A defeat for Indigenous constitutional recognition would be disastrous and demoralising. But history tells us that even worthy proposals with bipartisan support are not assured of success.
A year ago, a military coup toppled Thailand’s elected government. The junta promised elections once a new constitution is adopted, but its authoritarian rule betrays a hostility to real democracy.
History is not a ‘thing’ to be memorized, as some in the Oklahoma legislature might believe, but a living process, to be understood in all its complexity.
Last month President Obama welcomed the film Selma into the White House – a first-family showing that, as it happens, occurred a century after the first-ever screening of a movie inside the White House…
Until 1950 the Red Cross segregated blood. It was thousands of African-Americans during World War II who forced the Red Cross to include them as donors and helped pave the way for activism of the 1960s.
In the spring of 1950, Gordon Parks, the first African-American photographer for Life Magazine, returned to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas. On assignment for the magazine, Parks photographed his middle…
Robert McKersie, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Black History Month provides an opportunity to pull back the curtain and turn the spotlight on individuals who made a difference in the successes of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. I had the…
The public response to the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner has been compared to the 1960s civil rights movement. There are many differences between what happened 50 odd years ago and today but…
Hollywood films that depict American history deeply influence our sense of national identity. Films that portray Civil Rights and Black Freedom history are particularly important. Beyond entertaining moviegoers…
The civil rights movement produced many different types of leaders. Thurgood Marshall, argued successfully before the Supreme Court that racial segregation laws violated the US Constitution. Diane Nash…
It’s been almost 60 years since Martin Luther King, Jr. became a household name during the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, and some may find it astonishing that, until the recent release of Selma, he’s…
The Workplaces (Protection from Protesters) Bill – locally known as the “anti-protest” bill – was passed by Tasmanian parliament late on Tuesday night. The law was introduced as part of the government’s…
The film Pride, which won the Queer Palm Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is based on the true story of what seems to be a rare occurrence in human history: two oppressed groups (in this case…
As Dawn of the Planet of the Apes opens, it’s worth remembering that the racial conflicts and the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s underpin the original films. The traditional evolutionary hierarchy…
July 2 2014, halfway through the second term of America’s first African American president, marked the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act being signed into law by US President Lyndon Baines Johnson…