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Eating Dirt, Treating Slaves

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By  Rana Hogarth Historians of slavery must often contend with how the power imbalances of the slave system continue to shape the archival record, and, more importantly, influence the types of stories that get told. I certainly found this to be the case when writing my first book, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (University of North Carolina Press 2017). I felt overwhelmed as I weighed the written correspondence, published medical treatises, military records, and plantation records, medical lectures etc. by white physicians, military officers, colonial elites, and slave owners, against the dearth of written sources left behind by enslaved and free black people. Thus, it was a great challenge to construct a narrative using sources whose faithfulness in accounting for black people’s experiences in sickness and health were tenuous to say the least. Given the realities of the archives related to slavery, my approach to research became
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Inspiration Porn and Depictions of Impairment in Early America

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 By Meg Roberts Picture: An example of an almanac of a similar style and period as Daniel George’s. Entitled ‘The New-Jersey Almanack for the Year of our Lord 1779’, printed by Isaac Collins in New Jersey. Image sourced from Rutgers University Library and in the public domain. In 1775, seventeen-year-old Daniel George, a ‘student in astronomy’ from Massachusetts, composed an almanac. In an eclectic fourteen pages of printed text and tables, he recorded the rising and setting of the sun and the moon, the location of the planets, the tides, the weather, Quaker Meetings, ‘Remarkable Days’, ‘Liberty Days’, and poetry. He also included ‘for the use of the gentlemen officers and soldiers in the American army’ a narrative of the Battle of Concord, recently fought at the outset of the Revolutionary War. George had studied mathematics and astronomy extensively, and the almanac was the result of painstaking calculations throughout the year. In August 1775, George and his father visited the Rever
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Problematic Icons: Greta Thunberg and Helen Keller

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By Emmeline Burdett   Spitting Image The British satirical puppet show Spitting Image was originally broadcast on the TV station ITV between 1984 and 1996, but it has recently been revived. As the show satirises politicians and other public figures, it is inevitable that the puppets featured in the revival are different from the ones in the original programme One of the puppets in the revival is of teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. This has led to claims that Spitting Image is not satirising Thunberg as an individual public figure, but instead encouraging the public to regard all autistic people as figures of fun. This is far from the first time that Thunberg’s autism has been portrayed as something which makes her very vulnerable, and means that criticism of her is unfair. Some of her detractors have gone further and suggested that it also means that her perception of reality is flawed , and thus that what she says about climate change is unreliable.   The inabili
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