Haitians are asking the French government to return some of what was stolen.
New Age Activism: Maria W. Stewart and Black Lives Matter →
The 1830s was the high-tide of Jacksonianism, an era many historians consider the nadir of early American history. Although universal
Read moreCentrist Liberalism and the Myths of the American Past →
Whether the Obamas, the Clintons, or the Bushes, the scions of centrist liberalism have not provided a genuine repudiation of Trumpism. Even as hundreds of thousands of immigrants face eminent deportation schemes; even as the pharmaceutical industrial complex profits from the addiction of the white working classes; even as American Indians fight to repel centuries of resource exploitation, former president Obama retains his “Audacity of Hope,” telling the poor, the working classes, and the disaffected that if they had to choose a time in which to be born, “Now is the greatest time to be alive.”
Read moreThe Gift of Black Folk and the Emancipation of American History →
“Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warming have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?” — W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Read moreHistorical Amnesia and the Burden of the Euro-American Past in the Age of Trump →
President Trump’s administration has unleashed a powerful nativist movement anchored on racist and xenophobic sentiments. Yet, the “Muslim Ban” notwithstanding, conventional wisdom, especially in liberal circles, would still have us believe the gospel of American exceptionalism as a home for refugees, the tired masses, and the poor. This narrative of America’s enlightened benevolence posits Trump as an aberration of American humanitarian norms and values. As a result, it disavows the past to explain the rise of Donald Trump as an enigma.
Read moreThe Racial Fault Lines of American History in Trump’s America →
The story of American freedom and racism is, in this sense, a twinned legacy of a dual consciousness: on one side is the story of Euro-America, of building the proverbial city on a hill, one that cast its light throughout the land of dispossessed Native Americans and towards a manifested destiny, looking towards the darker people of the Pacific. On the other side are African-Americans, who were often the casualty of Manifest Destiny, not its beneficiaries.
Read moreConsider This: Language and the Problem of Translation
From the New York Public Library
Just read this beautiful New Yorker piece about language. As someone who is multilingual, it helped me reflect a bit on the constant negotiation between three languages.
Find the piece here:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/08/lauren-collins-learns-to-love-in-french
An Excerpt:
"Thanks to the Normans, who invaded England in the eleventh century, somewhere between a quarter and half of the basic English vocabulary comes from French. An English speaker who has never set foot in a bistro already knows an estimated fifteen thousand words of French."
My Reflection:
The excerpt perhaps explains why I initially found English exciting, fun and easy to learn as quickly as I did as a child. But just the same, it explains the debilitating way that being multilingual trips me in my writing. If my writing sometimes suffers from clarity, it is because of the conflation between the Germanic and Frankish roots of English. I've often substituted longer words (French) for simpler, shorter words (Germanic). According to Strunk & White, for more effective prose, writers should employ the shorter words. However, on my end, an abundant use of longer words stem from my francophone background. French, by reputation, is often considered "fancy" or is thought to reflect sophistication. But as I've always tried to explain to readers who may be frustrated by my writing on that front, I don't simply lean towards the French in English for pretension's sake. It is more that sometimes I think first in Francophone, then write in English. And yes, this can prove cumbersome as I am often translating between languages.
The more I write, the more I realize I naturally gravitate towards the French words. This has always been true of me since middle school. French is familiar and aesthetically pleasing to my ears, and thus becomes my first choice. The challenge, of course, has been to find a balancing act: how to not be mislead into thinking "Frenchified" English words actually conveys what I intend to communicate. To complicate matters, I sometimes feel a sense of loss (or am at a loss for words) when trying to sort between three languages in my head, with similar or dissimilar meaning of the words depending on context.
What's more, this triangulation becomes irritating when I cannot converse in either Haitian (French) Kreyol or French with as much ease as I can now in English, my third language in this order. This would make sense given the fact that linguists argue that Haitian Kreyol's superstratum is French, with West African languages constituting the substratum of the language. French is believed to make up 90% of Haitian Kreyol's vocabulary. But it does not follow that their relative grammars correspond, or for that matter their semantic evolution in the last 300 years. Both languages are etymologically rooted in one parent language (French), but have different meaning in the current cultures of the two societies, especially after severed ties with France in 1804. That is because Haitian Kreyol's infused French retains its vocabulary from the 17th and 18th century French spoken on the island. Mainland French, however, is not as frozen in time, regardless of the regulations imposed by l'Academie Francaise. In short, as a writer I can be lost in translation. This is true in spite of the fact that Kreyol and English are significantly influenced by French; I speak in three tongues that are at once the same and different, historically bound by evolving and diverging into mutually unintelligible parts.
Is this a Gift or a Curse: After 18 years, English appears to have supplanted Haitian-Kreyol as my first language. One way I know this is the fact that it has been gradually appearing more in my dreams. I tend to settle to speaking English more and more with siblings as it seems to be more convenient and less difficult to recall words. In English, my vocabulary is much more expansive in part because I can fold the other two languages into it. I also estimate that I spend some 75% of my life (especially since college) conversing with others in English. Meanwhile I am still more likely to dream and count in French (since it comes to me naturally). But I've often had to search in Kreyol to find and make sense of somethings that are initially incomprehensible to me in French.
Read moreWatch my 2015 Gilder Lehrman Fellow Interview
Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is a nonprofit organization supporting the study and love of American history through a wide range of programs and resources for students, teachers, scholars, and history enthusiasts throughout the nation. The Institute creates and works closely with history-focused schools; organizes summer seminars and development programs for teachers; produces print and digital publications and traveling exhibitions; hosts lectures by eminent historians; administers a History Teacher of the Year Award in every state and U.S. territory; and offers national book prizes and fellowships for scholars to work in the Gilder Lehrman Collection as well as other renowned archives.
External Links
100 Years of Perpetual Occupation: Woodrow Wilson’s Legacy in Haiti →
View of the Sainte Marie neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Feb. 19, 2016, with the Bay of Port-au-Prince in the background
HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES