Wicked Flesh
Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World
The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures.
100 years after ratification
Four faculty members share their thoughts on the complicated history of the women’s suffrage movement, the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and their hopes for what we might do today to honor the anniversary.
Of prison cells and suffrage
Alumna Laura Adams McKie helped build a museum that teaches visitors about the suffrage movement and the prison where women were sent for picketing for the right to vote.
Chapman’s ‘Dateline–Saigon’ now streaming
“Dateline–Saigon,” a documentary about Vietnam War reporting produced by Richard Chapman, senior lecturer in film and media studies in Arts & Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has been released for streaming on iTunes, Amazon Prime and other platforms.
The Content of Our Caricature
African American Comic Art and Political Belonging
Traces the history of racial caricature and the ways that Black cartoonists have turned this visual grammar on its head. Revealing the long aesthetic tradition of African American cartoonists who have made use of racist caricature as a Black diasporic art practice, Rebecca Wanzo demonstrates how these artists have resisted histories of visual imperialism and […]
Juneteenth and collective progress
Douglas Flowe, assistant professor of history, discusses the history of Juneteenth and its continued resonance for all Americans.
When the conspiracy is real
Umbrella Man. Outside agitators. Agents provocateur. As protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd continue, conspiracy theories and “false flag” charges have flown fast and furious. But sometimes the conspiracy is real. In “F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature” (2015), William J. Maxwell, professor of English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, details a decades-long harassment campaign waged against prominent African American writers and activists.
Uncontrollable Blackness
African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York
Early twentieth-century African American men in northern urban centers like New York faced economic isolation, segregation, a biased criminal justice system, and overt racial attacks by police and citizens. In this book, Douglas J. Flowe interrogates the meaning of crime and violence in the lives of these men, whose lawful conduct itself was often surveilled […]
The Great Leap Backward
Forgetting and Representing the Mao Years
It is now forty years after Mao Zedong’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, and more than fifty years since the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine. During this time, the collective memory of these events has been sanitized, reduced to a much-diluted version of what truly took place. Historical and sociological […]
A history of social distancing
Rebecca Messbarger, professor of Italian and founding director of the Medical Humanities program in Arts & Sciences, speaks on social distancing from medieval Florence to Progressive Era St. Louis.
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