Gain Sense

The Battle of Bloody Brook, September 18th, 1675 Editor's note: Parenthetical citations with associated page numbers are provided where necessary. In the late 1990s historians became re-interested in writing about seventeenth century New England's bloodiest conflict: King Philip's War (1675-1676). In 1999 alone, the following books were published: Jill Lepore's  The Name of War,  James D. Drake's  King Philip's War: Civil War in New England 1675-1676 , and finally, the subject of this article, Schultz and Tougias'  King Philip's War: The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict .  All of these books emphasized different aspects of the war. Lepore analyzed seventeenth and eighteenth century literature on King Philip's War to show that English colonizers wrote of it in a way that exonerated themselves of the violence they committed against Native Americans. Drake looked to the decades prior to the war, arguing that colonizers and Native p...

  Structural racism, also known as systemic or societal racism, is more deeply entrenched in our working culture than you think. A quick google search on the definition of structural racism gives us the following: "A system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with 'whiteness' and disadvantages associated with 'color' to endure and adapt over time. Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist." [1] This brings us to the point of this article: we need a revised definition for structural racism—one that hones in on what it is and how it affects people of color. While the above definition is effective ...

  Editor's note: This article is based on a talk delivered by Professor Gregory Downs in 2017.  In 2013, the Shelby v. Holder U.S. Supreme Court decision gave states permission to change their election laws without needing advance clearance from the Department of Justice. This decision invalidated a portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required preclearance with the DoJ to protect voters of color. Most people might ask: How did we get to this point? But history professor Gregory Downs (UC Davis) believes this as the wrong question. The United States, he argues, has never been a country where the government guaranteed the right to vote. Indeed, the United States is a country with a tradition of disenfranchisement, rather than enfranchisement. In his talk titled “Voting Rights Under Fire,” Downs argued that U.S. history could be defined by the struggle to expand and retract the vote. Far from being a recent development, “challenging registration laws and low voter turnou...

  In a talk entitled “‘She could spare one ample breast for the profit of her owner’: White Mothers and Enslaved Wet Nurses’ Invisible Labor in American Slave Markets,” Assistant Professor of History Stephanie Jones-Rogers of UC Berkeley argued that studying enslaved wet nurses reveals white women’s complicity in expanding slavery in the south and demonstrates how white mothers were at the forefront of these market transactions. White southern women had created a “niche sector of the slave market” dedicated to providing them with the specific maternal labor that they sought from bondswomen. Jones-Rogers emphasized that we cannot forget about the reproductive and maternal violence white women perpetrated against black bondswomen. Indeed, the commodification of slave mothers provides an important example of the disturbing “quotidian” horrors of slavery.