History

Adam Russell Taylor 12-26-2022
An illustration of a father reading a book to his son. Other books are spread across a table in the background with a girl looking at an open book.

Illustration by Candice Evers

BLACK HISTORY MONTH traces back to Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which established the second week of February to be “Negro History Week” as a counterbalance to the erasure of Black contributions to U.S. history. Black educators and students at Kent State University created the first Black History Month celebration in 1970, and President Gerald Ford recognized it in 1976, the year I was born. While Black history deserves attention every month, the past few years have provided plenty of evidence for why this month of particular emphasis is still needed. God reminds us in many ways of the dangers of forgetting our history, including the command, “Remember your history, your long and rich history” (Isaiah 46:9, MSG).

As the father of two young Black boys, I spend a lot of time thinking about the role of education in shaping our nation’s future. What our kids learn about the nation and the world from their parents, teachers, and peers profoundly shapes their worldview. That in turn deeply affects the direction our society takes as today’s children become tomorrow’s leaders, activists, and voters. It’s no wonder that education has served as a political battleground at many times throughout our nation’s history — from the Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution to the battles over racial integration in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.

Liuan Huska 12-29-2021
A collage of different faces forming one human head

Illustration by Jennifer Heuer

A FEW MONTHS into the pandemic, as the country started to notice the uptick in hate crimes against Asian Americans, caring friends checked in to ask, “Are you okay?” I found myself metaphorically turning around to see if they were talking to someone behind me. I was so unused to having my ethnic vulnerability seen and named.

Then a year ago, in March 2021, a young white man killed six Asian women in spas around Atlanta. This time it was clearer—I was not okay. My mother is a massage therapist and has worked in spas in Florida, where the killer was headed when police apprehended him. This time, I could say with more certainty, “This hurts me.”

In the blooming of Asian American consciousness since that event, however, I’ve continued to wonder how much of what happens to other AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) folks around the country, and back through time, is mine to own. Writer Jay Caspian Kang argues that Asian Americans who came to this country after the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act have little to no connection with earlier generations of Asian Americans, whose circumstances were vastly different. Between the lines, Kang is saying to us later waves of immigrants, “That’s not your history.”

Da’Shawn Mosley 1-04-2021
Portrait of a young person who is made up of pixels.

IF ASKED “What era would you time travel to if you could?” many young Black and brown and Indigenous people would answer in a flash, “None of them.” Why? We’re too aware of the past and what it means for us today—we tweet about the results of American slavery and can break news of the latest injustice to emerge from centuries-long hatred of nonwhite skin faster than MSNBC. We feel the negative effects of history enough each day to not want to go back there.

But maybe we should. If all we see of ourselves on TV and social media is us sick, oppressed, or dead, what other understanding of ourselves do we miss? How can we remember that we are greater than the damage done—that our history holds more than that and so might our present?

Ruby Sales, founder and director of the SpiritHouse Project, helps young people invested in faith and social justice see themselves through the lens of their divine wealth and boundless potential rather than through eyes dimmed by media and versions of history shaped by white supremacy. Sales, who by age 17 was a Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee member registering people to vote in her home state of Alabama, has a Master of Divinity degree from the Episcopal Divinity School and is a preacher, speaker, and intergenerational mentor on racial, economic, and social justice. I spoke with her in December by phone.      —Da’Shawn Mosley

Da’Shawn Mosley: I watched a YouTube video of you speaking in 2015 at St. Albans Episcopal Church in D.C. and was struck by what you said about today’s youth: that the most recent generations have incredible insight but haven’t lived enough to have hindsight.

Ruby Sales: Now that I’m working with young folks in my fellowship program and have had some time to weigh how things have changed from the ’90s to the 2000s, I think young people lack insight also. When you have been raised in a technological age, when history is no longer lived experience but is created on social media and reproduced through technology, I think that long-term memory is affected, as well as the ability to empathize and connect with human suffering. There is a difference between being able to theorize about human suffering and being able to feel it. All of these are challenges faced by generations raised in a technocracy—the decimation of history, of who we are as a people.

Aaron E. Sanchez 6-24-2020

'We Serve White's Only No Spanish or Mexicans' sign outside a Texas restaurant. 1949. Credit: Wikimedia Commons 

This history runs through, into, and over my interracial children.

Elizabeth Stice 4-20-2020

St. Jerome by Caravaggio. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

For Christians, studying history is an act of love and hope. 

The plague of Florence in 1348, as described in Boccaccio's Decameron. Etching by L. Sabatelli after himself. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. 

Between 1347 and 1352, 'The Great Mortality' touched a third of Europe's population. 

Jamar A. Boyd II 3-03-2020

Image via Wikimedia Commons 

Amid the reality of racism, resistance, and restraint, I witnessed my grandfather commit his life to bettering the place he’s always known as home. The servant leadership of my paternal grandparents highlights my family’s legacy in South Carolina.

the Web Editors 8-23-2019

Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot (4 - march 24, 1802). Original illustration by Auguste Raffet, engraving by Hébert.

On this day in 1791, an uprising of enslaved Africans on the island of Saint Domingue (modern Haiti) began.

Pen and ink hand-drawn map of Fort Monroe, Virginia, 1862, by Robert Knox Sneden. Wikimedia Commons. 

Fear became slaveholder religion’s tool of control, inspiring millions of poor white families in the South to send sons to war and pray for victory, even as the white sons of plantation owners avoided combat. During Reconstruction, when black and white representatives worked together in Southern legislatures to guarantee public education for all people, many poor white children went to school for the first time; many poor white people received healthcare at Freedman’s Bureau hospitals. Still, their preachers told them to be afraid. Even when black power helped poor white people in measurable ways, slaveholder religion taught white people to fear shared power.

Brandon Massey 7-03-2019

An overcrowded fenced area holding families at a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas. June 10, 2019. Office of Inspector General/DHS/Handout via REUTERS

As a student of the history of biblical interpretation, the rhetoric employed by Dobson and other evangelical leaders is frighteningly similar to that of German pastors and theologians in the Third Reich. It appears that Christians have either forgotten or are ignoring the dark history of Christianity’s marriage to partisan politics and nationalist agendas.

Aaron E. Sanchez 6-12-2019

Wikimedia Commons

My family walks a palimpsest, on translations and mistranslations of rivers, of people, of places, of faith. My family walks on unfinished words that have yet to be formed, stuck on molar, in mouths, being shaped by tongues that twist two into one. My family walks on places unfinished and already traversed.

Photograph of Ethel Waters, at University of Michigan while starring in "Member of the Wedding." Via Wikimedia Commons

Whatever faults Black Protestantism has had, its grand strength is in its exercise of democratic debate internal to black Americans about the meaning of the good life and who gets a say in the shaping of that life, including perspectives from other faiths.

Jemar Tisby

White evangelical support for Donald Trump has led some black evangelicals to a crisis of faith and ecclesial identification. In this moment, Jemar Tisby has risen as a voice that’s unafraid to challenge white evangelicals’ complicity with racism, forging another path for those feeling alienated. Tisby is currently completing his PhD in history at the University of Mississippi. He is the president of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, previously known as the Reformed African American Network, and writes widely about racism, the American church, and social justice. In 2017, a New York Times article quoted him saying: “Racism is not a ‘blind spot’ within white evangelicalism. It is part of that tradition’s DNA.” Now, Tisby has published a book tracing that DNA by way of history.

Volunteers and archaeologists work at an archaeological dig near caves in the Qumran area in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Jan. 15, 2019. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

In the cliffs high above the Dead Sea archaeologists chip away with pick axes, hoping to repeat one of the most sensational discoveries of the last hundred years - the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The scrolls, a collection of manuscripts, some more than 2,000 years old, were first found in 1947 by local Bedouin in the area of Qumran, about 20 km east of Jerusalem.

They gave insight into Jewish society and religion before and after the time of Jesus, and spurred a decade of exploration, before the search fizzled.

Recent finds have stirred fresh excitement however, and archaeologists are probing higher and deeper than before. Hundreds of caves remain unexcavated and the experts are racing against antiquities robbers.

Delonte Gholston 11-05-2018

Voter registration booth in the 1960s. Kheel Center, Cornell University Library. 

In the black community, voting has always been complicated.

We voted and yet you lynched us.

We voted and yet you incarcerated us.

We voted and you poisoned our water.

Aarik Danielsen 10-12-2018

John Paul II and Oscar Romero.

Throughout The Scandal of Redemption, Oscar Romero identifies a God with a balanced concern for individual hearts and the souls of nations.

The book, which collects sermons, radio transcripts and diary entries from Romero’s three years as archbishop of San Salvador, comes at a crucial time. Romero, pierced by an assassin’s bullet in 1980, will be canonized by the Catholic Church this weekend. A saint in every way we use the word, the life this book sketches is a timeless model for faithful political resistance and spiritual revival.

Edward Matthews 8-09-2018

Image via REUTERS/Mike Blake

While the INS’s mission was primarily to maintain control of the border and monitor immigration, the CBP’s mission aims to “safeguard America's borders thereby protecting the public from dangerous people”. The shift in mission from INS to CBP reflects an emphasis on anti-terrorism rather than immigration management.

People take part in the annual "March of the Living" to commemorate the Holocaust, in Oswiecim, Poland, April 12, 2018. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

“Being here made me realize how important my Judaism is. I’m a link in a long chain that the Holocaust tried to break. People my age are the future.”

Image via Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P. / Flickr

As Christians celebrate the festival this spring in commemoration of Jesus’ resurrection, the familiar sights of the Easter bunny and Easter eggs serve as a reminder of the holiday’s very ancient origins outside of the Christian tradition.

Image via Gandalf's Gallery/Flickr

Acknowledging that loneliness is a profoundly human and sometimes uncurable experience rather than a mere pathology might allow people — especially lonely people — to find commonality.