Announcement: 2023 Dorothy Ross Prize

We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2023 Dorothy Ross Prize for the best article in U.S. intellectual history. This award goes to an emerging scholar, defined as Read more

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Milwaukee Socialists’ Triumph & Global Impact

In 1910, the new mayor didn’t promise speed, but pledged “to do all our limited means permit to make Milwaukee a better place for every citizen.”

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Rice University to Relocate Statue of Its White Supremacist Founder

Rice University’s Academic Quadrangle will undergo a major redesign that will include moving the Founder’s Memorial statue of William Marsh Rice to a new location within the quadrangle.

William Marsh Rice was an oil and cotton tycoon, who when he died was said to be the richest man in Texas. He left the bulk of his estate to establish the Rice Institute for Literature. His will stipulated that only White students were allowed to enroll. From its founding in 1912 to 1965, no Black student was permitted to enroll. The university eventually won litigation allowing the educational institution to overrule the “Whites only” stipulation in its founder’s last will and testament.

The board of trustees of Rice University has decided the relocated statue will be presented with historical context and information about the university’s founder, including his ownership of enslaved people. A new monument of similar prominence will commemorate the beginning of the university’s integration a half-century after its opening.

“The board believes that the founding gift of William Marsh Rice is an essential landmark in our history, and the philanthropy of William Marsh Rice should be recognized,” the board’s statement said. “In addition, we acknowledge our founder’s entanglement with slavery, which is in stark contrast to the modern vision and values of our university.”

“We intend for the Academic Quadrangle to both fully acknowledge the history of our founding and founder, and to mark and celebrate the important evolution and growth of our university over time,” said Rob Ladd, chair of the board of trustees. “We believe the redesign will allow us to move forward as a community.”

The university has already implemented another recommendation that the Founder’s Memorial statue “should no longer be used as an iconic image of the university in its publicity.”

Pomona College Receives the Personal Archives of Myrlie Evers-Williams

Myrlie Evers-Williams, the long-time civil rights leader and former chair of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), is donating her personal archives to her alma mater, Pomona College in Claremont, California.

A native of Vicksburg, Mississippi, she attended what is now Alcorn State University in Mississippi, where she met her future husband Medgar Evers. After Medgar Evers was appointed field secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi in 1954, the couple worked together on voting rights campaigns and efforts to end school segreation. In 1962, their home was firebombed. On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers was assassinated while standing in the driveway of his home.

After two all-White juries failed to reach a verdict in trials of the suspected murderer of her husband, Myrlie Evers moved to California. (Medgar Evers’ murderer later was convicted of the crime in 1994.) She earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Pomona College. Myrlie Evers ran unsuccessfully for Congress and then worked in advertising and directed community affairs for the Atlantic Richfield Inc. She later served on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works. In 1995, she was elected chair of the NAACP.

Now 90 years old, Evers-Williams has donated her extensive archives to Pomona College. The collection focuses on her life after moving to California in 1964; the Mississippi state archives are home to the Medgar Wiley and Myrlie Beasley Evers Papers, covering their early years in that state.

The collection, consisting of more than 250 linear feet of documents, ephemera and artifacts, contains thousands of items. Included are photos of her with presidents ranging from Kennedy to Carter to Clinton; buttons, pamphlets and photos from her own 1970 run for Congress; transcripts and correspondence from her 2007 testimony before Congress; and correspondence related to her preparation for the second Obama inauguration, where she gave the invocation. Personal items include her Pomona College ID card, a hardhat from her time as a Los Angeles Public Works Commissioner and the dress she wore while performing piano at Carnegie Hall, fulfilling a lifelong dream.

Pomona College will preserve the collection for both academic and, in time, public access through The Claremont Colleges Library, where archivists are organizing and cataloguing the material spanning six decades.

Columbia University to Acquire the Archives of Composer and Educator Tania León

The Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University in New York has announced that it will acquire the archives of Tania León, the noted composer, conductor, and educator. Her orchestral work Stride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic in celebration of the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

A native of Havana, León left Cuba in 1967 and settled in New York. She found work at the Harlem School of the Arts as a substitute pianist for dance classes and later became the music director of the Dance Theater of Harlem. She has been visiting professor at Yale University, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of Kansas, Purchase College, and the Musikschule in Hamburg, Germany, among others.

Alejandro L. Madrid, who has written her biography Tania León’s Stride, A Polyrhythmic Life (University of Illinois Press, 2022), writes: “I have no doubt that Tania León is one of the most important and accomplished composers of her generation. Her music has influenced several cohorts of composers in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, while also serving as a bridge to positively acknowledge and accept the music and culture from Latinx composers as a serious interlocutor in European and American concert halls. At the same time, her advocacy and commitment to the advancement of marginalized communities of people of color has led to her pioneering work as a musical activist.”