tingilinde

essential reading on american concentration camps

We've had them in one form or another for a long time. Posted before, but necessary if you haven't read it.,   Here's a piece on those from WWII.  essential reading.  (via The New York Times)  

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They were described as vermin who were infesting America. They were deemed a national security threat to the United States, rounded up and sent to internment camps, where they were housed in military-style barracks behind barbed wire and watched over by armed officers in guard towers. There was no due process, no risk assessment, no effort to assess who might actually pose a threat and who just happened to look like “the enemy.” Instead, tens of thousands of men, women and children were subject to “removal” because, as one government report put it, “an exact separation of the ‘sheep from the goats’ was unfeasible.”

My mother’s family was among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast who were dispatched to internment camps during World War II. The faded photo of my mother, my aunt and my grandparents, standing in front of the Topaz Relocation Center barracks, where they were incarcerated in the Utah desert in 1942, used to feel like an artifact from a thankfully distant era — an illustration from a history lesson about what a former first lady, Laura Bush, last month called “one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.”

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froebel's gifts

A fascinating piece on the invention of Kindergarten from 99% Invisible.  Audio and transcript

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For a time, Froebel worked with one of the world’s foremost crystallographers in Berlin — and this experience would fundamentally reshape how he understood the world. Where most people saw nature in big flowing organic shapes, like hills and plants and animals, Froebel zoomed in to study the straight lines and geometric forms of crystals. He came to see these as the building blocks of reality.

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"not a racist bone"

When a racist defends a racist

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While many writers have rightly dismissed the “racist bone” fallback as nonsensical and metaphorically counterintuitive, especially given the history of pseudoscientific fields such as phrenology, few have explored the genealogy of the phrase itself. Excavating the development of this knee-jerk defense helps illuminate how mainstream Americans understand race, racism and the ideology of colorblindness — as well as the dangers of this understanding.

When it comes to this now ubiquitous defense, all roads appear to lead back to Ronald Reagan’s years in the Oval Office. Though there are piecemeal and disjointed references to the “racist bone” apologia dating back as early as the mid-20th century, its usage was neither frequent nor systemic until Reagan’s first term. Based on a Google Ngram search, the documented frequency of the “racist bone” defense grew most quickly between 1981 and 1986 and almost always applied to Reagan or someone in his administration.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

city transit 115 years ago

The City Hall subway station.   Times change.

 

white supremacy

The more I learn about the period, the more I have come to realize the American Civil War was never settled.   

Terry Gross talks with Henry Louis Gates Jr about his new book Stony the Road.  (transcript and audio)

 

 

images from the dawn of the atomic age

Ed Westcott's obit in The New York Times.

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Within that hush-hush world, Mr. Westcott took his camera wherever he could, chronicling the construction of its many plants (which had names like K-25 and Y-12), technicians at their stations, workers leaving their shifts, and even guards searching a Santa Claus at a gate. Mr. Westcott was the only person authorized to use a camera in Oak Ridge.

One of his best-known pictures shows women monitoring the controls of a calutron, which was used to separate uranium isotopes. Like the other workers, they were unaware of the government’s goal of building the first atomic bomb.

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and paint by numbers

Another passing

I'm more impressed by people trying to make something physical than read about it.  Maybe they venture off on their own., 

 

 

the story behind swiss miss cocoa mix

The inventor recently died - the Washington Post obit is interesting.

 

 

 

tracking down where trump's father was born

Interesting little piece (via The Washington Post)

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These days, the building is mostly empty. The top two floors are being leased as potential office space, presumably appealing given that the Bronx borough hall is just across Tremont Avenue to the south. If Trump’s family lived on the third or fourth floors, the apartment where the president’s father was born is now an antiseptic space ready for a small business to move in. If they lived on the second floor, their home is now an event space, used regularly for birthdays and quinceaneras.

The first floor is currently occupied primarily by a small store, Twakl Family Deli. “Twakl” is Turkish for “relying on God,” according to Mohammed Abas, 28, whose father owns the store.

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on the history of NYC subway labeling..

Years of history and three companies.  (via The New York Times)

 

The Interborough Rapid Transit Company built the trains that are numbered.

The Independent System included what are now the A, C, D, E, F, G, R and Q lines.

 The Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation included what are now the B, J, M, N, Z and L lines.

 

and why numbered lines currently perform better than lettered lines