When we speak of people hiding from the Nazis during the Second World War, we think immediately of Anne Frank, concealed for two years with her family in an Amsterdam attic. But there were, of course, many, many other Jews who went into hiding.
Polish-Jewish artist, architect and historian Natalia Romik is excavating these hideouts in eastern Europe, many of them in the most unlikely of places, including a cemetery, a cellar and even a tree.
She takes castings of the hideouts and creates sculptures from them in her work to map and archive what she calls Jewish survival architecture. So far she has uncovered 12 such hiding places.
2023 Dan David Prize winner Dr. Karma Ben Johanan discusses her new book Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish relations after Vatican II. What were the implications of the Vatican’s new approach to Judaism, announced in the 1960s, across the Catholic world and among Jewish theologians?
A visit to Nairobi’s archives led to a ‘eureka moment’ for Kenyan Chao Tayiana. She set out to retell colonial narratives – using digital technology to bring lost and suppressed stories to light.
When Chao Tayiana was growing up in Ngong town, west of Nairobi, she heard many stories about the Tsavo man-eaters, a pair of lions that “terrorised” and killed African and Indian railway workers during the construction of the Kenya-Uganda railway in the late 1800s – and were later “heroically” shot by John Patterson, a British officer.
The man-eating big cats lent drama to the romanticised view of railways as a way for Europeans to penetrate “the deep dark interiors of Africa”, or as a symbol of Britain’s grand designs for development of the “wild” African continent. The photo of Patterson posing with one of the dead lions became synonymous with white conquest.
2023 Dan David Prize winner Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers reveals how white women across the American South played crucial roles in perpetuating the system of slavery.
Of all of the people enslaved in the southern United States over time, 40% of them were owned by women. For example, when she married George Washington in 1759, Martha Washington was herself the enslaver of 84 people.
So why has the trading and enslaving of people been commonly perceived as a male domain? Why, in fact, were many white women so entrenched in this trade in human lives?
In this episode, Don Wildman is joined by 2023 Dan David Prize winner Stephanie Jones-Rogers. Stephanie has been exploring the testimonies of these people formerly enslaved by women to find out more about their experiences.
Don Wildman is the host of American History Hit, on which he explores the past to help us understand the United States of today.
Dr. Anita Radini is not your average archaeologist. An assistant professor at the School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, she analyzes the tiny remains of dust that collected in the dental plaque of early humans to learn about their work lives and environments.
For her outstanding work, she won the 2023 Dan David Prize which recognizes the work of archaeologists, as well as historians, digital humanists, curators, and documentary filmmakers.
Q: Before we dive into your work, can you tell us what attracted you to archaeology in the first place?
“I’ve always been fascinated by the past. I was born and grew up in Rome, where history and archaeology are around you everywhere. The city, one can say, invited me to join this profession. At the age of five, my mum – a teacher – took her pupils to Pompeii, the ancient Roman town destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius. The visit impacted me, stayed with me, and I think I have been obsessed with archaeology ever since.”
2023 Dan David Prize winner Adam Clulow explores how fears of a sprawling conspiracy took hold in a remote Dutch East India Company fort in 1623 – with deadly consequences.
Historically the federal government has done very little to push banks to address climate risk in the financial system. The last major wave of environmental legislation passed in the 1960s and 1970s, when banks were nowhere near as big as they are now. Back then, the primary targets of anti-pollution laws were corporations that were actively generating emissions or had dumped toxic waste that needed to be cleaned up. This made sense, given that manufacturing and chemical firms were still at the top of the Fortune 500 list in 1977, while financial firms were not. Banks simply did not receive the same scrutiny as firms in the industrial sector.
Changes in the banking sector over the past half-century have produced dramatic consolidation, making a handful of big banks outsize financial engines in the fossil fuel industry. So long as these large banks and financial firms continue funding major fossil fuel development, environmental activists argue, addressing climate change will be impossible. And policymakers are now beginning to heed their calls.