By Gretchen Gerzina/The Conversation

Two years ago, I was in the United Kingdom working on a follow-up project for my books Black London and Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. While looking through old British newspapers, I was astonished to read an 1893 announcement in the Daily Telegraph proclaiming Sarah E. Farro to be “the first negro novelist” with the publication of her novel True Love.
I wondered: who was this woman? And why didn’t we know about this reportedly groundbreaking novel?

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Posted on May 26, 2016

Bill Clinton Didn’t Reform Welfare, He Killed It

“The opening chapter of $2.00 a Day describes a Chicago mother whom the authors call Modonna Harris,” Christopher Jencks writes in the New York Review of Books.
“Harris graduated from high school and then took out loans to attend a private university. However, she got no financial help from her divorced parents, and when she hit her student loan ceiling at the end of her second year, she dropped out. Misadventures in love followed, and after her marriage broke up she had a child to support. The best job she could find was as a cashier, but after eight years her employer fired her because her cash drawer was $10 short. The store eventually found the missing $10, but it did not rehire Harris.

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Posted on May 24, 2016

By SIU Press

1. Claiming the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America. By Sarah Hallenbeck.

“Sarah Hallenbeck’s Claiming the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America is a fresh and masterful piece of scholarship that will make significant interventions to the fields of feminist rhetorical studies and histories of technical communication in particular, as well as rhetorical historiography writ large.”
– Jessica Enoch, associate professor and director of academic writing at the University of Maryland
Read More.

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Posted on May 18, 2016

Featuring Kenny Loggins And John Cusack

“Book Expo America is the largest publishing event in North America and for the first time in almost a decade [it took] place in Chicago, instead of the Javits Center in New York,” according to Good e-Reader.
“Big publishing houses have sent less people, have smaller booths and are putting on less parties. This has resulted in attendance being down 20% this year.”
Oops.
Here’s a rundown of the expo, which wrapped up its three-day run on Friday.

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Posted on May 16, 2016

Plus: Rebranding Anthropology & Chicago Zinefest

Follow the saga.
“In December 2014, the publishing arm of the [Chicago-based] American Bar Association, the preeminent professional organization for U.S. lawyers, commissioned a book by Chinese rights activist Teng Biao,” Foreign Policy reported last month.
“Provisionally entitled Darkness Before Dawn, the book was to paint a picture of China’s politics and society through ‘the shocking stories’ of Chinese human rights lawyers, as well as through personal narrative, according to Teng’s book proposal, which he sent to Foreign Policy.

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Posted on May 12, 2016

By Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage/The Conversation

Economic inequality is high and rising. At the same time, many governments are struggling to balance budgets while maintaining spending for popular programs.
That’s prompted some presidential candidates to argue it’s time to raise taxes on the rich. Bernie Sanders is leading the charge and would create a new top income tax rate of 54.2 percent, up from the current 39.6 percent. Hillary Clinton would institute the so-called Buffett rule to require individuals with adjusted gross incomes of over $1 million to pay an effective rate of at least 30 percent, and she’d add a new 4 percent surcharge on anyone who pulls in $5 million or more.
As White House aspirants, other politicians and voters debate whether it’s time to once again soak the rich to spread their wealth around, it’s helpful to consider what prompted past governments – ours and others – to raise their taxes.
We investigated tax debates and policies in 20 countries from 1800 to the present for our new book, Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe.
Our research shows that it is changes in beliefs about fairness – and not economic inequality or the need for revenue alone – that have driven the major variations in taxes on high incomes and wealth over the last two centuries.

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Posted on May 10, 2016

By Jane Hodson/The Conversation

Parents and teachers in England are angry about a spelling, punctuation and grammar test that school children must sit for at the end of primary school.
First introduced in 2013, all 11-year-olds at local-authority-maintained schools will take the test on May 10. This year the difficulty level has increased significantly, in line with the new national curriculum, leading to calls for all key stage tests to be cancelled.
In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s The World At One, schools minister Nick Gibb answered a typical question from the test incorrectly. He was presented with the sentence: “I went to the cinema after I’d eaten my dinner.” Asked whether the word “after” in the sentence was a subordinating conjunction or a preposition, Gibb said preposition.
According to the terminology used in the tests this is the wrong answer, although the British-American linguist Geoff Pullum has argued that this terminology is based on an “ancient but incorrect analysis.”
There are many aspects of the debate around these tests, and the wider culture of testing they are a part of, but a significant issue remains the purpose of learning grammar.

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Posted on May 9, 2016

By Rebecca Wanzo/The Conversation

The stakes are high for Marvel and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates to do Black Panther well. The character appears this month in the blockbuster Captain America: Civil War, a prelude to the film he’ll headline in 2018. And last month, Coates released the first issue of a new Black Panther comic series.

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Posted on May 5, 2016