July 29, 2021
The Morality of Carbon.
Three Americans create enough carbon emissions to kill one person.
How Many Are At Risk?
Find out how many in your city are at risk of being evicted.
The End of the Work Week.
The five-day workweek is dead. It’s time for something better.
Rent prices are soaring.
33 percent rent increases and bidding wars on rentals are the new norm.
July 13, 2021
Red Lined Neighborhoods are Hotter.
Segregated housing is hotter.
1619, 1776 & The Politics of History.
History as an end.
Who Are All The Skyscrapers For?
Sam Stein on endless skyscrapers.
Hampton Roads Gets Housing Hotline.
A support line opens for housing.
What We’re Listening To:
The Scarlet E: Unmasking America’s Eviction Crisis.
March 3, 2021
The Fight Over Graham, North Carolina.
Racial fault lines in the Deep South erupt over a Confederate monument.
The Hope of the Self-Checkout Machine.
A class-based promise of utopia or a jobs killer.
Preserving West African Cuisine.
A free archive dedicated to sharing the region’s cuisine is online.
Reenacting Slavery for Entertainment.
The complex history of 500 Black actors who reenacted plantation life in 1895.
February 17, 2021
The Nationalization of Racial History.
American Exceptionalism and its influence on Black studies.
America’s Relationship to ‘Craft’.
What is craftsmanship? And why is it so political?
Native American Street Names.
How “Indianizing” places in America belies a painful past.
The Challenge of Decolonizing A Statue.
Leopold II ruled the Congo with violence. Can his statue be anti-colonial?
February 4, 2021
Celebrating Black History Month in Norfolk.
Norfolk State’s Black History Celebrations.
Check out a range of events all month long from NSU celebrating African American history, arts, and culture.
A Hampton Roads Black History Driving Tour.
Drive Hampton’s rich African American heritage sites on the 400 Years Forward tour.
A Virtual Civil Rights Museum Visit.
Visit Google’s virtual museum and explore photos from the Civil Rights movement.
ODU celebrates African American History Month.
From Black Church gospel to Stonewall, open mics to history. ODU has a range of events all month long.
January 20th, 2021
This Land Is Your Land.
Restoring the original protest in the Inauguration singalong.
Not Our Democracy?
America’s history of coups in this hemisphere and beyond.
The Road to Abolotion.
Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution.
What Faces Biden?
What counts as recovery in our America?
January 6, 2021
Broomstick Weddings.
The enslaved marriage tradition of jumping over a broom stick.
West on Justice.
An interview with Cornel West on the future of social justice.
The Cost of Emancipation.
Shifting the financial burden of emancipation onto enslaved people.
Community Land Trusts.
Advancing Equity Through Communal Ownership of Land.
December 1, 2020
Predicting the Next Big Flood.
Getting the forecast right in Norfolk.
Escaped Slaves and Mexico.
When the North was out of reach, Mexico was the only option.
The Dubious Title of “Indian Country.”
Colonizing Native land 1607 to 2020.
Preserving Indigenous Varieties of Crops.
The necessity of bringing back Native farming practices.
November, 3 2020
South Carolina’s School Desegregation.
And a fight to keep things the same.
How Cars Changed Life for African Americans.
A level playing field for Black mobility.
A Trump Fridge or Biden Fridge?
Quizzing assumptions of class and food.
Growing Food Deserts in Hampton Roads.
A snapshot of rising hunger.
October 21, 2020
Justice For The Elaine Massacre.
Accounting for long-ignored violence.
Miami’s Climate Gentrification.
The city builds for the rich, the seas rise.
The Haitian Revolution And Today’s Protests.
Drawing parallels in representation.
Tennessee’s First Day of Desegregation.
12 students and the riots that followed.
October 7, 2020
Minneapolis: Life In A Cop-Free Zone
A converted hotel didn’t last long.
The Story of El Paso’s
Equestrian.
Toppling a racists statue.
Mapping Disparities and COVID.
Poverty and pollution compound illness.
Norfolk’s Great Dismal Swamp Holds History
Uncovering the path of runaway slaves.
September 21, 2020
Racism is a Religious Issue.
White Christianity’s reckoning.
Historians Debate Context over Removal.
Removing the Washington monument.
Passing for White to Escape Slavery.
The strategy of freedom from slavery.
Commemorating Confederate Jews.
Unlikely monuments to Jewish war dead.
September 3, 2020
Police Unions & The Right to Organize.
Balancing collective bargaining.
The Long Birth of Urban Sprawl.
Houses, dealerships, and racial legacies.
Suppressing Native American Votes.
Voting in the ‘Mississippi’ of the North.
Filling the Green Space Gap.
Cities lacking nature isn’t natural.
August 19, 2020
Black Black Face.
Subversive act of Black people playing White people playing Black people.
Norfolk Casino Wants ‘Yes.’
Tidewater residents are concerned about little input in the city’s game plan.
On Riots and Resistance.
Defining the terrain of Black freedom after the Civil War.
Life Expectancy by Race.
Black health disparities and the rising cost of lives.
August 5, 2020
Black Pullman Porters.
How black Porters laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.
Equitably Grown Food.
Community Land Trusts in Georgia bring power to poor black farmers.
Global Police Violence.
Dispatches from around the world on police violence.
Black Funded Schools.
How Rosenwald schools brought education to the segregated South
July 22, 2020
Monuments in America.
Since 1776 no movement has been able to stop the love of monuments.
Mary McLeod Bethune.
Leading a vanguard of black American women for over 50 years.
Mask Enforcement in 1918.
How Tucson, Arizona, fined and jailed its way to masking.
Oklahoma Gets a Change.
The Supreme Court rules much of Oklahoma is now Indian Country.
July 8, 2020
Tulsa, Ohio, 1921.
An NAACP Officer’s investigation into the riots.
Why Have Statues At All?
The history of the National Statuary Hall Collection.
Hillsboro, Ohio, 1954.
Black mothers march for 18 months to end school segregation.
Pulling Down Monuments.
Frederick Douglass on the trouble with statues.
June 24, 2020
Who is an Ally?
“When the makers of policing tech say Black Lives Matter.”
Corporate Blackwashing
Corporations have turned to antiracist rhetoric, but they uphold inequality.
The Police Union
“How police-union power helped increase abuses.”
“If We Must Die.”
Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay on Black lives.
June 10, 2020
A Fragile Democracy Hangs In The Balance.
Michelle Alexander on the need to get it right this time.
America Has Rejected Its Poor.
Reverend Dr. William Barber On Rejecting The Poor.
Institutionalized Racism: A Syllabus.
From JSTOR, a list of reads on race.
“A Boot On The Neck of Democracy.”
Cornel West on the question of reform.
June 3, 2020
We’ve been here before. These words have been said a lot over the past week. The cycles of racism and violence can often make us feel we are stuck in a déjà vu. While cellphone footage capturing the killings of black lives may be new, police violence against black people is not new. In this special edition of our newsletter, we look at 4 events from our shared history that shape protests today, and the government response to dissent.
L.A. Protests After Police Beat Rodney King.
1992
Miami Protests After Police Kill
Arthur McDuffie.
1980
Baltimore Protests After Police Kill Freddie Gray.
2005
Nixon Promises Protesters "Law and Order.”
1968
May 27th, 2020
Oakland Arrests Their Unmasked Mayor.
In 1919 one politician thought himself above the Spanish Flu.
Norfolk Loses Waterfront Living.
Rising sea levels force adaptive retreat from the coast.
America Forgets The Spanish Flu.
Where are all the memorials to the victims of America’s worst pandemic?
Native Communities Fear COVID Extinction
Native Americans face another wave of threatening disease.
May 14, 2020
Social Distancing Began Before COVID-19.
Bush, the DoD, and a science fair.
Gun Violence Jumps In Quarantine.
Stacking epidemic on top of epidemic.
Disease and the Atlantic Slave Trade.
The toll of infection aboard slave ships.
Re-opening the Rent Strike.
With many suddenly out of work, the rent strike is making a comeback.
For our previous recommended reads, click here to visit the archive.