My visit to the Penn Museum’s Africa exhibit was a sobering experience. I will try here to evaluate what I think are the museum’s attempts to come to terms with the ethical issues surrounding this exhibit. On the one hand, the museum’s curators have clearly tried to demonstrate to visitors that it has deeply …
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On Feagin and Bobo
I was assigned the articles by Feagin (1991) and Bobo (2000) for this week. These are very different articles and so will require largely separate analysis. By interviewing multiple respondents, Feagin’s study sought to determine the responses of middle-class Black Americans to discrimination in public places. This discrimination ran the gamut from avoidance and hostile …
On Telles’s ‘Race in Another America’
The first five chapters of Edward Telles’s Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil Princeton UP, 2004) provide an overview of the history of how the racial complexity has been presented and interpreted over the course of Brazilian history, as well as introduction to the specific racial terminology employed both officially …
On Thorton’s ‘American Indian Holocaust and Survival’
After an introductory chapter of American Indian Holocaust and Survival (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987) that briefly outlines the arrival of both indigenous people and Europeans to the Western Hemisphere, Russell Thornton spends the next three chapters of his book estimating the population of the hemisphere in 1492, narrowing it down to what became the contiguous United States; providing an overview …
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On Zuberi, ‘Thicker Than Blood’
Zuberi’s Thicker Than Blood (University of Minnesota Press, 2001),Chapters 3 and 4, traces the origins of statistical analysis in racialized thinking, first discussing the history of statistics and then showing how statistics were used to justify and perpetuate theories of racial superiority. According to Zuberi, statistics emerged alongside the social sciences and were applied quite early …
On Crosby, ‘Ecological Imperialism’
For this week, I focused on Chapters 5-7 from Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge UP, 1986, 2004), which discusses the phenomenon of why Europeans were successful in creating the “neo-Europes” outside of Europe but failed to so in other locations. These chapters focus respectively on the topics of how European colonizers learning the wind patterns at …
Sociology of race (and ethnicity?)
There was a poor offering of history courses in Penn’s department this fall, so I elected to take a sociology course on race. It was originally listed as a course on race and ethnicity and I thought I’d find it useful in understanding ethnic cleavages in Eastern Europe. It might still serve that purpose, but …
Carlo Mattogno is a bad historian
A couple years ago, during a slow period, I took the time to actually read a section of a book by the Holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno. Mattogno is often touted as the cream of the “revisionist” crop — the guy who does real research, visits archives, eschews antisemitism, etc. A mere ten pages of his …
Neema Parvini and the pitfalls of literary scholars doing history
Simulblogged at Holocaust Controversies There’s a British Shakespeare scholar named Neema Parvini who has made a second career out of far right commentary on a YouTube channel called Academic Agent. He Tweets under the handle OGRolandRat. As I’ve written here before, I share something in common with Robert Faurisson and Grover Furr — and it …
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Ryan Faulk’s Second Guesses
Simulblogged at Holocaust Controversies Having written just a few days ago about Ryan Faulk’s problematic foray into Jewish population analysis 1939-1945, I checked his Bitchute video again to see whether anyone had posted the link from here to the comments section. Turns out someone did. I also happened to visit the Cesspit, knowing that Faulk had registered …
Inevitable Historicity 