Johns Hopkins, the 19th-century businessman who bequeathed a fortune to found the hospital and university in Baltimore that bear his name, and who on scanty evidence was long heralded as an abolitionist, enslaved at least four Black people before the Civil War, school officials disclosed Wednesday.
Sad and disappointing news to hear given what I was always told as a student. I’m glad that they appear to be addressing it directly and fixing some of the erased history. Hopefully they may be able to uncover more and come up with some reasonable ways to address it in the present.
As Johns Hopkins discovers ties to slavery, many of us who work there are rattled by the shattered myth of our university founder, long admired as a Quaker and abolitionist.
Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans' aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.
Trying a slightly different method for cross posting from my website to Mastodon. If it works properly I’ll also see my website name as the posting client!
There was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home.
The nice part is that this applies even if you’re not a designer. Reminds me of the most important IndieWeb principle: have fun.
I finally signed up for Parler a couple weeks ago. Admittedly, I haven’t been terribly active posting on there, but I have been following a few people and trying the Parler experience out. …
Today, we’re introducing new ways to discover writers on our homepage, as well as the beta version of Substack Reader, a new way to keep up with your newsletters.
Great to see another feed reader enter the fray. While it definitely focuses on Substack newsletters and is incredibly limited in functionality at the moment, it does support RSS feeds in general.
I’m hoping it might add JSON feed and h-feed support as well, but it’ll need a lot of work to displace feed readers like Monocle, Together, or Indigenous as my daily drivers.
Readthread by @jonnymorris1973(threadreaderapp.com)
Not sure we need anymore It’s A Wonderful Life discourse but I’ve seen a couple of professional critics in my timeline completely misunderstanding the point of the film so I feel I must intervene for the sake of reason. pic.twitter.com/NYIlXQIAkF
The ergodic hypothesis is a key analytical device of equilibrium statistical mechanics. It underlies the assumption that the time average and the expectation value of an observable are the same. Where it is valid, dynamical descriptions can often be replaced with much simpler probabilistic ones — time is essentially eliminated from the models. The conditions for validity are restrictive, even more so for non-equilibrium systems. Economics typically deals with systems far from equilibrium — specifically with models of growth. It may therefore come as a surprise to learn that the prevailing formulations of economic theory — expected utility theory and its descendants — make an indiscriminate assumption of ergodicity. This is largely because foundational concepts to do with risk and randomness originated in seventeenth-century economics, predating by some 200 years the concept of ergodicity, which arose in nineteenth-century physics. In this Perspective, I argue that by carefully addressing the question of ergodicity, many puzzles besetting the current economic formalism are resolved in a natural and empirically testable way.
Directed by Farhad Safinia. With Mel Gibson, Sean Penn, Eddie Marsan, Natalie Dormer. Professor James Murray begins work compiling words for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in the mid-19th century, and receives over 10,000 entries from a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Dr. William Minor.
Rating: ★★★½
More dramatic than I remember the book being. Entertaining and dramatic.