Bicentennial Celebration Research Articles

The Legacy of Pierre Paul Broca: A Bicentennial Celebration.

The Legacy of Pierre Paul Broca: A Bicentennial Celebration.

Affective Aspirations of Activist Musical Diplomacy at the Bicentennial Celebration of Brazilian Independence in Lisbon

AbstractIn 2022, Prime Minister of Portugal António Costa of the Socialist Party held a celebration of Brazilian music at his residence in Lisbon for the Bicentennial of Brazilian Independence a month before the presidential elections between Bolsonaro and Lula. In contrast to Bolsonaro’s right-wing rallies, Costa featured acts that were feminist, antiracist, and leftist. In this diplomatic event, musical performances criticised Bolsonaro’s Brazil and supported Lula’s campaign, imaginatively aspiring for an alternative Brazil despite the organizers’ directive not to protest. I show how the performers strategically and affectively advanced a comprehensible political critique in this crucial moment of Brazilian political history.

The Poe Centenary in Boston

The Poe Centenary in Boston

Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico’s Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present

Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico’s Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present

Critical Analyses of Liberia’s Bicentennial Celebration: A Way Forward to a New Historical Narrative and Development Tangibility

The land known today as Liberia existed with rich civilizations; well institutionalized tribal governance and political structures that functioned well to meet the political, economic and spiritual demands before the Western Civilization that came along with repatriation of the Americo-Liberians or the settlers in the early 1800s. Before 1822, there were socio-political establishments and institutions, the likes of Condo Confederation of the Mandingo leader, King Sa Bosso Kamara, King Jack Ben of Jumbo Town of Grand Bassa, King Brister, a Dei ruler, King Zolu Duma or Peter Careful as known by European of Gon (the Capital City of his Kingdom on North Lofa River) and others are some of the historical indigenous figures and their leadership ability and kingdoms are illustrations of existing socio-political civilizations before the docking and berthing of the Elizabeth; a Ship that brought the first batch of America-Liberians ( Freed Slaves) in 1822 at Dozoa Island ( Providence Island), from North America. Further, this year marks the exact two centuries since the arrival of settlers. The event has been widely celebrated in the midst of incomparable development and economic successes as per the years of the nation’s existence; the so-celebrated class (the settlers) governed the State from 1847-1980 under the Republican and the True Whig Parties respectively with the same injustice and socioeconomic apartheid-like of leadership that they escaped from, from the USA, and from 1980-2022 under the so-called majority native people led-admirations, the country stays economically and developmentally bleeding . Thus, there is a dire need to a radically change the State’s behaviour by fighting corruption and prioritizing sustainable development and shared economic prosperity that has been compromised over the last 200 years to meet the aspiration of the people (Liberians). Hence, this paper aims at exploring some of the historical ambiguities and factors that led and contributed to incomparability of Liberia’s 200 years with her development and economic achievement. Nations’ success are measured by their tangible achievement not only how long they have been in nationhood.

Critical Analyses of Liberia's Bicentennial Celebration: A Way Forward to a New Historical Narrative and Development Tangibility

Critical Analyses of Liberia's Bicentennial Celebration: A Way Forward to a New Historical Narrative and Development Tangibility

“Ebony” Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America

“Ebony” Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America

Introduction: On Learning, Freedom, and Democracy

Introduction: On Learning, Freedom, and Democracy

Finding “Hidden Heroines”

This article explores girls’ participation in 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial celebrations through their national organizations. Members of the Girl Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls were deeply involved in the nation’s displays of civic pride. Girls’ organizations linked their ordinary service projects to the Bicentennial and created new projects as they caught the national bandwagon. To some extent, these efforts emphasized unquestioning patriotism, but each organization, propelled by second-wave feminism and social history, also absorbed and advanced efforts to recover multiple perspectives. Girls’ organizations became public history spaces and girls in them saw the understanding of and dissemination of history as an important part of female citizenship.

The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University ed. by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy

Reviewed by: The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University ed. by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy Mary N. Woods The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University. Edited by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 341. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8139-4322-0.) The University of Virginia is the only American institution of higher education conceived, nurtured, designed, built, overseen, and, I would add, obsessed over by one of the nation’s founding fathers and presidents. Thomas Jefferson envisioned a modern university that would educate the next generation of leaders for the young American republic. At the same time, he wanted an institution whose faculty and graduates would protect and defend the South and its dependence on slavery. Published to coincide with the university’s bicentennial celebrations in 2019, The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University intertwines the man with the university he considered one of his greatest achievements. The very first account of the University of Virginia appeared in 1856 (only thirty-one years after the first students arrived on campus); it drew on at that time unpublished correspondence between Jefferson and Senator Joseph C. Cabell, his chief ally for the university in the state legislature. Extensive use of archival materials housed at the university and at Monticello is also at the heart of these fourteen essays curated and edited by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, all eminent Jefferson scholars. The book’s center of gravity is the period between 1814, when Jefferson prepared funding estimates and an architectural design, and 1825, when the university opened with eight faculty members and sixty-eight students. The authors—who are architects, librarians, and archivists as well as professors—deal with the university’s prehistory, students, campus design and buildings, curriculum, and library. The editors do not shy away from the painful, difficult, and contradictory histories of Jefferson and the university. By having students live close to faculty around a central lawn, Jefferson believed he was creating an Academical Village that would instill order, decorum, learning, and domestic tranquility. In their essays, Ervin L. Jordan Jr. and Maurie D. McInnis reveal another village: the attics, barns, kitchens, laundries, dining halls, and smokehouses where African Americans dwelled and labored. Drawing on archival materials only recently transcribed and digitized by the university-sponsored “Jefferson’s University— the Early Life” project as well as on archaeological findings, Jordan and McInnis recuperate the histories of Black people, both free and enslaved, at the university. They make abundantly clear that Jefferson’s Academical Village relied on slave communities like those that sustained the plantations and created their wealth. There the sons of planters first learned the lessons of racial oppression and white supremacy that they applied so brutally to enslaved people at the Academical Village. In “‘Chastising a Servant for His Insolence’: The Case of the Butter Bully,” Jordan recounts histories of students such as Thomas Jefferson Boyd, who brutalized a Black male waiter (nameless, as was usual in university records) for serving him supposedly rancid butter. McInnis shows just how long and egregious the history of sexual violence at American universities has been in an account of the attempted gang rape of a Black girl, aged twelve, by three students. [End Page 117] These two essays demonstrate how slavery, violence, and white supremacy were bred in the bone of the University of Virginia. Breaking from the tight focus on the early years that otherwise prevails in the collection, McInnis explains that the university’s history of racial violence and oppression is exactly why Richard B. Spencer, an alumnus, chose the campus and downtown Charlottesville for his rally of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in 2017. I hope others will bring theories of class, race, Blackness, and whiteness to bear, building on Jordan’s and McInnis’s exemplary work. Melding theory and history may help us grapple with the systemic racism that has for far too long pervaded daily life and institutions in the United States. “A Look Back at Jefferson’s Forward-Looking Mission for the University...

The Little Book of Good Habits for Young People (Cărticica Năravurilor Bune pentru Tinerime), translated by the Protopope of Sibiu, Romania, Moise Fulea (1787-1863), at its bicentennial celebration

The Little Book of Good Habits for Young People (Cărticica Năravurilor Bune pentru Tinerime), translated by the Protopope of Sibiu, Romania, Moise Fulea (1787-1863), at its bicentennial celebration

El maestro desde la nostalgia. La restauración de la Compañía de Jesús en la mirada de Manuel Revuelta González, SJ

Queremos poner en valor la labor investigadora realizada por Manuel Revuelta sobre el restablecimiento de la Compañía de Jesús en la España de Fernando VII. Nos hemos centrado, especialmente, en un uno de sus últimos libros titulado El restablecimiento de la Compañía de Jesús. Celebración del bicentenario. Una obra imprescindible para conocer con detalle la historia de la Compañía restituida y su restablecimiento en el orbe católico.

Nostalgic journey of Regional Institute of Ophthalmology-Government Ophthalmic Hospital, Egmore – Bicentennial celebrations (1819–2019)

Nostalgic journey of Regional Institute of Ophthalmology-Government Ophthalmic Hospital, Egmore – Bicentennial celebrations (1819–2019)

Frankenstein as Cautionary Tale for Medical Humanities? A Brief Coda.

Amidst the recent bicentennial celebrations of the first publication, in 1818, of Mary Godwin Shelley's novel Frankenstein, little attention was given to the character Henry Clerval. Yet despite his few pages in the novel, Clerval's role as a humanist foil for Victor Frankenstein is significant. This brief coda examines what contemporary readers might learn from Clerval when his character is read allegorically, and how his presence in the novel makes clear that it can serve as a cautionary tale not only for biomedical scientists, but also for medical humanists.

Tiempo, historia y política. Una reflexión comparativa sobre las conmemoraciones bicentenarias en México y Argentina

El objetivo de este artículo es comparar las conmemoraciones oficiales del bicentenario de las Revoluciones independentistas que tuvieron lugar en México y Argentina. Por un lado, se busca analizar cómo dos gobiernos ideológicamente diferentes conmemoraron el Bicentenario y representaron la idea de revolución y, por otro, examinar las relaciones que dichos gobiernos establecieron con el tiempo histórico. Las fuentes utilizadas para alcanzar dicho objetivo son los discursos oficiales de los presidentes y las celebraciones bicentenarias. Las hipótesis que se busca demostrar es, en primer lugar, la de que, mientras México intentó construir una memoria reconciliatoria, en Argentina se procuró poner en evidencia las rupturas entre los actores del pasado y el presente. En segundo lugar, esas dos formas de conmemorar dieron lugar a dos representaciones diferentes de la idea de revolución y a dos maneras de representar la tríada pasado-presente-futuro.

National history, allegory and the force of habit in the films of Matías Piñeiro

Abstract This article examines how Matías Piñeiro’s films El hombre robado/The Stolen Man (2007) and Todos mienten/They all Lie (2009) critically redeploy foundational figures and rhetorical devices that structure the dominant narratives of Argentine national history. Both films take lesser-known writings of the nineteenthcentury intellectual and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, best known for Facundo: Civilización y barbarie/Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845) (1845), as the point of departure for intricate plots involving the romantic intrigues of young people in twenty-first century Buenos Aires. Contrary to the teleology integral to official versions of national history, which have been conspicuously on display during the Bicentennial celebrations of Latin American independence in recent years, Piñeiro’s films posit a more porous and more unstable relationship between the present and history, in which the ruins of the latter persistently, if intermittently, and fragmentarily inform everyday life, and vice versa. Thus, through the insistent repetition of the basic components of foundational myths of Argentine identity, El hombre robado and Todos mienten redirect a force of habit to restore the polysemy of the commonplace tropes of national history.

Student Research: Documentaries Made in the Community

ABSTRACTMiddle school students learned about their community when they created documentaries as part of a state bicentennial celebration. Students gathered multiple primary and secondary resources and worked with community members to interview them for their perspectives through video presentations as part of the inquiry process. Students work with local history to find connections between people both past and present. Looking at institutional histories allowed students to communicate their authentic findings to the people in the community.

"Why I Wrote the Phyllis Wheatley Pageant-Play": Mary Church Terrell's Bicentennial Activism

"Why I Wrote the Phyllis Wheatley Pageant-Play"Mary Church Terrell's Bicentennial Activism Lurana Donnels O'Malley (bio) Sometimes I joke in rehearsal, "If this was truly a period piece, I'd be in chains somewhere." —OKIERIETE ONAODOWAN Hamilton: An American Musical, the groundbreaking creation of Lin-Manuel Miranda, broke that ground in part by casting actors of color as key historical figures of the American Revolution and its aftermath. On Broadway, African American actors played three US presidents: Okieriete Onaodowan (James Madison), Daveed Diggs (Thomas Jefferson), and Christopher Jackson (George Washington).1 Jackson, however, was not the first man of African descent to portray George Washington on the American stage. More than eighty years earlier, in 1932, a black man played the role in a production that explored the relation between America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved: Mary Church Terrell's Historical Pageant-Play Based on the Life of Phyllis Wheatley.2 As critic Lyra D. Monteiro notes about Hamilton, there is "a truly damning omission in [Hamilton]: despite the proliferation of black and brown bodies onstage, not a single enslaved or free person of color exists as a character in this play."3 In contrast, the 1932 production of Terrell's script placed the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley front and center as an enslaved African American character with agency and impact. Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) was an African American educator, writer [End Page 225] suffragist, and civil rights activist. Terrell (figure 1) was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman in the United States appointed as a member of a board of education, in Washington, DC. Although Terrell was a prolific writer (the author of numerous essays and articles in addition to her autobiography), to my knowledge she wrote only two scripts, both intended as contributions to the 1932 bicentennial celebration of George Washington's birthday: a pageant about the African American soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War and a biographical pageant-play on Phillis Wheatley. The former was never staged; the latter was performed as part of the official Washington, DC, festivities for Washington's bicentennial. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Portrait of Mary Church Terrell, courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives, Howard University, Washington, DC. Terrell's stated goal for both historical pageants was to combat the negative and demeaning images of African Americans she had encountered in other plays and pageants planned for the Washington bicentennial. In Phyllis Wheatley, Terrell exposes the injustice of authentication rituals, as Wheatley is again [End Page 226] and again asked to prove the validity of her talent as a writer. Ironically, Terrell herself faced such judgment from two sides: from black critics opposed to the Washington bicentennial's representations of African Americans and from production staff and supporters who questioned the historical authenticity of her pageant-play. Although the production faced numerous obstacles and was considerably downsized from the original plans, the performance, created by a dozen artists and staff members, featured a cast of more than two hundred African Americans, most of them public school youths performing for their own community. Phyllis Wheatley was ultimately the only staged birthday bicentennial event to place African American history at center stage and in a positive light. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Engraving of Phillis Wheatley, 1773, attributed to Scipio Moorhead. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, DC. As Terrell knew, the historical Wheatley (figure 2) was not only contemporaneous with Washington but also had an unusual connection to him. In October 1775, Wheatley composed a poem in honor of General Washington and sent it to him at his headquarters in Cambridge along with a brief note; in February 1776, Washington wrote a reply to thank her for it.4 Wheatley's poem first appeared in print in the Virginia Gazette in March 1776; titled "To his Excellency [End Page 227] George Washington," the panegyric praises Washington but also requests that he be guided by the...

The Recorded Anthology of American Music and the Rockefeller Foundation: Expertise, Deliberation, and Commemoration in the Bicentennial Celebrations

The Recorded Anthology of American Music and the Rockefeller Foundation: Expertise, Deliberation, and Commemoration in the Bicentennial Celebrations

Running the Cold War: Gender, Race, and Track in Cultural Diplomacy, 1955–1975

On July 10, 1976, President Gerald Ford mingled with journalists and glamorous international travelers along the East Coast of the United States. He spent the afternoon in Plattsburgh, New York bidding farewell to the United States Olympic Team before its athletes departed for the Montreal Olympiad. 1 On the heels of recent bicentennial celebrations, Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter derided such events as “rose garden strategy,” canny campaign tactics, during an election year. 2 Yet Ford’s visit with elite athletes reflected diplomatic tradition, not merely a publicity stunt. Olympians had affected U.S. foreign policy since 1945. As celebrities and cultural politicians, athletes compelled presidential administrations to consider their power to cast abroad positive impressions of the United States. Presidents fostered connections with athletes who supported their agendas, and avoided contact with Olympians whose politics they disliked. During his brief presidency, Ford learned firsthand that sport could function as effective cultural diplomacy. His administration depended on multiracial athletes, male and female, to communicate nuances of foreign policy. Before his trip to the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) in December 1975, U.S. track and field athletes smoothed the turf the previous spring, on Mao Zedong’s invitation, during a massive goodwill exhibition. Amid critiques of détente, Ford sent athletes to Montreal to build popular expressions of patriotism at home and diplomatic friendships abroad.