Monthly Archives: May 2022

InAll About History issue 117, on sale now, you can uncover the origins of the Olympian gods and learn how the myths the Ancient Greeks built around their deities helped to inform their civilization.

Breaking down the stories of Zeus, Athena, Hades, Poseidon and more, All About History connects the dots between Greece and its neighboring cultures. You can also find out why these gods were so important to regional identity, such the important connection between Athena and her namesake city of Athens.

Annette Giesecke is your guide through the twisted tales of Greek mythology, giving you a crash course in the origins of the Greek gods, from the Titans to the Olympians and then explaining the role some key gods played in people's daily lives.

Also in All About History 117, you can learn about the militant life of Emmeline Pankhurst and her fight for women's suffrage, discover the dark side of Ludwig van Beethoven, read about the origins of popular superstitions and find out who Africa's greatest (but often forgotten) queens have been through the centuries.

Related: Read a free issues of All About History

Plus there's a breakdown of the history of the Space Race, insight into why medieval writers were obsessed with dragons and a walkthrough the childhood home of Anne Boleyn.

According to Herodotus it was the poets Homer and Hesiod, writing in the 8th century B.C., who gave the Greeks their gods. Herodotus, who lived in the 5th century B.C., was himself a Greek from the city ofHalicarnassus in what is now Turkey. He was right about Homer and Hesiod, or more properly, the works attributed to them. Homers Iliad and Odyssey, together with Hesiods Theogony, are the oldest existing works of literature inthe Western world.

In both of these book-length poems, allthe major gods appear as characters with distinct personalities and powers. In his Theogony, which translates as Origin of the Gods, Hesiod explains how exactly the Greek gods came into being. Hesiods divine-creation myth is also a cosmogony, a story of the origins of Nature and the Universe. The first gods were elemental. They were deified physical parts of the Universe, but they gradually became anthropomorphized, believed at least sometimes to have human emotions and form. Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Poseidon and the other familiar Olympian gods did not at first exist, onlycoming into being after the creation of Earth and Sky, which also were considered gods.

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According to Hesiod, the Universe existed first as a vast nothingness, a vacant space for which the Greek word is Chaos. From Chaos arose Gaia, who was conceived both as our planet Earth and as a great mother goddess. More primordial elemental gods would follow. Eros, the force of desire, also arose from Chaos, and next came Erebos (Darkness) and Nyx (Night). Erebos and Nyx together bore Aether (the bright upper sky) and Hemera (Day). Wanting companionship and protection, Gaia herself produced Ouranos (Sky) to cover her on all sides.

Read more inAll About History 117.

Alongside figures such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven is widely regarded as one of the worlds greatest classical composers. In his lifetime Beethoven crafted some 722 works, comprising string quartets, sonatas and symphonies. Yet like many artistic geniuses, Beethovens personal life was tumultuous and he himself developed a reputation as a difficult individual. An upbringing with an alcoholic and abusive father, who was determined for his son to become a musical prodigy, deeply affected the young man.

As the composer entered the final few decades of his life and faced increasing health issues and depression, he became involved in a bitter battle for the custody of his nephew perhaps seeking a musical prodigy of his own. These events reveal an often overlooked side to the life of the renowned composer, particularly when remembering masterworks such as Fr Elise. Its a troubled and distressing side the dark side of Beethoven.

Delve deeper into the dark side of Beethoven inAll About History 117.

As Britain entered the 20th century, the list of things British women werent allowed to do was depressingly long: among other things, they couldnt serve on juries, they couldnt open bank accounts or apply for loans, they couldnt take on certain professional roles like lawyer or accountant, and they werent allowed to vote. At the time, most single women had little to no social standing and married women had to surrender all of their property and earnings to their husbands upon saying, I do. Many people believed women had smaller brains than men and were therefore unprepared for the world of work and politics.

Countless activists campaigned to bring about change for the countrys female citizens, with varying degrees of success. One particular fight that frequently hit the headlines was that in favour of womens suffrage the right to vote in political elections and a mixture of persistent parliament pressure and unusual demonstration techniques helped to bring about the victory. A key player in the campaign was Emmeline Pankhurst: activist, feminist and the original suffragette. Fueled by an unmatchable passion for voting equality, she dedicated much of her life to the cause and, almost a century after her death, is still remembered as one of Britains most influential womens rights advocates.

Read more about the incredible life of Emmeline Pankhurst inAll About History 117.

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All About History 117: Where did the Greek gods come from? - Livescience.com

If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion in the U.S., the nation may find itself on a path similar to that trod by the Irish people from 1983 to 2018. A draft decision signed by the majority of conservative justices was leaked in May 2022, and indicates the court may do just that.

Abortion was first prohibited in Ireland through what was called the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861. That law became part of Irish law when Ireland gained independence from the U.K. in 1922. In the early 1980s, some anti-abortion Catholic activists noticed the liberalization of abortion laws in other Western democracies and worried the same might happen in Ireland.

READ MORE: Whats next for abortion rights after Supreme Court leak?

Various Catholic organizations, including the Irish Catholic Doctors Guild, St. Josephs Young Priests Society and the St. Thomas More Society, combined to form the Pro Life Amendment Campaign. They began promoting the idea of making Ireland a model anti-abortion nation by enshrining an abortion ban not only in law but in the nations constitution.

As a result of that effort, a constitutional referendum passed in 1983, ending a bitter campaign where only 54% of eligible voters cast a ballot. Irelands eighth constitutional amendment acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and [gave] due regard to the equal right to life of the mother.

This religiously motivated anti-abortion measure is similar to anti-abortion laws already on the books in some U.S. states, including Texas, which has a ban after six weeks of pregnancy, and Kentucky, which limits private health insurance coverage of abortion.

What happened over the 35 years after the referendum passed in Ireland was a battle to legalize abortion. It included several court cases, proposed constitutional amendments and intense advocacy, ending in 2018 with another referendum, re-amending the Irish constitution to legalize abortion up to 12 weeks gestation.

Even before 1983, people who lived in Ireland who wanted a legal abortion were already traveling to England on what was known as the abortion trail, as abortion was also criminalized in Northern Ireland. In the wake of the Eighth Amendment, a 1986 Irish court ruling declared that even abortion counseling was prohibited.

A key test of the abortion law came in 1992. A 14-year-old rape victim, who became pregnant, told a court she was contemplating suicide because of being forced to carry her rapists baby. The judge ruled that the threat to her life was not so great as to justify granting permission for an abortion. That ruling barred her from leaving Ireland for nine months, effectively forcing her to carry the pregnancy to term.

On appeal, a higher court ruled that the young womans suicidal thoughts were in fact enough of a life threat to justify a legal termination. But before she could have an abortion, she miscarried.

The case prompted attempts to pass three more amendments to Irelands constitution. One, declaring that suicidal intentions were not grounds for an abortion, failed. The other two passed, allowing Irish people to travel to get an abortion, and allowing information to be distributed about legal abortion in other countries.

Even with these adjustments, the Eighth Amendment sometimes restricted the ability of medical professionals to offer patients life-saving care during a pregnancy-related emergency.

In 2012, Savita Halappanavar, age 31 and 17 weeks pregnant, went to a hospital in Galway, Ireland. Doctors there determined that she was having a miscarriage. However, because the fetus still had a detectable heartbeat, it was protected by the Eighth Amendment. Doctors could not intervene in legal terms, ending its life even to save the mother. So she was admitted to the hospital for pain management while awaiting the miscarriage to progress naturally.

Over the course of three days, as her pain increased and signs of infection grew, she and her husband pleaded with hospital officials to terminate the pregnancy because of the health risk. The request was denied because the fetus still had a heartbeat.

By the time the fetal heartbeat could no longer be detected, Halappanavar had developed a massive infection in her uterus, which spread to her blood. After suffering organ failure and four days in intensive care, she died.

This was likely not the only time someone had suffered, or even died, as a result of being denied abortion in Ireland. But the publicity surrounding the case prompted a new wave of activism aimed at repealing the Eighth Amendment. In 2013, the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act was signed into law, which did not fully repeal the Eighth Amendment but legalized abortions that would protect the mothers life.

It is estimated that about 170,000 people traveled from Ireland to seek a legal abortion between 1980 and 2018.

In 2018, a referendum repealing the Eighth Amendment passed overwhelmingly by a margin of 66% to 34%. As a result of the repeal, legal abortions are now allowed during the first trimester, with costs covered by the public health service.

As a social work professor who researches reproductive health care, I see many parallels between what happened in Ireland between 1983 and 2018 and the present U.S. situation.

People in the U.S. are already traveling long distances, often to other states, in a manner similar to the Irish abortion trail.

In both the U.S. and Ireland, the people who need help paying for abortions are mostly single people in their 20s who already have an average of two children, according to research I conducted with some abortion funds, which are charitable organizations that help people cover often-unaffordable abortion expenses.

In contrast to the United States, Ireland is moving away from political control over private life. Its history offers some lessons. For decades before 2018, pregnant people in Ireland faced forced pregnancy, suffering and even death, a cautionary tale for what pregnant people in the U.S. could face if Roe is reversed.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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What Irelands history with abortion might teach us about a post-Roe America - PBS NewsHour

Pennsylvania Republicans have nominated state senator Doug Mastriano to be the next governor. Mastriano is one of the most radical gubernatorial candidates ever to receive a major party nomination.

Many Republicans have indulged Trumps claims that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. But few have gone as far as Mastriano has to try to justify Trumps fever dream.

On 25 November, Mastriano staged a faux legal hearing in Gettysburg, in which Giuliani played prosecutor before a panel of Republican state senators and representatives. Mastriano introduced a number of poll watchers who told unsubstantiated stories of phantom ballots, hacked machines, and dead voters, which they claimed had all led to an election stolen from Trump.

Five days later, after all of Trumps legal challenges had failed and the Pennsylvania secretary of state had formally certified Biden the winner, Mastriano introduced a resolution urging Congress to ignore the official results. His plan was for the Pennsylvania legislature to ignore millions of votes and directly appoint electors pledged to Trump.

Ultimately, Mastrianos resolution didnt go anywhere in the Republican-controlled state legislature because Pennsylvanias Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, did not yield to demands to call a special session. But Mastriano was not deterred. On 10 December 2020, Mastriano signed on to an amicus brief supporting Texass effort to convince the US supreme court to throw out the results in Pennsylvania and several other states. That effort also failed.

In the lead-up to 6 January 2021, Mastriano was reportedly in regular communication with Donald Trump. On the day, Mastriano was at the US Capitol and was captured on video walking through police lines with a crowd of people.

In a statement, Mastriano said that police lines did shift throughout the course of the day and he followed those lines as they existed. (In February, Mastriano was subpoenaed by the January 6 committee. It is unclear if he complied.)

In July 2021, Mastriano sent a letter to several counties requesting information and materials needed to conduct a forensic investigation of the 2020 general election and the 2021 primary. Mastrianos conduct, however, was so extreme that he was removed from the process by the Republican leadership of the Pennsylvania senate. The senate president, Jake Corman, said that Mastriano was only ever interested in politics and showmanship and not actually getting things done.

During his candidacy for governor, Mastriano has been clear that he will use his power including his authority to appoint the Pennsylvania secretary of state to influence the administration of future elections. He said the following on 30 March:

Im Doug Mastriano, and I get to appoint the secretary of state whos delegated from me the power to make the corrections to elections, the voting logs and everything. I could decertify every machine in the state with the stroke of a pen via the secretary of state. I already had the secretary of state picked out. Its a world-class person that knows voting integrity better than anyone else in the nation, I think, and I already have a team thats gonna be built around that individual.

Yesterday, with Trumps endorsement, Pennsylvania Republicans put him one step closer to the governors mansion.

In April, Mastriano spoke at a far-right Christian conference, Patriots Arise for God and Country, which was organized by Francine and Allen Fodsick, self-described prophets who have long promoted QAnon, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. At the outset of the event, organizers played a video claiming the world is experiencing a great awakening that will expose ritual child sacrifice and a global satanic blood cult. The QAnon conspiracy alleges that top Democratic officials and celebrities are Satan-worshipers running a secret child sex-trafficking ring. The video also featured allegations that 9/11 was a false flag, vaccines are genocide therapy, and Hitler faked his death.

Last year, the Fodsicks promoted Mastriano on promotional material for the event, but Mastriano said he would not attend. At the time, a spokesman said Mastriano strongly condemns the Q anon conspiracy theory and never committed to speak at this event but sadly was used to help promote it with his picture on the invite.

Last month, Mastriano attended as a featured speaker, using his remarks to complain about the persecution and oppression he was subjected to for contesting the 2020 presidential election. The Fodsicks auctioned a portrait of Trump for $4,000 during the event, with the proceeds going to Mastrianos campaign. This year, his campaign did not respond to a request for comment by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In a 31 March appearance at the PA Pro Life Coalition, Mastriano said supporters of abortion rights wanted to wipe out Black and Latino communities. He said he believed thats a baby from Day 1 at conception. Mastriano said my objective, of course, is to save life at conception and not play games.

In a 27 April debate, Mastriano said opposition to abortion is his No 1 issue. The first bill he introduced in the Pennsylvania senate was a heartbeat bill which would ban abortion after six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant. But Mastriano said that, as Pennsylvanias governor, he would work our way toward a total abortion ban from conception. Mastriano made clear that he doesnt support any exceptions to abortion bans for rape, incest or life of the mother.

Mastrianos position on abortion reflect his Christian nationalist worldview. Christian nationalism, the New Yorker reports, is rooted in the idea that God intended America to be a Christian nation. During his time as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan he developed a dim view of Islam. He has frequently spread Islamophobic memes online, including a conspiracy theory that Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, directed fellow-Muslims to throw a five-year-old over a balcony.

After retiring from the military and successfully running for office in 2019, Mastriano began attending events held by a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation. Members of the New Apostolic Reformation believe that God speaks to them directly, and that they have been tasked with battling real-world demons who control global leaders. (Mastriano says he has not worked directly with the group.)

In the legislature, Mastriano has supported a bill that would have mandated teaching the Bible in public schools and would have made it legal for adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples.

Judd Legum is the founder and author of Popular Information, an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism, where this post originally appeared

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Republicans just nominated one of the most radical governor candidates in history - The Guardian

Maddie Meyer - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images

The FIFA men's World Cup will have female referees for the first time in the event's history during the 2022 tournament in Qatar.

On Thursday, FIFAannouncedthe list of matchday officials for the event, which included three female referees and six women in total.

Stephanie Frappart, Salima Mukansanga and Yoshimi Yamashita are among the 36 referees.Neuza Back, Karen Diaz Medina and Kathryn Nesbitt are on the selected assistant referees.

"As always, the criteria we have used is quality first and the selected match officials represent the highest level of refereeing worldwide," Pierluigi Collina, the FIFA Referees Committee chairman, said. "The 2018 World Cup was very successful, partly because of the high standard of refereeing, and we will do our best to be even better in a few months in Qatar."

Collina added he hopes the presence of female match officials "will be perceived as something normal and no longer as sensational" in the future.

Frappart made history in December 2020 when she became the first woman to officiate a men's UEFA Champions League match.In April, she broke new ground again when she was named the referee for the French Cup final.

Mukansanga is likewise a trailblazer in Africa. She was the first woman to work an Africa Cup of Nations fixture in January, having already taken part in the Olympics and Women's World Cup.

Yamashita was part of the first all-female officiating crew in the AFC Cup in 2019 and worked the Women's World Cup as well.

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Men's World Cup to Have Female Referees for 1st Time in History in Qatar - Bleacher Report

The Baltimore Ravens have been regarded as one of the best drafting teams in the NFL over the course of their franchise history. Theyve been able to find talent at the top of the draft, mid-to-late round gems, as well as undrafted free agents who turn out to be diamonds in the rough.

In a 2017 NFL re-draft, Gary Davenport of Bleacher Report put together the entire first round with his predictions if it was held today. For Baltimore he selected a familiar face in cornerback Marlon Humphrey, talking about how it shouldnt be a shock to see the Ravens end up with the former University of Alabama star once again.

It shouldnt strike one as surprising that the Baltimore Ravens would wind up with the same player in this redraft. Part of the reason the Ravens have remained a perennial contender for as long as they have is the fact that the team consistently drafts well.

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Ravens repeat history in 2017 NFL re-draft by Bleacher Report - Ravens Wire

Prisoners in cell blocks at Rikers Island Prison in New York in 1970. (Photo via Getty Images / Bettmann)

Desperation, decay, and violence are far from exceptional for Rikers. The islandwhich hosts eight of New York Citys jails and the nearly 6,000 people caged in themhas become synonymous with ruinously brutal carceral practices and inhumane facilities. But by the summer of last year, the chaos and disorganization of the Covid-19 pandemic had degraded living conditions considerably for the islands prisoners. A delegation of state elected officials, visiting the complex to document the crisis in September 2021, witnessed prisoners in desperate conditions: floors strewn with garbage and human waste, vermin infestations, sick prisoners abandoned without access to medical care, an attempted suicide. A mass sick-out policywherein thousands of guards simultaneously coordinated taking medical leavehad badly intensified the situation: New York Citys phenomenally well-resourced jails, where correction officers significantly outnumber prisoners, appeared to be badly understaffed. By years end, 16 people had died in the custody of the citys Department of Correction (DOC), some from medical neglect, some from suicide, all while the citys jail population crept up to pre-pandemic levels and vaccination rates among prisoners remained alarmingly low.1 BOOKS IN REVIEW

The jail complex represents such an affront that it is currently slated to close by the end of 2027, though this closure is contingent on the citys construction of four new skyscraper jails. So its ironic that, as anti-jail organizers often say and as geographer Jarrod Shanahan firmly establishes, Rikers itself has its origins in a liberal attempt to reform the citys preexisting carceral facilities and practices.2

Shanahans new book, Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage, traces in detail the competing political agendas that produced Rikers, following the history of the citys jails from the 1950s up through the end of Ed Kochs mayoral administration. Shanahan makes it possible to answer the immediate and pressing questionwhy did an agenda of jail reform fail so drastically, producing in the process one of the most notorious penal colonies in the United States?by asking, and answering, several others.3

How and why did New York City begin to confine its captive population to a formation of rock and landfill floating in the East River? Who was this population, and how did it transform from majority white at the opening of the Rikers Penitentiary in 1932 to majority Black and Puerto Rican by the 1970s? How and why did the city turn to arrest and detention as a means of disciplining this population, rocked earlier and harder by the effects of deindustrialization and unemployment than the rest of the city? How did the citys correction officers acquire the massive political power they currently enjoyable to undertake unauthorized work stoppages without the repercussions that successfully keep nearly all other public employees in New York State in check? And what does this history of failure and its human cost tell us about the fate of future efforts, however humanely intended, to reform New York Citys jails?4

Captives in that sense is more than a history of Rikers: It chronicles the transformations of finance, industry, race relations, and political consciousness that made the jail complex possible in the first place. Shanahan documents the tumultuous second half of the 20th century in New York Citythe fading glow of the New Deal; the rise of Black Power and the New Left; the near-total exit of the citys manufacturing capital, and the subsequent capture of the political apparatus by the banking and real estate sector; the imposition of austerity policies following the fiscal crisis of the 1970sfrom the standpoint of the citys jails, as well as the people warehoused within and fighting to get out of them. Rikers absorbs the symptoms of social problems the city is unwilling to address at their root, Shanahan argues. By following the history of the citys jail system, including but not only its most infamous outcropping, Shanahan makes it possible to see in greater clarity the social relations and competing political trajectories that defined the fate of postwar New York City.5

In particular, Shanahan documents two opposed but mutually reinforcing traditions: the liberal reforms that he calls penal welfarism on the one hand, and the more straightforwardly punitive agendas that over the course of the 1960s congealed into the law-and-order coalition on the other. Although these traditions remained two distinct visions of the postwar order, Shanahans project in a sense is to demonstrate the major role of liberal reformism both in creating the Rikers Island complex, with its perpetual state of humanitarian crisis, and in advancing the law-and-order political consensus that ultimately dominated city politics for decades. In a grim, ironic reversal, penal welfarism created much of the physical and political infrastructure of the citys carceral apparatus and also fueled the development of the coalition that would eventually reject jail reform in full.6

Shanahan begins with the unlikely career of Anna M. Kross, whose name now adorns one of the jails on Rikers, and whom Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. appointed as the DOCs commissioner in 1954. Kross envisioned a jail system that would uplift the moral character of those it held: Run by the agendas of social scientists rather than correction officers, the jails would, in Shanahans words, not merely respond to criminal acts, but consider the prisoner as raw material to be reshaped through incarceration. Kross took up the agenda of progressive penologist Austin MacCormick, who oversaw the opening of the Rikers Penitentiary in 1932, but whose project had been stymied by the Depression and World War II. Krosss primary goal was to increase the civilian staff and civilian control over the jail systeman agenda that set off a longstanding conflict with correction officers, who viewed running the jails as the prerogative of what Shanahan calls their arrogant autonomy. Kross intended to use her trained professionals in social science to retrain and reform the proletarian flotsam and jetsamher termswho passed through the citys jails under her watch, by providing her charges with educational programs, prison work programs, recreation, access to mental health professionals, and mandatory STI testing and treatment. She also oversaw the redesign of the jail facilities in bright-toned paint schemes with greater access to natural light.7 Current Issue

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Yet Krosss attempt to remake the jail system and provide a measure of social services to New Yorks incarcerated population ran up against her task of running facilities adequate enough to house the tens of thousands of people who cycled yearly through the jails. That is to say, Krosss agenda as a reformer of the citys jails put her at odds with her own responsibilities as their administrator. Years into her tenure as DOC commissioner, Kross confronted the same problems she had found at the start: desperately overcrowded jails and abject conditions, including the violent and neglectful treatment of prisoners by the correction officers. As Shanahan notes, Kross herself advocated for reducing the citys jail population, but she had little control over this figure, which fell squarely into the lap of the New York Police Department and the citys courts. Kross therefore advocated for more funding and resources for those facilitiesbuilding, in her words, bigger and stronger bastilles to hold our prisoners.8

Her attempt to resolve this contradiction between penal welfare programs on the one hand and adequately administered facilities on the other resulted in a significant expansion of the citys carceral capacitiesarguably the lasting effect of her commissionership. She oversaw the construction of the facility then known as C-76, now the Eric M. Taylor Jail on Rikers; she opened the Brooklyn House of Detention, a skyscraper jail now known as the Brooklyn Detention Complex and still in use; and, most critically, she secured funds for the construction of the bridge between Rikers and East Elmhurst, Queens, which replaced the ferry that had previously shepherded prisoners and supplies to and from the island. As readers of Robert Caros The Power Broker might guess, the bridge to Rikers, more than any single jail facility, locked the city into a decades-long pattern of development, pushing successive administrations to detain ever more prisoners on the island.9

The rapid expansion of the citys carceral infrastructure that took place under Kross advanced, however unwittingly, the power of the citys correction officers, whose ranks swelled to staff the new jails, and who received favorable raises and terms of employment to buy their grudging support for Krosss reform programs. Under the leadership of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association, they won official bargaining rights as part of Wagners electioneering deal with the citys labor unions, which offered public recognition in exchange for their support of his candidacy in the 1953 election. Together with the Patrolmens Benevolent Association (PBA), the NYPDs largest union, COBA soon began to flex its political muscle, winning pay parity with the citys cops and firefighters and undertaking work slowdowns and stoppages.10

These active and militant unions became integral cogs in the developing law-and-order coalition: Outside the walls of the citys jails, the PBA, in coalition with affiliates of the John Birch Society and the American Nazi Party, stoked racist fears to defeat at the ballot Mayor John Lindsays civilian review board in 1966, which would have placed independent investigation and disciplining power in a body outside the NYPD itself. (The citys current Civilian Complaint Review Board, introduced under Mayor David Dinkins, has virtually no real disciplinary power over the citys cops, a testament to the PBAs enduring power.) Inside the walls, correction officers brutally repressed the prisoner rebellions that shook the citys jails in August and October of 1970.11

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When the city slammed into its fiscal crisis in the mid-70s, the PBA and COBA had positioned themselves as a force within city government sufficient to extract concessions from the mayors office to be considered separate from the citys non-law-enforcement unions. Amid an atmosphere of implicitly or explicitly racist repression of the citys Black and brown working-class population, subject to harsher punishment and longer sentences under the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws, the law enforcement unions pushed a political agenda to brand themselves as a solution to the social ills the fiscal crisis unleashed. COBA therefore played an instrumental role in brokering the citys version of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore have called the anti-state state: As the citys debtors forced austerity policies on public spending, gutting social services and forcing layoffs, New York City maintained, and eventually increased, its repressive capacities to arrest and detain. After weathering a peak of cutbacks in the 70s, by the late 1980s and 90s the DOC and COBA had benefited from yet another round of increases to the citys jail facilities: expanded wings for currently existing jails in 1987, a new jail for women in 1988, an 800-bed maximum security jail in 1991, and the Vernon C. Bain jail barge in 1992.12 Related Article

Shanahans history demonstrates that, over the course of the expansion of jail facilities and law enforcement power in city politics, Anna Kross and the progressive penologists sowed, and the law-and-order coalition reaped. Its a sobering lesson for anyone who harbors fantasies of kinder, more humane, state-of-the-art jailsparticularly for those who place their hopes in the new jails under construction now.13

If abolitionists who want to end the mass social practice of caging human beings often face the charge that we operate under utopian fantasies, Shanahans book suggests that the burden of proof actually falls on the would-be reformists who are seeking a supposedly better way to punish. In the history that Captives documents, not only did penal welfarism fail to produce a less violent city; it couldnt even produce a less violent jail.14

So whats the actual way out of the crisis, if not bigger and strongeror sunnier and more pastel-tonedbastilles? To start, Captives tells the story of an alternate political tradition in its careful attention to the waves of prisoner rebellion, organizing, and escape that have defined New Yorks jails from the 1950s to the present. Linking together the accounts of current and former prisoners like Kuwasi Balagoon, Jamal Joseph, Sundiata Accoli, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur, Shanahan illuminates the struggle of working-class Black and brown organizers to release people from their cages, sometimes by legal means, sometimes not.15

Many of these efforts were successful: Jamal Joseph and his comrades in the Panther 21 walked free after an eight-month trial in which agents provocateurs in the pay of the NYPD admitted under oath to setting up the defendants; the Communist Party USAled organizing around Angela Daviss stint at the House of Detention for Women helped build support for her eventual release; and jail rebellions from the 1950s through the 70s resulted in compromises between prisoners and the DOCs leadership. Many other efforts, however, were not as successful. But in the cases of both success and defeat, the aim, purpose, and direction of this political tradition is freedomnot just for any one person who happens to be held captive at Rikers, but for the classes of people who are continually subject to arrest and detention, whom the city abandoned in its early experiments with neoliberal governance, and who continually fend off poverty, hunger, and debt together with the actual repressive capacities of the state. Any meaningfully anti-racist political project will have to develop both the principle and the power to keep people free from the citys criminal injustice system, as the public defender Janie Williams calls it, and free to move and do with themselves as they want.16

In the end, freedom of this kindto live without the threat of incarceration or dispossessionis a positive project that will require a mass transformation of public resources, social institutions, and state capacities. If Rikers, in Shanahans words, absorbs the symptoms of social problems the city is unwilling to address at their root, then the task of closing Rikers means decisively addressingand building the power to addressthose very social problems whose effects Rikers absorbs: desperate inequality, neighborhoods consigned to the devastating effects of climate chaos, untenable levels of debt, mass divestment from both K-12 and postsecondary education, an utterly inadequate health infrastructure, widespread unemployment, and patterns of development and tenancy that force people from their homes, all sustained while the very few enrich themselves in what Jane McAlevey and others have called the new Gilded Age.17

At the same time, even widely redistributive social programs will not be enough on their own to banish the possibility of another round of punitive crackdowns. As Mayor Eric Adamss scant months in office have revealed, the fervent social base for the law-and-order agenda persists, and under the right circumstances can be goaded into a panic that lawmakers of all stripes can use to justify carceral expansion. To shutter the citys jails, the left will have to outmaneuver some parts of this bloc and disarticulate others. Specifically, we will have to isolate its explicitly racist formations, like the PBA, which endorsed Donald Trumps reelection in the summer of 2020 following the George Floyd rebellion; we will also have to persuade other segments of this blocsuch as the Black and Latino homeowners in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx who voted for Adams in overwhelming numbersthat their real needs for stable communities are better served by means other than criminalizing their neighbors. That means, in turn, articulating a political alternative to the center-left coalitions that have consistently increased the NYPDs size for decades, allocated massive funds for jail construction, and caved to the political terror tactics of the law enforcement unions. One question, then, for organizers who share the vision of a city without cages: What kind of popular front do we need in order to build the necessary power for this program?18

The poet and prison organizer Tongo Eisen-Martin has observed that if it has a prison, it is a prison. Not a city. Inverting this thesis, we can observe that the project of closing Rikers for good has relatively little to do with some buildings floating in the East River, and everything to do with the mass social capacity that state institutions contain, divert, and channel, and that can therefore assume a totally different shape under other circumstancesone that might actually relegate the citys jails to the dustbin of history. We do not have to live in a city or a world that cages human beings at scale as a false solution to real problems. A series of social, political, and economic forces over time have produced this result; with intention, principle, and strategy, organized people can produce a totally opposite one. And that, in any case, is one of the lessons of Shanahans remarkable book.19

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The Disastrous History of Rikers - The Nation

Today in OTM History

2021: Eduardo Rodriguez is giving up too many hits; This ended up being a problem all year. Eddie hasnt pitched to his expectations this year, either.

2020: Underrated players from the 2007 championship team; That whole team in general is underrated.

2018: Who the mock drafts have the Red Sox taking; Nobody had Triston Casas as the pick. Id say its worked out.

2017: Hector Velzquez struggles in his major-league debut; Hed turn things around and be a solid swingman for a few years.

2016: Time to give Rusney Castillo one more chance; It did come a couple weeks later, but that was his last one and it only lasted about a week.

2015: Is it time for Rusney Castillo?; Weird timing!

2014: Third base trade targets for the Red Sox; Number one? Pablo Sandoval...

2008: Jon Lester throws a no-hitter just two years after recovering from lymphoma. Its the fourth no-hitter caught by Jason Varitek.

1976: Carl Yastrzemski, for the first and ultimately only time in his career, hits three home runs in one game.

1941: Lefty Grove breaks a major-league record by winning his 20th consecutive Fenway start.

1933: Red Sox catcher Rick Ferrell homered against his brother Wes, who hit a home run of his own a few innings later. It is the first time in league history two brothers on opposite teams homered in the same game.

Happy 26th birthday to Connor Wong, who is currently the teams third catcher and is likely not far away from getting an extended chance as at least the backup catcher.

Many thanks to Baseball-Reference, NationalPastime.com and Today in Baseball History for assistance here, and thanks to Battery Power for the inspiration for these posts.

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Today in Boston Red Sox History: May 19 - Over The Monster

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History Within Reach For Pinecrest Baseball | Sports | thepilot.com - The Pilot

However, McRae came alive on the next batch of rallies, winning New Zealand, Australia and finally his home event the RAC with a fifth on Sanremo too to give L555 BAT its first rally wins.

McRae maintained use of the car for the entire 1995 season but the poor form that plagued 94 returned at the start of the season a crash on the Monte and an engine problem in Sweden.

But third in Portugal put some points on the board and McRae and L555 BATs season once again took off when the WRC traveled to the southern hemisphere as a win, coupled to Carlos Sainzs absence through injury, hauled McRae firmly into title contention.

Second in Australia preceded another, albeit forced and controversial, second place via team orders in Spain before McRae spectacularly overcame a puncture to win the RAC and the world title at the end of the year.

See the article here:

Delving into the history of a WRC icon DirtFish - DirtFish

An Age-Old Question: what is skateboarding?

From the 1950s to the present day, skateboarding has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry impacting millions of lives across the world as an artform and a sport. In its history, skateboarding has inaugurated its own museums, awarded its own hall of fame and curated a self-documented history, cementing a special place in the heart of freedom culture.

The launch ramp of 1950s California lit the torch of skateboarding to be handed off to each new generation over the coming eras. In these decades, skateboarding transcended through ups and downs of economic prosperity and mainstream popularity, as different faces and figures shined in the spotlight or dominated the back alleys of urban performance.

Between the youth of the world and those ageing skateboarders who've watched it grow and change, the question of 'What is skateboarding?' has undergone a metamorphosis with each passing of the baton. While we do our best to answer this question again, we take our first push into a larger world. A world defined by the ultimate expression of freedom, movement and an intimate look at the history of skateboarding.

Angelo Caro Frontside Hurricane

Gaston Francisco

The origin of the skateboard is as ambiguous as the origin of our universe. There are multiple reports from self-proclaimed skate-historians of who, what and where the first skateboards appeared. It's largely agreed upon that skateboards originated in the United States, first as crates of wood with roller derby skates attached to the underfoot. The earliest models had handlebars attached, like modern scooters, but eventually the boxes were replaced by wooden planks and the handlebars scrapped for an experience more akin to surfing. These scooter-boxes were seen as far back as the late 1800s, but it wasn't until the 1950s when wooden pallets with clay wheels were popularised on the downhill slopes of Southern California.

Skateboarding's first slams

It's difficult to imagine ourselves in the 1950s or 1970s DogTown eras the birthplace of skateboarding. It would be even more difficult to imagine how much skateboarding would change since its conception. In the early 1960s, skateboard companies like Hobie and Makaha began advertising skating as 'sidewalk surfing' or an alternative to surfing when the waves were flat. By 1963, Makaha formed the first professional skateboarding team, competing in the first ever skateboard competition later that year in Hermosa, California. While the remnants of early 1960s downhill skateboarding competitions take the form of death defying modern day San Francisco hill-bombs, the freestyle competition formats and most tricks performed at the Hermosa competition are now but a distant memory to contemporary skateboarding.

Even with its novelty in American sports, skateboarding popularity ultimately crashed by 1965. People were more likely to go to a roller derby competition than a skateboarding competition. Skateboarding in the media began advertising skating as a dangerous activity, while the clay wheels and handstands grew as tiresome as watching a hula-hooper for hours on end. To understand how skateboarding nearly perished is to understand ultimately why its earliest forms are no longer seen. But, more importantly, comparing where skateboarding is today from these times, we see one of the greatest transformations of a sport in the 20th to 21st century.

Reinventing the (skateboard) wheel

Skateboard wheels

OJ Wheels

Not figuratively, but literally. The skateboard wheel was reinvented by Frank Nasworthy, who introduced the urethane wheel to skateboarding in 1973. The new wheel, replacing the clunky clay wheels of the 1950 and 1960s, gripped the asphalt and pool walls like cleats on the grass. With the invention of the kick-tail alongside it, (a raised back end of the skateboard), a new definition of a professional skateboard was born. Skateboarding magazines sold at the local surf shop now had a horse to promote as a new craze of skateboarding began to expand worldwide. Just three years after the new skateboard wheel, the first skatepark sprouted in Florida in 1976.

Before the end of the decade, skateparks began to appear throughout North and South America, and soon after across Europe and Asia. Skateboarding's 1970s rise to mainstream culture was best popularized by the 2005 film Lords of DogTown. In 1975, as seen in the film, the Zephyr skateboarding team spearheaded by Tony Alva showed the world skateboarding's potential at the Ocean Festival in Del Mar, California. This moment in skateboarding history stands as a cornerstone to its history and how skateboarding competitions would change in the coming decades.

However, skateboarding would ultimately suffer another near-fatal crash at the approach of the 1980s. As dubious corporations from outside skateboarding began to infiltrate skateboarding competitions with trojan horse contracts and over-saturation of contests, skateboarding's popularity fizzled out to a hermetic group of freedom seekers who prevailed in the empty backyard pools of America. Skateparks were no longer being constructed, as sky-rocketing insurance costs latched onto the injury prone aspect of skating. And so, no longer accepted by SoCal parents or corporations seeking the next great fad, skating became the calling card of anti-establishment culture and the growing punk scene of the 1980s.

What Zephyr Skateboards did that year in Del Mar for the world of skateboarding wouldn't be seen again until Tony Hawk landed his 900 in the 1999 X-Games. On June 27, 1999, Tony Hawk dropped in at the Summer X-Games vert ramp for the 11th time to land the most recognizable trick in skateboarding history. At the time, no skateboarder could fathom just how much Tony Hawk's two and a-half rotations would catapult skating into a new orbit of popularity. But by the time Hawk had officially brought professional skateboarding to the mainstream spotlight again, skateboarding had already undergone an immense transformation throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

Most skateboarders and non-skaters alike will attest to the significance of Tony Hawk's 900. But most non-skaters have no idea how important the 1980s and 1990s really were for skateboarding. In that time, street skateboarding was crafted by society's outcasts. The blueprints for professional street skating were drawn and everything we've come to know about skateboarding media claimed their niches in the skate world.

With the help of a new skateboard designed for aerial manoeuvres, Rodney Mullen had invented several flip tricks by the 1980s, after Curt Lindgren invented the Kickflip in 1978. The first street-only skateboarders Natas Kaupas and Mark 'The Gonz' Gonzales raised the bar once again by Boardsliding the first handrails. Skateboarding evolved from the backyards of ramp builders into the parking lots of grocery stores riddled with red curbs.

With the mainstream media turning a blind eye to skateboarding, skateboarders were given the chance to document their own culture through their own lens. This allowed skateboarders to wield the powers of producing their own media culture, combating the exact reasons why skateboarding had endured two major crashes in popularity in the late 1960s and early 1980s. With skateboarders fully in control of the factors of production of skate culture, the golden-era of street skateboarding blossomed in the years 1993-2006. We saw in these years the rise of Shorty's and Chad Muska, videos like Mouse and Yeah Right! by Girl Skateboards, prominent international skate-teams like FLIP Skateboards, the celebrated LOVE Park era and the THPS video games franchise, as skateparks became synonymous with public park planning.

The trick heard around the world

As skateboarding evolved in a post-Tony Hawk era, skateboarding's interaction with society changed. Skateboarding deepened its roots in street skateboarding, as the definition of being a professional skateboarder shifted from competition skating to video parts, while mainstream skate culture saw itself in novel forms of entertainment. Bam Margera would go on to parody a pro-skateboarder career with a reality television show, Viva-La-Bam. As companies entered the fold, skateboarding gained more recognition and skatings elite began making palpable salaries.

Today, Street League and the X-Games draw the largest crowds in years. With more eyes comes more scrutiny, as today a juvenile distaste and adolescence is still associated with skateboarding in dominant forms of media. That being said, the off-shoots of skateboarding have also grown tremendously to tip the scales back into the hands of skateboarders. In the past five to 10 years, female skateboarders are the sports largest growing demographic. Skateparks are now found on every major continent of the World with countless clips filmed and posted to social media everyday. Skateboarding endures as one of the worlds most inclusive and accessible expressions of freedom.

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The history of skateboarding: how the sport has grown - Red Bull