Host Jack Eidt features a 1995 talk at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles by the late author Mike Davis, urbanist historian, public intellectual, and commentator on politics, labor, activism, and society.
Tag: urban history
Tribute to the Late Urban History Provocateur Mike Davis
We feature a lecture by Mike Davis about his book Planet of Slums, which investigates the increasing inequality of the urban world. According to the U.N., more than one billion people now live in extreme poverty in mega-cities facing environmental and social collapse from perpetual and worsening climate disruptions.
“Bleeding Kansas” and Stories of the Underground Railroad
Bleeding Kansas is the term used to described the period of violence during the settling of the Kansas territory between 1854 and 1861. At the core of the conflict was the question of whether the Kansas Territory would allow or outlaw slavery, and enter the Union as a free state. Check out the documentary Dawn of Day, Stories of the Underground Railroad.
Jean Jacques Dessalines and the Women Warriors who Liberated Haiti
Today’s attempts to malign Haiti stand as only the latest in a long line of hegemony and oppression against this Caribbean island nation. January 1, 1804 is Haitian Independence Day, and Haitian attorney Ezili Dantò honors and remembers Janjak Desalin (Jean Jacques Dessalines), Haiti’s Liberator and founding father, as well as the indigenous army, and women who influenced him. Janjak’s ideals and legacy lives on – Nou la!
Old Town Auburn, Portrait of a Gold Rush Town
On a visit with the Outdoor Writers Association of California to the Sierra Nevada town of Auburn, the dark and light of the gold rush history sparkles its brick-faced brilliance in a stroll through Old Town.
Frederick Douglass on the 4th of July: Injustice and Cruelty
Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in 1838 and became one of the most powerful and eloquent orators of the abolitionist movement. Listen to his 1852 Independence Day talk, organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Sewing Society and performed by James Earl Jones.
Libertarianism Failure: Inequality and the Repeal of Public Protections
In a nation that prides itself on democracy and equality, one finds many defenders of elitism and inequality among some conservatives, most libertarians, and especially objectivists. In a capitalist nation, one that often worships economic success above morality, one can find religious defenses of amorality going back pretty far. How did we get here?