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WSUV professor authors book on slavery

Woman, children were enslaved on Indian Ocean island

France probably isn’t the first country to pop into your mind when you think of nations with a convoluted and ugly history of slavery, but a new book by WSU Vancouver history professor Sue Peabody may change that.

Sue Peabody
Sue Peabody

Peabody, an international expert in French colonial slavery in the Indian Ocean, released her book, “Madeleine’s Children,” through Oxford University Press on Oct. 3. The book tells the tale of Madeleine, a slave brought to France as a teenager in 1772, and her children, Furcy, Constance and Maurice, who were illegally enslaved on Reunion Island, a French Indian Ocean colony at the time. The story traces her son Furcy’s struggles to gain his freedom through a corrupt and convoluted system of colonial rule.

“It’s really a remarkable piece of work,” said Brett Rushforth, an assistant professor at the University of Oregon who read Peabody’s manuscript for Oxford University Press. “It’s amazing how those worlds interconnected. In India, you have complicated colonial rules, legal statuses and servitude. You have France’s sugar islands, and then you have France itself. These three things are very different from each other and yet end up intertwined.”

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The Columbian

‘When you close your eyes and think of Clark County’

Diverse group shares what Clark County, Washington, is to them and how it shaped their lives.

The exhibit, “I Am Clark County,” is an oral examination of Clark County that looks at 12 unique lives. The subjects—or “narrators” as they are called by their interviewers—represent a diverse group through a variety of religions, races, jobs, ages and personal histories.

Donna SinclairThe exhibit is the brainchild of Donna Sinclair, instructor of history at Washington State University Vancouver. Sinclair laid the groundwork for the exhibit during WSU Vancouver’s spring semester by teaching a group of her history students how to interview and put together an exhibit.

The goal, as Sinclair describes it, was to talk with “ordinary Clark County citizens. Through the lens of their experience we can learn something about this place,” she said.

The physical exhibit itself features a descriptive poster of each subject, with various aspects of their lives highlighted, an assortment of graphics of both the subject and things pertaining to their life and three to five ways the subjects identify themselves. Next to each poster, hanging on the wall with headphones, are the interviews.

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The Reflector

With 75 years of perspective, we can re-examine the legacy of Pearl Harbor even as we honor those who served

By Raymond Sun, associate professor of history, WSU Pullman.

The living memory of the attack on Pearl Harbor is almost extinguished. It’s time to rethink how we want to remember Dec. 7, 1941, 75 years later—and beyond.

Ray Sun
Sun

To acknowledge the many negative effects that the memory of Pearl Harbor had on how Americans fought the Pacific War is not only intellectually and historically honest, but provides the moral integrity required to build a national memory that can guide us wisely in the present when facing severe challenges about race, religion, refugees, immigration and national security. This is neither to deny the honor due to the dead of Pearl Harbor, nor to displace the site from its central place in American memory.

Seventy-five years later, we have a great opportunity to craft a more mature, complex understanding of the multiple legacies of Pearl Harbor.

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The Spokesman-Review

Rapture Me Up, Daddy: Trump, the End of the World, and Me

More than 40 percent of Americans believe that the Second Coming will take place by the year 2050, with that number rising to 58 percent among white evangelicals.

Matthew Sutton
Matthew Sutton

“Among lay people it’s just a given that the Rapture’s going to happen,” says Matthew Avery Sutton, history professor at Washington State University and author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, in an interview with VICE. “Most evangelical churches would be shocked to find out that this is a 150-year-old concept and not a 2,000-year-old Biblical concept.”

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VICE

Fossatti made the most of her 102 years

Alice Fossatti died Sunday at age 102. Her spitfire personality propelled her through the Depression, a 73-year marriage, motherhood, 23 years of teaching kindergarten at Hawthorne Elementary School and decades of communing with her inner artist.

Brigit Farley
Farley

Washington State University history professor Brigit Farley recalls how Fossatti validated and affirmed her pint-size pupils. Later, when Farley started teaching at the college level, the two discussed the teaching profession and the importance of lifting up students and teaching them to be kind thinkers.

“I think she would say that the most important thing in teaching little kids was instilling confidence and belief in themselves,” Farley said. “That’s the foundation she built in them. That’s something I very consciously took from her in my own work. Turns out that is as important when people are 25 as it is when they are just five.”

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East Oregonian