The bathroom has become a battleground for transgender rights — and rightfully so. Research shows that bathroom restrictions threaten the health and safety of the transgender community.
Can Captain Kirk’s struggle for belonging and identity become a tool for teaching?
James Vaughan
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.
Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha shows little sign of listening to growing public opposition to his military junta’s authoritarian rule.
EPA
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.
A still shot from DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915).
The Hollywood Reporter
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…
Sicily, 1943: Whose blood was this U.S. soldier getting?
NARA
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…
Selma director and co-writer Ava DuVernay has crafted a new and important vision of an oft-examined era in our nation’s history.
Stanley Wolfson/Library of Congress
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 “engineer” of civil rights legal victories
law2.umkc.edu
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…
The movie Selma takes King – best known to Americans as an orator – and turns him into an organizer.
Wikimedia Commons
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…
Criminals the lot of them: that is what people who stand against government plans ‘to rebuild Tasmania’s forestry industry’ could become under the new anti-protest law.
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…
In 1984, British LGBT rights groups worked on behalf of striking miners.
Flickr
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…
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes continues with the premise of the original.
Twentieth Century Fox
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…