Johnson at 300
Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language” was first published in 1755 as his attempt to both rein in and celebrate the galloping vigor of English. For 150 years, it was considered the...
View ArticleDocumenting a colonial past
A Harvard history professor and a team of current and past students are helping Kenyans to tell the story of their break from colonial Britain in a new exhibit in the East African nation’s National...
View ArticleStrong evidence
The work of a Harvard history professor has bolstered the case of a group of elderly Kenyans who are seeking reparations from the British government for rape, castration, beatings, and other abuses...
View ArticleIlluminating an unseen history
It sounds like a story nearly all elementary schoolchildren can tell: A group of colonists, many of them simple farmers fed up with being unfairly taxed and ruled by a sovereign thousands of miles...
View ArticleReflections on justice delayed
There was jubilation in the streets of Nairobi last Thursday after the British government announced a $30 million settlement for abuses by colonial authorities during Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion in the...
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Johnson at 300
Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language” was first published in 1755 as his attempt to both rein in and celebrate the galloping vigor of English. For 150 years, it was considered the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Documenting a colonial past
A Harvard history professor and a team of current and past students are helping Kenyans to tell the story of their break from colonial Britain in a new exhibit in the East African nation’s National...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Strong evidence
The work of a Harvard history professor has bolstered the case of a group of elderly Kenyans who are seeking reparations from the British government for rape, castration, beatings, and other abuses...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Illuminating an unseen history
It sounds like a story nearly all elementary schoolchildren can tell: A group of colonists, many of them simple farmers fed up with being unfairly taxed and ruled by a sovereign thousands of miles...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reflections on justice delayed
There was jubilation in the streets of Nairobi last Thursday after the British government announced a $30 million settlement for abuses by colonial authorities during Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion in the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Real talk
Ifeoma Fafunwa knows there was a time in living memory when Germans gassed gay people along with Jews, Gypsies, and others they considered inferior. So it struck her as ironic when, a few years ago,...
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Harvard scholars take fresh look at the Partition of British India, which...
The birth of Hindu-led India and Muslim-ruled Pakistan in 1947 from what had been British India was horrifically violent, the start of a religious conflict in which millions died and millions more fled...
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Photography fellow Joana Choumali explores ‘anthropology of clothing’
What happens when Western secondhand clothing and message T-shirts are imported to African consumers, many from less affluent classes? Joana Choumali, a Côte d’Ivoire-based artist noted for her work...
View ArticleResearch, personal story frame professor’s new book
The intellectual questions Durba Mitra asks are formed as much from her archival research as from her conversations with women on their experiences of social judgment and subordination and their...
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Pondering putting an end to Columbus Day, and a look at what could follow
Celebrated by Italian immigrants in the United States since 1792, Columbus Day became a federal holiday in 1937 to commemorate the “arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas.” The explorer’s...
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Racial awareness and reassessing public art in Europe
Who owns the public space, and who should be represented within it — and how? The questions have relevance within and beyond America’s borders, and they are at the forefront of movements to remove or...
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How to liberate African art
Many museums find themselves in a complicated period of transition as they confront their entanglements with colonialism. That complex project was the subject of a recent Harvard Center for African...
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