History Is A Weapon (and a blog)

Alan Berkman Presente

2009-06-07T20:39:00.000-07:00

We wrote about this only a few entries ago, but we didn't realize we'd have to follow it up so soon with such a bummer entry. I didn't know Berkman well, spoke to him on the phone only a few times because of a project I was working on, but he just seemed like a really decent accessible guy.

This got posted online and here it is.

Michael Steven Smith on rembering Dr. Alan Berkman, People's Doctor
After battling recurrent cancers for half his life, Alan Berkman died in Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York City around seven o'clock in the evening of June 5, 2009. He was under a death sentence with a cancer that was going to kill him. He chose to try a risky stem cell transplant procedure where he first had to have chemo-therapy to knock out his own stem cells and then replace them with the stem cells of a donor. Even finding the donor was difficult, the holocaust having significantly narrowed the gene pool of persons who might have a match. One was found. Alan entered the hospital knowing he might not get out. He understood what his doctor's were telling him. He himself was a doctor, a sixties graduate of Columbia's school for physicians and surgeons and now a professor there in the school of public health.
Alan's first was struck by cancer when he was in prison. He did eight years, four of them in solitary. He diagnosed himself. But to no avail. The authorities would do nothing, as if they wanted him to die. They must have hated Alan. A communist. A Jew. A doctor. A supporter of blacks and latinos and native Americans at the second battle of Wounded Knee. They knew his history. It was quite a dossier. A sixties radical. SDS. Active in the anti-war movement. A practising doctor in New York's poor neighborhoods. Forced underground for years because he wouldn't give up the name of a woman he treated for a gunshot wound she got in a failed Brinks truck robbery that killed two cops and a security guard in Rockland County. Then arrested and convicted and doing hard time in a maximum security prison. He helped a cop killer. And now he is in our hands. But Alan was unbent and unbowed. He was tough.
Finally his family and attorneys got him medical attention. He told me they operated on him while handcuffed to a gurney. Deep stomach surgery where the muscles need to be cut. When he awoke from anesthesia they took the handcuffs off and made him get up off the gurney and walk. He got cancer again before getting out on parol. Amazingly Bill Kunstler and Ron Kuby prevented the State from taking away his medical license. He started working as an AIDS doctor in the South Bronx.
That's when I met him. About twenty years ago. He helped me on a case. We drove out to Brooklyn to see the client and then had dinner, the first of many. A steak and a martini. Alan and Barbara, Debby and me. We four. Good friends and comrades.
We went back to that restaurant a couple of weeks ago, just before Alan checked into Memorial. We thought we would see him the next week at the event honoring him and Dr. David Hoos for co- founding HEALTH GAP. But that was not to be. His doctors couldn't give him the time and he was whisked into the hospital for first the chemo and then the transplant. Alan got the new cells but died before they could take root.
When HEALTH GAP was formed with the help of ACT UP and HOUSING WORKS the anti-viral aids medicine "cocktail" cost ten to fifteen thousand dollars a year. Big pharma controlled manufacturing and distribution with their intellectual property rights. Alan helped change that , not having the requisite respect for private property. Now the drugs cost about eight-seven dollars a year and some four million people are taking the medicine, prolonging their lives.
Alan wasn't religious. Religion to him was superstition. Being part of a sect was too narrow and confining for Alan. The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition. The historian Isaac Deutscher had a phrase for it, "the non-Jewish Jew." Alan was in line with the great Jewish heretics, rebels, and revolutionaries of modern thought; Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Freud, and Einstein. They too went beyond the boundaries of Judaism, finding it too narrow, archaic, constricting.
I don't wish to stretch the comparison. Alan was not so much a radical thinker as a man of action. But his intellectual understanding - and he was well educated and widely read - powered his activity. He had in common with these great thinkers the idea that for knowledge to be real it must be acted upon. As Marx observed: "Hitherto philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however is to change it."
Like his intellectual predecessors Alan saw reality in a state of flux, as dynamic not static, and he was aware of the constantly changing and contradictory nature of society. Alan was essentially an optimist and shared with the great Jewish revolutionaries and optimistic belief in humanity and a belief in the solidarity of humankind.
The stem cell procedure failed to save him. Alan Berkman has passed, but his work and his example have taken root. Goodbye dear friend. We all remember you with the two best words in our language: Love and Solidarity.

by Michael Steven Smith

Grassroots Media Conference

2009-05-28T17:44:00.001-07:00

A friend of History Is A Weapon will be speaking at the Grassroots Media Conference. The panel will be on Movement Building and Media Making. If you go and are nice, you might get an ultra rare History Is A Weapon sticker.

Documentary Is Never Neutral

2009-05-25T20:28:00.000-07:00

The always awesome Documentary Is Never Neutral updated. If you love docs, we know you'll love it. Anyone got a spare copy of Peter Davis's Middletown or an invite to ffffound?

Alan Berkman is Awesome

2009-05-18T18:07:00.000-07:00

Word has come that Alan Berkman is preparing for a medical ordeal. We ask that people keep him in your thoughts and prayers. Why? Because Alan Berkman is awesome.

Dot org is back

2009-05-13T20:14:00.000-07:00

Friends,

History is a weapon can be found at history is a weapon dot org, dot com, and one other brief spot, but it should always be open for business. Last week, the dot org went down, and it took us a few days to get it off a junk site, but we're alive and well and will be forever. If you love us, please feel free to post up that historyisaweapon.org is back and alive. Maybe you'll help people who thought we mysteriously died, maybe you'll send new people our way. Either way, we'd totally appreciate it.

History Is A Weapon

Open Call

2009-04-05T18:30:00.000-07:00

So, if you've been following the History Is A Weapon Blog, and who isn't?, you'll notice that we're up to an update a month or so. So while we're thinking of some new stuff to post, and we have been inspired by skimming Meredith Tax's "The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict 1880-1917" (if you haven't read her Rivington Street and its sequel, Union Square, do so. They're simply awesome), don't forget that History Is A Weapon does accept submissions from the larger internet world. Definitely talk to us before you start scanning and typing, but if you think you have something that'll add to the collection, we might just add it to the collection.

Mark Rudd

2009-02-04T17:29:00.001-08:00

I'm reading Mark Rudd's new book, Underground, and went to his site where I came across this wonderful essay by Peter Marin:

Gloria:

The important thing, I think, in considering the Weathermen, is that we remember what America was like in the days when the Weathermen began. Hysterical days, to be sure, but I have a hunch that many of us saw our own nation more clearly then than we have since. Certainly it was clear back then that, in relation to other nations and to large segments of our own population, we acted as a nation in ways destructive and sometimes genocidal, and also that the myths and mystifications with which we surrounded our own activities kept, and would go on keeping, most Americans from realizing what their nation was or did.

I mean to say that groups like the Weathermen and the Panthers saw America quite clearly. But they were so unprepared for what they saw, and were so clearly lacking in any sense of viable strategies for dealing with what they saw, that they slid quickly and tragically into modes of reaction which were almost always hysterical, self-destructive, and self-defeating--to say nothing of their ineffectuality.

Yet as easy as it is to say that, one must remember that the tactics the Weathermen adopted were nothing at all compared to the brutality to which they were reacting. This is what we tend to forget. I was down in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago, spending some time among unemployed and pauperized blacks: women with children and no money at all; men without hope, or work, or dignity. What one saw was an inexcusable part of American life so familiar and pervasive that none with any power--and certainly none of our current presidential candidates--makes any move to do anything about it. If you look carefully to (re)discover in our own South what you can see in dozens of other spots in the country (you know Detroit particularly well) or in impoverished foreign nations: the continuous and inexcusable violence done to millions of people in the name of "freedom" and "democracy." That, I suppose, is what the Weathermen understood.

Does this justify or explain their tactics? Maybe not. But remember this: Few of those who criticize the Weathermen or counsel other tactics actually practice other tactics or effect change in other ways. I know (as you do) all the criticisms of the Weathermen, and I can recite, also, the tactics for change that all agree are superior to their violence: patience, politics, reason, passive disobedience, peaceful protest, education, exhortation, etc. But we also know (though we pretend we do not) that none of these approaches has accomplished very much, save in the area of civil rights. And meanwhile lives end and bodies pile up, and how is it possible to be fully aware of this, and not be tempted to violence against those responsible or complicitous?

The violence of the Weathermen is evidence of two things: first that they saw their nation and its evils clearly, and, secondly, that they had no adequate response to what they saw, and so were driven to ends which partook perhaps too much of the evils they discovered. But how could they have avoided that? They had no readily available political traditions of patient resistence and dissidence to fall back on, and the political left by then had been decimated and divided by the Stalin Pact, the World War, factionalism, and old age. Nor had they any religious or secular moral framework into which they could put the evil they saw, or which would dictate or suggest an adequate response.

They were not, I think, essentially political, no matter how political their rhetoric got. They were moral apocalyptists, violent Anabaptists of a kind, godless in their response and yet driven by their discovery of evil as surely as those in the past for whom God was (I say this, remember, as a purely secular man) the only adequate force or value to pit against evil. And they were, finally, quintessentially American, partiaking, ironically and yet unavoidably, of precisely the values (or the absence of values) they abhorred. They had discovered the moral void at the heart of American life; they were shocked, astonished, transformed,; but they had nowhere to go with their vision of the void but straight into it, and in they went, losing themselves, perhaps, in what they feared and opposed. It could not--given the nature of the nature of the nation and age--have been otherwise.

The Jews, you know, have a tradition, a law: that to study the Cabala, and to see God's hidden truths, you must be of a certain age, and have around you a community of others capable of sustaining you, keeping you sane (such is the supposed power of God's law and face). But the young in the Sixties looked at power, evil and greed and had nothing around them--no tradition, no community--to guide them; they created their response out of thin air and nerve, out of sympathy and the anger of betrayed children. They tried, as best they could, through violence, to topple or simply nudge the weight, the rock, of what it was they had discovered, and the fact that it moved not an inch is not necessarily what proves their tactics false. It may, indeed, be precisely what proves them necessary.

I say all this reluctantly, simply trying to follow the thought through. I am by nature pacific--I can afford to be. But I do not know whether that is evidence of superior "wisdom" (compared, say, to the Weathermen) or merely the fact that my sense of immediacy and the presence of evil is not as sharp as their. Nor may my heart be quite as exposed or vulnerable to human suffering. Too much of our present day wisdom is simply exhaustion, complicity, and a taste for comfort. Had the Weathermen existed in other nations, we might have understood them better. But because they were Americans, their behavior called into question the whole issue of what the rest of us, as Americans, should be doing; and I suspect that there is something self-justifying and self-indulgent in the way we see the Weathermen today. What we say about them may be true, but we do not say it because it is true, if you see what I mean.

Peter

Carol Chomsky

2008-12-20T13:21:00.000-08:00

It is with regret that we note the passing of Carol Chomsky. Though her own linguistic work is less familiar to us, like Roslyn Zinn, her presence at the edges of stories casts a long shadow. My parents had dinner with her and her husband a few years ago. They reported that Noam was interesting and very smart, but she was funny and "a real firecracker." Our condolences to the family.

Documentary Is Never Neutral

2008-11-06T21:04:00.001-08:00

We just put online our major redesign of Documentary Is Never Neutral. We're totally proud of it, thankful of re-designer Anna over at Left Palate, and slowly adding new content to it. If you're a radical documentary filmmaker type, interested in it, or know someone who is, come on down, the price is right, and check it out.

William Ayers

2008-10-06T21:39:00.001-07:00

Reading any nonsense against Bill Ayers is frustrating, but in the context of a bomber of children, John McCain, being the leveler, the whole thing has heightened to the empire's usual level of absurdity. Well, Bill Ayers is great (true story: all this nonsense about Obama having a coffee at Ayer's house, and everyone else saying they've had coffee with Ayers, reminded me that I met Ayers at a conference years ago and we got to talking and he took me out to Starbucks. Maybe Ayers just really likes coffee.) and I think the only good thing to come out of listening to an empire's whining, that is literally this instant violently forcing its claws on the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, is that more people will read go check out Ayers's blog. I'm not such a fan of Obama, and every time I listen to people distance Obama from Ayers, I just recall Ayers being really friendly, not romanticizing the Weather Underground stuff (this was at an event with about thirty guys silently sizing him up while clearly getting their radical man-crush on and he just wasn't interested in catering to that), and trying to navigate a progressive radical path. On one hand, he's living a chaptered life and he's doing great work in education and people who want to demonize him need to go read some of his books on education and see who he is these last twenty five years beyond combating republican talking points. On the other hand, he supposedly* bombed the place where they orchestrate mass campaigns of murder, pillage and rape, and I'm supposed to root against him?!

*He was part of the WUO; I have no clue if he was involved with the Pentagon bombing.

We don't know either, but we'll be there.

2008-09-23T08:52:00.000-07:00

This is being forwarded around. Forward it some more and show up.

ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THURSDAY’S PROTEST

When: 4pm Thursday, September 25!
Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area
What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc.
Why: To say we won’t pay for the Wall Street bailout

Everyone,

This week the White House is going to try to push through the biggest
robbery in world history with nary a stitch of debate to bail out the Wall
Street bastards who created this economic apocalypse in the first place.

This is the financial equivalent of September 11. They think, just like
with the Patriot Act, they can use the shock to force through the
“therapy,” and we’ll just roll over!

Think about it: They said providing healthcare for 9 million children,
perhaps costing $6 billion a year, was too expensive, but there’s
evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street
pigs. If this passes, forget about any money for environmental protection,
to counter global warming, for education, for national healthcare, to
rebuild our decaying infrastructure, for alternative energy.

This is a historic moment. We need to act now while we can influence the
debate. Let’s demonstrate this Thursday at 4pm in Wall Street (see below).
We know the congressional Democrats will peep meekly before caving in like
they have on everything else, from FISA to the Iraq War.

With Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, the money markets and now this
omnibus bailout, well in excess of $1 trillion will be distributed from
the poor, workers and middle class to the scum floating on top.

This whole mess gives lie to the free market. The Feds are propping up
stock prices, directing buyouts, subsidizing crooks and swindlers who
already made a killing off the mortgage bubble.

Worst of all, even before any details have been hashed out, The New York
Times admits that “Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it,”
and its chief financial correspondent writes that the Bush administration
wants “Congress to give them a blank check to do whatever they want,
whatever the cost, with no one able to watch them closely.”

It’s socialism for the rich and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us.
Let’s take it to the heart of the financial district! Gather at 4pm, this
Thursday, Sept. 25 in the plaza at the southern end of Bowling Green Park,
which is the small triangular park that has the Wall Street bull at the
northern tip.

By having it later in the day we can show these thieves, as they leave
work, we’re not their suckers. Plus, anyone who can’t get off work can
still join us downtown as soon as they are able.

There is no agenda, no leaders, no organizing group, nothing to endorse
other than we’re not going to pay! Let the bondholders pay, let the banks
pay, let those who brought the “toxic” mortgage-backed securities pay!

On this list are many key organizers and activists. We have a huge amount of
connections – we all know many other organizations, activists and
community groups. We know P.R. folk who can quickly write up and
distribute press releases, those who can contact legal observers, media
activists who can spread the word, the videographers who can film the
event, etc.

Do whatever you can – make and distribute your own flyers, contact all
your groups and friends. This crime is without precedence and we can’t be
silent! What’s the point of waiting for someone else to organize a protest
two months from now, long after the crime has been perpetrated?

We have everything we need to create a large, peaceful, loud
demonstration. Millions of others must feel the same way; they just don’t
know what to do. Let’s take the lead and make this the start!

News from the Police Raid and Detainment of journalists at the RNC

2008-09-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

Breaking: Amy Goodman and producers arrested in St. Paul

The following is a release from Democracy Now!

ST. PAUL, MN -- Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was unlawfully arrested in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota at approximately 5 p.m. local time.

Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who were being unlawfuly detained. They are Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman's crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul.

Democracy Now! is calling on all journalists and concerned citizens to call the office of Mayor Chris Coleman and the Ramsey County Jail and demand the immediate release of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar. These calls can be directed to: Chris Rider from Mayor Coleman's office at 651-266-8535 and the Ramsey County Jail at 651-266-9350 (press extension 0).

An earlier video about harassment of journalists there:

The Zinn Education Project

2008-08-20T20:33:00.000-07:00

We've come across a few pieces from the people behind "Rethinking Schools" (their great Rethinking Globalization) and "Teaching for Change" (their inspiring "Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching" featuring Roz Payne photos), but of course when the two got together to make the Zinn Education Project, we had to share. They've put together a great PDF packet that's packed with over a hundred pages of material for teachers who want to us Zinn's work in the classroom. We looked through it and it looks great. So if you're a teacher or a student, or you know someone who is, check it out at http://www.zinnedproject.org/.

The 2000 Election and the "War on Terrorism"

2008-08-05T19:06:00.000-07:00

So until today, the last two chapters of the most recent A People's History of the United States were never typed up. But now it's just one chapter that remains, because The 2000 Election and the "War on Terrorism" is online.

Where are the other updates? We've got stuff on the stove, kids, and you'll see it unleashed when it's good and ready.

HAPPY 4th OF JULY! JESSE HELMS HAS DIED!

2008-07-04T08:58:00.000-07:00

Anti-integrationist
Opposed Martin Luther King day
Name is on the Helms-Burton act, the centerpiece of the embargo against Cuba
against ALL Affirmative Action programs
voted to bail out the savings and loan industry AND to slash school lunches for impoverished children, medical care for disabled veterans, prescription drugs for the elderly, and wages for working families
absolutely hated all gay people
supported apartheid in South Africa
From a Mother Jones article
a staunch ally of right-wing military rulers like Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Raoul Cedras in Haiti, and Roberto D'Aubuisson in El Salvador. Confronted with evidence that D'Aubuisson directed death squads to murder civilians, Helms made it clear that some things are more important than human life. "All I know," he replied, "is that D'Aubuisson is a free enterprise man and deeply religious."
Routinely fought against AIDS research from the beginning, blaming people suffering from the disease for it.
In 1993, sang Dixie to the first african american senator, Carol Mosely-Braun, and promised to make her "cry."
Hell burns hotter tonight!

The 4th of july is coming up.

2008-06-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

Every year, the fourth of July comes up and the empire celebrates revolution. The contradiction annoys a lot of us, but something else happens: a lot of people come to History Is A Weapon and read The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro by Frederick Douglass. Read it, forward it to your friends, and enjoy your Fourth. We may be a small axe, but the big tree will know soon enough, we're sharp and ready and, soon enough, it'll fall.

George Carlin RIP

2008-06-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

From Carlin's Obituary in the always disappointing New York Times:

Although some criticized parts of his later work as too contentious, Mr. Carlin defended the material, insisting that his comedy had always been driven by an intolerance for the shortcomings of humanity and society. “Scratch any cynic,” he said, “and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”

Still, when pushed to explain the pessimism and overt spleen that had crept into his act, he quickly reaffirmed the zeal that inspired his lists of complaints and grievances. “I don’t have pet peeves,” he said, correcting the interviewer. And with a mischievous glint in his eyes, he added, “I have major, psychotic hatreds.”

Carlin will be missed.

Utah Phillips RIP

2008-05-28T08:46:00.000-07:00

The great folksinger and storyteller, Utah Phillips, passed away a few days ago. With the passing of Rosalyn Zinn in the last week, this has been a crummy week. Our condolences with the family.

Roslyn Zinn

2008-05-21T06:52:00.000-07:00

It is with great sadness that we note the passing of painter/activist/teacher Roslyn Zinn. While we may only know her through the glimpses, her participating in the stories of Howard's life, the mentions in his talks, for those of us who didn't know her personally, her deepest impact is through his work. Her obituary in The Boston globe quotes Howard Zinn saying:

"I never showed my work to anyone except her, because she was such a fine editor," he said. "She had such a sensibility about what worked, what read well, what was necessary, what was redundant."

As someone who works in media production, I know that there is always more than the single author or director guiding the final vision. As one of the many people who has been profoundly impacted by this body of work, I mourn her passing. Our prayers are with her family and friends.

Aimé Césaire

2008-04-17T15:41:00.000-07:00

It is with great sadness that we learn of the passing of theorist and writer Aimé Césaire. Our condolences to his family. For those unfamiliar with Césaire, we recommend the excellent Discourse on Colonialism .

Winter Soldier

2008-03-12T11:41:00.000-07:00

Watching the film Winter Soldier today, there are so many first visceral reactions. The backdrop is that the New York governor is resigning for sleeping with prostitutes, which is pretty inexcusable, except the corporate press's tenor of "oh of course he has to resign," when Bush and Cheney just grin down from their pile of corpses is pretty aggravating. The film is one of those necessary ones that just wrenches all the lies out into the light. It's a documentary about the Winter Soldier investigations/hearings where veterans of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Vietnam tell about what they did and saw. I can't convey the power of it, you should just go watch it. I might go and schedule a screening in my neighborhood because it is that good.
There's going to be a New Winter Soldier that begins tomorrow and goes through this weekend. If you have a blog, tell people about it. If you're on a list-serv, spread the word. There's a lot that people can do to help. Spread the word. Let people know. We need to get it up on reddit and delicious. It needs to be talked about. The war needs to end.

Cuba

2008-02-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

We hang with the anarchists, we've got a whole stack of Spanish Civil War books on the shelf and are quick to argue the possibility and beauty in an anarchist world. Occasionally, we drink with the liberals and we hang with every sect of lefty faction, including the world renowned communist factionalist league. But some of them anarchists grit their teeth when they hear us talk about Cuba. We love Cuba. A quick sail from the deepest south, a plantation society was overthrown.
And despite all the trashing from the U.S., rhetorically and physically, Cuba has held strong through coup attempts, biological warfare, losing its biggest subsidizer (don't scoff, capitalism is an entire system of subsidy), and the long silent endurance marathon of struggling to stay free so close to the empire's cold inner core. Look to Allende in Chile and the activists (students, organizers, teachers, doctors, workers, people all with dreams, stories, scars and strengths and families) taken to the stadium, look to Nicaragua and the rest of Central America and the families ripped apart and death squads, look to vietnam and the thousands of gallons of poison just pumped, carpet style, over the entire country. The masters have to make examples of the uppity slaves; one that has struck back must be put down.
Today, the New York Times reports that Fidel Castro is resigning as the president of Cuba. Lefties everywhere, of every stripe, need to touch base. The United States government has tried to destabilize and threaten Cuban sovereignty since the bay of pigs, including, but not limited to linking Cuba to the war on terror (president Carter, of all people, immediately got on a plane to Cuba and said that this was total nonsense and that Cuba shouldn't be linked to at all; we still hate Carter, but he did earn points for this one). If Cuba is attacked or messed with, lefties need to mobilize and stand up quick. We need to make clear that this is unacceptable. I wish the same thing was happening for Iraq and Afghanistan, but if the master's whip changes direction, we must be ready.
The world is a much better place because of Castro's work. We hope that he continues to live a long and healthy life.

A Question of Class

2008-02-03T14:11:00.000-08:00

In the last year, as History Is A Weapon has become more widely known, we've been getting a little more email sent in. We try to respond to everyone in a timely manner and be as helpful as we can. In the last few months, we've been getting some email that we appreciate, but it peeves us a little. College students, they've been only college students so far, say great things about the site and then insist that we expand. We'd love to add more stuff, about first nation stuff, queer issues, more on gender, latino and asian struggles, but there's only so much time and we're trying to get other things off the ground. Besides, we're picky. They always close their emails with a pledge to help, but most of them disappear into the ether (with some notable exceptions who we appreciate greatly). We always respond with a "why don't you type up 'A Question of Class' from Dorothy Allison's Skin?" We hear such good things about it. Well, now we need to suggest something new to be typed up, because A Question of Class is here and it is excellent.

I could try to do it some sort of justice, but can't. The entire time I first read it, I annoyed the other person in the room with "you just have to read this! It's amazing." Well, now it is amazing and online. You should read it right now.

New Addition Poster

2008-01-06T20:14:00.000-08:00

Oh, do we have a gift for some of you. Now don't go clicking all willy-nilly, but Anna over at Left Palate helped us put together a poster. So if you have access to something that can print 11 by 17 in color and want to help spread the word about History Is A Weapon, the idea and the website, go to our poster page and print up a copy. It's a bigger file, so don't hotlink it or anything, but we trust you.
Happy postering!
The History Is A Weapon poster page

Anna, who designed our wrapping paper, also made an early ~~inspiration to~~ ~~competitor~~ ~~parody~~ something that is perhaps best left described as little as possible. We think she thinks she is funny.

Two New Additions

2007-11-27T18:27:00.001-08:00

Search parties have been sent out due to the lack of new additions as of late. So, we're sending up a flare with both Maria Stewart's "Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall, Boston" and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "Declaration of Sentiments". We'll probably continue on the down low for a little while, so check out old Left Palate and hold your horses. People are busy.

p.s. We've been getting more than a few emails lately about what Histories are missing from HIAW. While we agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments, you can always type them up and send them to us. We will post them (check in advance, obviously; we do have strict guidelines.)