet, from another perspective, the modem world is about a balance between public and private interests. After all, it was the public infrastructure of the telephone network that enabled the growth of these privately operated systems. Like the Minitel in France, the modem world is another model of a data infrastructure operating under different political economic conditions from the Internet we inhabit today.

Stories about the modem world reveal a path not taken in the history of the Internet. In the early 1990s, BBS enthusiasts could have reasonably expected greater public investment in telecom, an upgrade for the Information Age. They might have envisioned a fiber-optic common carrier providing reliable, high-bandwidth data communications to everyone with a phone number. We should try to imagine the kind of Internet that would have emerged in such an environment. Would problems of access and equity be different? Would we expect greater accountability from service providers? Would user surveillance and personalized advertising still be the predominant models for commercial media? How would we conceive of justice and equity differently?

JB: As we grapple with the radical diversity of digital cultures today, what can we learn from looking at the mosaic of the modem world?

KD: The continued diversity of services from the 1980s to the present demonstrate that there is nothing inherent in the technology that determines what people do with these spaces. [It] doesnt matter if its a dial-up modem or the latest smartphone, we adopt the tools at hand to meet our needs for community, communication, and commerce. The challenges of cultivating community are persistent, especially when the people involved are pseudonymous strangers on a computer screen!

We see the same problems arise, time and [time] again. Governance and moderation are hard. We might value accountability, transparency, and participatory rule-making, but they dont come for free. They require expertise, care, and experience.

A key difference [between now and] in the modem world was that authority and responsibility were distributed closer to the ground. Instead of a handful of global platforms governed by opaque terms-of-service agreements, every BBS was its own small platform. The system operator, or sysop, was the final authority. As the owner of the system, they were ultimately responsible for everything from vetting new users and mediating conflicts between users to writing software and paying the phone bills. Yet, despite this their total control, BBS sysops were also members of the community, accountable and accessible in ways that massive platform providers simply cannot be. Tech firms talk often about the value of scaling up, but the history of online communities demonstrates the importance of scaling down.

Read more:

The Intimate and Interconnected History of the Internet - The Nation

~Submitted by The Bedford Historical Society

The Haunted History of New Englandpresentation melds historical fact together with legend and myth to produce an interesting, fascinating, and sometimes shocking new look at events that really happened and the stories of haunting that followed them.

The topics addressed in the lecture will be Mercy Brown The Vampire of Exeter Rhode Island, the cursed Freetown State Forest in Massachusetts, The horrors of the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River Massachusetts, a haunted forest in the wilds of Connecticut, the ghostly happenings at Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire, and evidence of ghosts at the John Alden House in Duxbury Massachusetts.

This is a one hour slide presentation that also incorporates video footage. The event is free and open to the public in the Great Room (3rd floor) of Old Town Hall starting at 2 p.m. on October 23.

About Christopher Daley

Mr. Daley is a historian and published author. He has been presenting talks on historical topics all over New England for over 25 years. He has been a history teacher in the Silver Lake Regional School District in Kingston Massachusettsfor 24 years. He has been involved in several historical organizations both public and private, including the Pembroke Historical Commission and Historical Society as well as the John Alden Historical Site in Duxbury.He and his wife Cathy live on the South Shore of Massachusetts during the winters and spend their summers at their house in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

The rest is here:

The Haunted History of New England Presentation ~ October 23 - thebedfordcitizen.org