colonialism 
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SOURCE: Smithsonian
1/26/2023
Caroline Dodds Pennock on The Indigenous Americans Who Visited Europe
by Karin Wulf
In contrast to the stock story of the "Age of Exploration," Indigenous Americans often traveled to Europe afte 1492. A new book looks to this history to examine the origins of a cosmopolitan world.
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/17/2023
Parthenon Marbles' Fate Subject to Secret Talks
The British Museum and Greek government officials have acknowledged secret talks over the last two years about the repatriation of marbles taken by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon in the early 1800s. The resolution is not yet known.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
12/16/2022
Was Emancipation Intended to Perpetuate Slavery by Other Means?
by Sean Wilentz
Protests movements have latched on to a misguided interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment that argues it allowed and even encouraged the system of mass incarceration as an extension of slavery. A new global history extends that critique to the age of emancipation in general.
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SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
12/14/2022
Philly's Columbus Statue is Out of the Box—So is the Discussion About His Legacy
Historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries talks about controversial statues: one removed in Richmond, and one uncovered in Philadelphia.
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SOURCE: New York Times
11/28/2022
A Paris Museum Holds 18,000 Human Skulls, but Won't Say Whose
By identifying the sources of skulls in its collection, France's Museum of Mankind fears it might open itself to demands for restitution.
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11/20/2022
Does Novelist Robert Keable Deserve a Reappraisal?
by Simon Keable-Elliott
Briefly celebrated in the 1920s, then consigned to posthumous obscurity, the missionary and novelist, whose experiences encompassed the collision of colonialism, war and racism in the British empire, is overdue for rediscovery.
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SOURCE: Africa is a Country
11/15/2022
The Specter of Foreign Forces in Haiti
by Ambroise Jean-Léon (trans. by Awori Othieno)
The situation in Haiti now echoes a long history of coercion by foreign governments who have leveraged the threat of invasion to steer domestic politics.
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11/13/2022
Monkeypox Has Been Around for Decades; This Outbreak is a Product of Neglect
by Alessandro Hammond and Cameron Sabet
The world's response to viral outbreaks in poor nations demonstrates the hoarding of resources in the Global North, but it's ultimately self-defeating for rich nations, too.
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/17/2022
France's Return of 24 Skulls to Algeria Wasn't What it Seemed
The French and Algerian governments have both played up the gesture of reconciliation, without acknowledging that the provenance of the remains is dubious (only 6 are documented to be the skulls of Algerian resistance fighters) and they remain French property.
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SOURCE: Democracy Now!
10/10/2022
Indigenous Singer-Activist Buffy Sainte-Marie Condemns Doctrine of Discovery at Heart of Colonialism
Indigenous musician and activist Buffy Sainte-Marie has written and sung about the struggles of Native American and First Nations peoples for decades.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
9/25/2022
The Forgotten Violence of the US-Philippines Relationship
by Adrian De Leon
By declaring a relationship of "friends, partners, and allies" between the United States and the Philippines, and embracing the regime of Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., the United States concealed its violent conquest of the islands and its ongoing support for authoritarian rule there.
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SOURCE: NPR
9/16/2022
Natasha Lightfoot on the British Commonwealth's Future after Elizabeth
Will other former British colonies follow the recent example of Barbados and dissociate from the postcolonial Commonwealth?
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SOURCE: New York Times
9/8/2022
Mourn the Queen, Not the Empire
by Maya Jasanoff
As the head of the postwar British Commonwealth, the Queen symbolized the effort to put the brakes on the global wave of decolonization, including deadly and secret campaigns of state violence in Northern Ireland, Kenya, and elsewhere.
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SOURCE: Al Jazeera
9/15/2022
Benin Bronzes Have Final German Exhibition Before Repatriation
"'The recognition of the colonial injustices and the subsequent return of the items “will continue to define our work in the future,' Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation."
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SOURCE: TIME
9/12/2022
On Climate, the British Monarchy Mortgaged the Planet's Future
by Priya Satia
The monarchy, as a cultural core of the British empire, papered over the separation and alienation among humans resulting from the conversion of the Earth to a set of exploitable commodities.
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SOURCE: Foreign Policy
9/12/2022
Queen Not Innocent of Empire's Sins
by Howard W. French
"I bear no ill will toward her following her death. Her empire—and empires more generally—though is another matter."
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SOURCE: NPR
9/12/2022
For Many Scholars, Queen's Legacy Inseparable from Colonialism
Vanderbilt's Moses Ochonu and Wisconsin's Mou Banerjee argue that the Queen's passing calls attention to unfinished business of acknowledging the violence of the British Empire—violence the Queen's image helped to conceal.
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SOURCE: AlterNet
9/10/2022
Andrew Roberts Blows Up on MSNBC Over Queen's Link to Colonialism
The British historian and host Ali Velshi butted heads over the mentioning of colonialism and its part in the late Queen's legacy.
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8/28/2022
Stephen Aron's Work Examines Moments of Intercultural Peace in the West
by James Thornton Harris
Both triumphalist and revisionist histories of America's westward expansion emphasize violence, and disagree about whether to understand it with pride or guilt. But what can we make of the moments where understanding and accommodation temporarily prevailed?
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SOURCE: The New Republic
8/16/2022
Salman Rushdie Changed Everything
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
The novelist's creative brilliance and critical acclaim signaled a moment for south Asian people around the world to see themselves outside the frame of colonialism and to grapple with the subcontinent's ethnic and religious fissures.
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