Category: Social Stream

Watched Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) from Amazon Prime
Directed by David Yates. With Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Alison Sudol, Dan Fogler. The adventures of writer Newt Scamander in New York's secret community of witches and wizards seventy years before Harry Potter reads his book in school.

Rating: ★★★★½

Purchased digital streaming license on Amazon Prime. Surely we’ll watch this a few more times. This was Evie’s first time seeing it.

Watched "Hinterland" Both Barrels from Netflix
Directed by Gareth Bryn. With Richard Harrington, Mali Harries, Alex Harries, Hannah Daniel. An estranged husband kidnaps his son. Mathias and Rhys make a dark discovery at his parents home. Mathias risks his own life by searching alone. A former Superintendent puts pressure on the independent investigator to close another case.
Watching this late at night, it took about four tries to make it through to the end. One of the most brutal episodes of the series, and one of the few featuring a gun.
Read Johns Hopkins, benefactor of namesake hospital and university, was an enslaver by Nick Anderson, Lauren Lumpkin, and Susan Svrluga (Washington Post)
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.
Read - Want to Read: Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones (Cambridge University Press)
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.