https://www.npr.org/2021/03/16/977843348/venture-aims-to-resurrect-and-reimagine-anti-slavery-newspaper-for-the-21st-centThe Boston Globe and Boston University Center for Antiracist Research are partnering to launch The Emancipator, a resurrection of an early 19th-century abolitionist newspaper that its contemporary founders hope will reframe the national conversation in an effort to "hasten racial justice."
"This reimagined platform will marry the best of scholarship and journalism to analyze, comment, and seek truth about the racial problems of our time," Ibram X. Kendi, co-founder of The Emancipator and founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, said in a press release.
The Emancipator plans to launch online later this year, according to the release, and is currently seeking two co-editors in chief to be based at the Boston Globe and Boston University.You know, I think I'll relaunch a paper that influenced America and changed it forever, too.
Maybe this one: Die Germantauner Zeitung, published in the 1700's and was greatly influential in starting the American Revolution.
Or maybe this one; The Neue Volkszeitung (New People's Newspaper) was a German-language newspaper issued from New York City, United States. The paper had a moderate social democratic orientation and is remembered as a leading anti-Nazi American publication in the German language during the years of World War II. (source wikipedia)
Or maybe I'll find some ethnic American press to emulate, one that was contemporary when this stuff was written:
https://iowaculture.gov/sites/default/files/history-education-pss-irish-foreign-transcript.pdf Or perhaps a paper from this era of European immigration, one in which my earliest American ancestors endured, described well here:
http://dhs.delranschools.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_3013045/File/Kaminski/Zinn-3.pdfOther family members may wish to join in and start a paper in keeping with the times that were faced by their ancestors as described here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25011005?seq=1Seems to me this could go on and on and on and on, with a newspaper for every American titled by a paper which reported the grievances and triumphs past for each ethnic group.
Brilliant!
Except which one do I read? After all, my family's American ethnicity includes--- but is not limited to---the English, Central Europe (essentially the Holy Roman Empire, which "was neither holy, Roman, nor an Empire), the Irish, Russian and German Jews, and West African.
I mean, whose grievances among our ancestors do we choose to bring to the fore and try to keep alive in the 21st century? Jews are still fighting thousands of years of discrimination, stereotyping, and physical abuse and violence; Germans and Austrians still have to push back from being put forth as autocratic, cold, unfeeling, militaristic, and heartless or just plain old Nazis; the Irish today are still characterized as lazy, fun-loving drunken potato-eaters with dysfunctional families who have excessive ties to Catholicism and all it represents (though they did give us tomorrow's holiday, Lucky Charms, Riverdance and Guiness Stout); and my ancestors from Mali? Well, we think they're still pissed off about a lot of things, going back to the Roman Empire, as you can likely imagine.
I mean, what is an American like me to do?
I guess I've got to sift through this and just pick out the best of the best (or worst past history having to be endured by them, not us), even though it only goes back to 1777.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles/Should take some time. Wish me the luck of the Irish. And don't worry my Talmudic zeal and German dedication to the tasks at hand will serve me well, and...damn those Romans!
Poll
