In 1963, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire helped launch a revolutionary literacy campaign in the impoverished northeastern Brazilian town of Angicos, where hundreds of rural workers learned to read and write in just 40 hours of instruction. Freire’s approach was about much more than literacy. Rather than emphasizing memorization and repetition, he developed “Culture Circles” where participants…
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“On July 4th, 1776 … the United States became the greatest force for freedom, justice, equality, and prosperity in the history of the world,” President Donald Trump declared in a promotional video for the Freedom 250 campaign, the administration’s flagship initiative commemorating the U.S.’s semiquincentennial. Among the centerpiece events planned for the nation’s 250th birthday celebration was an…
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“I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” Those are the opening words of America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, a new book from Princeton historian Eddie Glaude. Released ahead of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, the book is a critical look back at how the United States has celebrated previous milestone birthdays…
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The abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass is known for many things, but perhaps among the most significant is his views on education’s relationship to slavery. Douglass himself was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818. Douglass described in his 1845 autobiography how one of his enslavers, Mrs. Auld, began teaching him to read when he was a child. Mrs. Auld’s husband ordered her to stop…
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More than 400 years have passed since the first white colonists arrived in North America to establish a settlement, and more than 160 years since slavery was abolished, yet structural racism is still alive and kicking in the U.S. In the interview that follows, two economists, Michele Holder and Jeannette Wicks-Lim, co-authors of a new book titled The Political Economy of Racism: The Persistence of…
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“With a single sheet of parchment and 56 signatures, America began the greatest political journey in human history,” declared Donald Trump, announcing the nation’s upcoming 250th anniversary. Under Trump’s direction, a sweeping federal initiative — branded as both America 250 and the “Freedom 250” campaign — has launched a full year of patriotic programming. The Salute to America 250 Task…
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