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By Christian K. Anderson/The Conversation
When I toured the South Carolina Governor’s Mansion in 2019, I noticed the multi-volume papers of John C. Calhoun on display. It struck me as remarkable that Calhoun’s ideas would be featured so prominently given his vigorous defense of slavery and his role in laying the groundwork for the Civil War.
But the reality is Calhoun’s legacy until now has been quite prominent in American society – and not just in the South.
Posted on June 28, 2020
By ALM
ALM announced Tuesday the release of COVID-19 as a Trigger for Force Majeure: A Global Survey, a resource to quickly answer key questions about the impact of force majeure on contractual obligations during and in the aftermath of the pandemic. The authors are McDermott Will & Emery lawyers who worked with ALM to produce a Q&A that readers can immediately download and put to use on behalf of their companies and clients.
The survey covers 10 countries and 16 U.S. jurisdictions including California, New York, Illinois, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, and Washington, D.C. The international sections help lawyers and clients assess the contractual obligations in Belgium, Canada, China, Germany, France, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.
Posted on June 24, 2020
By SIU Press
“Vicksburg, Mississippi, held strong through a bitter, hard-fought, months-long Civil War campaign, but General Ulysses S. Grant’s 40-day siege ended the stalemate and, on July 4, 1863, destroyed Confederate control of the Mississippi River. In the first anthology to examine the Vicksburg Campaign’s final phase, nine prominent historians and emerging scholars provide in-depth analysis of previously unexamined aspects of the historic siege,” SIU Press says.
Posted on June 23, 2020
By Diamond Comic Distributors
Free Comic Book Day, the comic book industry’s largest annual promotional event, is traditionally scheduled to take place the first Saturday in May each year.
However, the impact and spread of COVID-19 prevented the event from being celebrated at its normal time this year.
Now, the beloved event has been rescheduled and reworked to take place throughout July and early September in order to accommodate social-distancing and store capacity regulations across the country, effectively making it Free Comic Book Summer!
Posted on June 20, 2020
By Jerrod MacFarlane/New America
This past March, during the early weeks of the pandemic, McDonald’s launched a campaign featuring a pulled-apart version of its iconic golden arches. Intended to “encourage consumers to keep each other safe through social distancing,” the ad drew backlash from thousands of social media users – including Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Surreal as this episode may seem, it’s just the latest example of how McDonald’s and its global coterie of franchises have pioneered the use of community engagement and identity-forward marketing to drive profit.
In her recently released book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Marcia Chatelain – New America’s 2017 Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow – traces how McDonald’s tested and perfected this strategy on black American communities.
The history she relates features a lively cast of entrepreneurs, activists, and political leaders, all of whom developed a shared investment in what the Nixon administration termed “black capitalism.”
That concept has remained consistent in the intervening six decades: a belief that the most effective redress for dispossessed, disenfranchised black Americans is investment in entrepreneurship and private business in black communities – typically, fast food franchises.
Posted on June 19, 2020
By Sarah Witman/Undark
The way most unnatural deaths are investigated in the U.S. is not as flawless or fast-paced as shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit would have you believe. But in the early 20th century, it was much worse.
In 1914, New York City’s commissioner of accounts, Leonard Wallstein, investigated the city’s coroner system and found it to be grossly inefficient and corrupt. Of the 65 coroners holding office at the time, “not one was thoroughly qualified by training or experience for the adequate performance of his duties,” he wrote in his report. The few who had medical degrees were “drawn from the ranks of mediocrity,” motivated only by the money they could extort from police, prosecutors, or the accused.
By the 1920s, two cities – Boston and New York City – had converted from the coroner system to the medical examiner system. Unlike coroners, medical examiners were required to have some kind of post-secondary education, as well as specialized training in forensic pathology – learning to decipher clues like ligature marks, decomposition, and lividity to determine the time, manner, and cause of death.
In 18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics, Bruce Goldfarb vividly recounts one woman’s quest to expand the medical examiner system and advance the field of forensic pathology.
Posted on June 17, 2020
By Stern Pinball
Stern Pinball, Inc., a global lifestyle brand based on the iconic and outrageously fun modern American game of pinball, and Incendium, a multi-faceted production company known for an array of animation, comic books, toys, and video games, announced today the availability of a new limited edition pinball machine celebrating the world’s greatest illustrated magazine, Heavy Metal. The Heavy Metal pinball machine will be available exclusively from Incendium.
The Heavy Metal pinball machine commemorates the 300th issue of Heavy Metal, which has been running since 1977 and inspired the 1981 animated movie of the same name. An exclusive variant cover edition of issue 300 will be included with every machine. Heavy Metal is working with Incendium as a premier licensing partner to align with premium brands and their products.
Posted on June 15, 2020
By David Rutter
Consider a life hating a book that everyone else seems to love. And hating the nearly-as-beloved movie made from that same despicable book.
I have spent much of my life telling relatives, friends, acquaintance, passers-by and total strangers that Gone With The Wind is a terrible movie, and that Margaret Mitchell’s book is even worse (419,000 words! It’s like one of L. Ron Hubbard’s artery-choking books).
Kin always laughed at my self-righteous piety and argumentative silliness.
But they were wrong. GWTW always made me angry. Deeply so. It even makes me angry that it does not make other people angry.
Now HBO has decided to “reframe” the 1939 movie with “context,” presumably a panel discussion, and then re-show it again, and again and again. It’s just what Black Lives Matter needs to make it even more justifiably angry about white mindlessness.
In GWTW, black lives don’t matter at all. They are charming props.
Posted on June 12, 2020
By Levi Van Zyl (readershark) via YouTube
‘A lot of the books I see going around, and the lists I see going around, are literally like all James Baldwin, which is totally fine, it is important to read an author who paved such a path in the black – and especially the black queer – community but it’s been awhile. It’s been awhile since then. Also, black people are more than their pain. You can’t just push pain, pain, pain, because at that point you’re almost fetishizing the pain.’
Posted on June 10, 2020
By Phillip Crawford Jr.
In celebrating LGBTQ Pride this June, when so much of the world has embraced equality, it’s difficult to imagine that illicit bars run by the Mafia once were one of the few gathering places for gays and lesbians.
In The Mafia and the Gays, author Phillip Crawford Jr. meticulously documents how the mob once had a near-monopoly on gay bars for decades in New York and Chicago, relying upon an extensive collection of primary sources including FBI files, many of which were not publicly available until acquired by the author through the Freedom of Information Act.
Posted on June 9, 2020
