As Black History Month begins, there are a plethora of lists circulating on the web of resources to use for learning more about Black History. Black history is American history. In this space, I wanted to briefly share the stories of some girls who were visible parts of the Civil Rights Movement. When I wrote … Continue reading
On August 18th, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified by Tennessee, the last state that was needed to take the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment” across the finish line. On August 26th, 1920, it became the law of the land: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged … Continue reading
Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph Servant of God Dorothy Day is a difficult figure to pin down, both in Catholic culture and in American history more generally. Raised a-religious in a working-class family, as a young woman, she ran with a hard-partying group of writers and had … Continue reading
Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman Although the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) got a boost in popularity when they promised President-elect Trump that they would “see him in court” if he tried to enact campaign promises that contradicted the Bill … Continue reading
A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage by Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder We are less than two months away from the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States.* I’ve been doing a lot of reading about suffrage history this year. So far, I have most enjoyed Why They Marched and The Woman’s … Continue reading
This topic is kind of adjacent to my usual scope for this blog, but over the last few weeks, it has been on my heart a lot, so I decided to give it a go. Solidarity is a pillar of Catholic social teaching and one that I take both comfort in and motivation from. I … Continue reading
Why They Marched: The Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote by Susan Ware is a great read for this year, as the 100th anniversary of U.S. women’s suffrage comes up this August. I Ware does not treat the American suffrage movement as a monolithic, unified group of women, as … Continue reading
In One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy, Carol Anderson lays out the nefarious, and sometimes also mundane, ways that seemingly racially neutral justifications have been used to deny racial minorities their right to vote from the Jim Crow era to the present day. I was wearily angered by the techniques she … Continue reading
A History of America in Ten Strikes by Erik Loomis uses the history of labor strikes in the United States as a lens to look at broader trends in American history. The ten strikes include the Lowell Mill Girls strike, The Eight-Hour-Day Strikes, The Anthracite Strike, The Bread and Roses Strike, The Flight Sit-Down Strike, The … Continue reading
This month, there was a flurry of press about the women being sworn into the House of Representatives, among them Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress; the first two Native American women elected to Congress, Deb Haaland and Sharice Davis; and Ilhan Omar, the first Somali-American woman elected to Congress, and one … Continue reading
Ph.D.s and Pigtails 