Congratulations and thanks to Chris Densmore and everyone involved in the production of this short video on Lucretia Mott. Swatties will recognize several of the locations in which interviews were filmed.
Tag Archives: history
Quakers and Abolition
Quakers and Abolition, a book just released by the University of Illinois Press, includes essays by Ellen Ross (Religion), J. William Frost, (Professor Emeritus) and Christopher Densmore (Friends Historical Library). The book was edited by Geoffrey Planck (Swarthmore graduate) and Brycchan Carey, with an acknowledgement to the Cooper Foundation for its support of the 2010 Quakers and Slavery Conference.
TODAY: Learn about Joshua Evansc an active Quaker abolitionist
Joshua Evans Event at Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College
Wednesday, April 9, 4:30 PM
Ralph Greene of New England Yearly Meeting will present a program on Joshua Evans (1741-1798). Evans was considered “singular” even by the Quakers. He was an early and active abolitionist, traveling as far South Carolina to bear testimony against enslavement, he worked on behalf of the Native Americans in New Jersey, his scruples against any support of slavery led him to wear undyed clothes, because the dyes used at the time were produced by slave labor, and he criticized the worldliness of Quakers of his time, suggesting among other things that the wearing of shoe buckles, where a simple lace would do, was vanity.
The manuscript Joshua Evans Journals at Friends Historical Library are being digitized and transcribed as part of a Digital Humanities Program.
Ralph Greene is very active in New England Yearly Meeting and the Friends Church in South China, Maine.
All are invited to Friends Historical Library, just inside McCabe Library, to hear more about the life and witness of Joshua Evans. Please forward this invitation to anyone who might be interested.
Mary Walton to speak about Alice Paul at Swarthmore Friends Meeting
Swarthmore Friends Meeting is pleased to announce:
Mary Walton, author of A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot, will speak at Swarthmore Friends Meeting, this Sunday, February 23, at 11:45 in Whittier Room. Alice Paul was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement during 1913-1920, and a New Jersey Quaker in a lineage of women Quaker activists. She was also a pioneer of nonviolent resistance. She is compared to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, in terms of her vision for and leadership of the women’s suffrage movement. Through nonviolent direct action, she and her followers spurred a recalcitrant Congress and President to approve the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote. Join us as we learn more about the struggles and sufferings of those involved in this movement from Mary Walton this Sunday. Mary Walton is author of four books, a former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and a community organizer.
Rutgers Conference Commemorates Community Organizing in the Modern Civil Rights Movement
The determined grassroots efforts of individuals who drove the struggle for Civil Rights during the 1960s will be explored at the 2014 Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series, Tending the Light: Community Organizing and the Modern Civil Rights Movement, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014, at the Paul Robeson Campus Center, 350 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., on Rutgers University’s Newark Campus, from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
(Photo by Danny Lyon
Mississippi, 1963: Martha Prescod, Mike Miller, and Robert Parris Moses doing voter registration work in the countryside. Moses is one of the MTW speakers in February.)
The Series’ 34th installment will commemorate the 50th anniversary of Mississippi Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by illuminating the history of community organizing in the black freedom struggle, the immense amount of work such struggle entails, and the heroic individuals who take it on. The daylong conference features four distinguished speakers: Bob Moses, civil rights movement veteran and president and founder of The Algebra Project; Diane Nash, civil rights movement veteran; Charles Payne, the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago; and Barbara Ransby, Professor of History and African-American Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago. MTW speakers will reflect on the history of community organizing, from the perspective of their personal experience and of their scholarship on the topic, as well as the legacy and lessons of such grassroots work for contemporary politics.
Marion Thompson Wright, the person behind the lecture series, was the first professionally trained female historian in the U.S.
Immediately following the MTW conference, the audience is invited to attend a free reception at the Newark Museum, 49 Washington St., which also features live musical entertainment by The Bradford Hayes Trio. Both the MTW conference and museum reception are free and open to the public.
The lecture series was co-founded in 1981 by Dr. Clement Price, Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History at Rutgers University, and the late Giles R. Wright, New Jersey Historical Commission. Over the past 33 years, the conference has drawn thousands of people to the Rutgers-Newark campus and has attracted some of the nation’s foremost scholars and humanists who are experts in the field of African and African American history and culture. It has become one of the nation’s leading scholarly programs specifically devoted to enhancing the historical literacy of an intercultural community.
The annual conference was named for East Orange native Dr. Marion Thompson Wright, a pioneer in African American historiography and race relations in New Jersey, who was the first professionally trained woman historian in the United States.
The Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series is sponsored by the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience; the Federated Department of History, Rutgers-Newark and the New Jersey Institute of Technology; and the New Jersey Historical Commission/Department of State. The 2014 conference receives additional support from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the Rutgers Committee to Advance Our Common Purposes, and the Prudential Foundation.
For additional information about the program, visit the Institute’s website at: http://ethnicity.rutgers.edu, or contact the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, 973/353-3891.
Wendy Chmielewski awarded honorable mention for historical research on women in politics
Dr. Wendy Chmielewski, a member of the Peace and Conflict Studies steering committee has been awarded a 2013 honorable mention award for the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics from Iowa State University for her ongoing project, Her Hat Was in the Ring: U.S. Women Elected to Political Office Before 1920.
From all of us in the Peace and Conflict Studies program, congratulations Wendy!
Challenging the Cold War Warriors: Greenham Women Against Cruise Missiles, 1983-1988
On November 5th, 2013, Dr. Wendy Chmielewski, Curator of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection will present a paper at West Chester University during a conference on the Cold War.
Dr. Chmielewski’s paper is titled: “Challenging the Cold War Warriors: Greenham Women Against Cruise Missiles, 1983-1988” Greenham Women Against Cruise Missiles was a group of women from Britain, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Congressmen Ron Dellums and Ted Weiss who attempted to sue the Reagan administration in US federal court for human rights and US constitutional violations.
Conscientious Objectors Serving the Mentally Ill During World War II
Behind the Gates: Conscientious Objectors Serving the Mentally Ill During World War II
Friday, October 4, 2:30 pm
McCabe’s Popular Reading Room, Main Floor
Swarthmore College
Open to the Public. Directions to campus.
Wendy Chmielewski, Curator of the Peace Collection, [and a member of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program steering committee] will talk about how WW II conscientious objectors were directly responsible for exposing shameful conditions in US mental hospitals , changing forever how the mentally ill were created. Original photographs, drawings, pamphlets, documents, and other resources will be available.
With Hannah K. Jones, author of Byberry, from Arcadia Books, 2013. Jones will talk abut her experience in using resources from the Peace Collection to write her recent book on the Pennsylvania State Hospital (known as Byberry), located near Philadelphia.
Visit the online collection of resources on conscientious object in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
Thanks to Mary Walton for her lecture on Alice Paul ’05 and Mabel Vernon ’06
We would like to thank author Mary Walton for her lecture this afternoon on the courageous work of Swarthmore alums Alice Paul ’05 and Mabel Vernon ’06 in their organizing and nonviolent campaigns to secure the vote for women in the United States.
A standing-room only crowd of people from the Swarthmore community and the local community gathered in the Scheuer Room to celebrate the International Day of Peace, the College’s sesquicentennial, and 125 years since the first peace studies course in higher education was taught at Swarthmore. The audience expressed their appreciation for Ms. Walton’s presentation with extended applause.
We would like to thank all of our co-sponsors who made this event a success, including Peace Day Philly for including our event in the city-wide celebration of the International Day of Peace.
Sponsors: Peace and Conflict Studies, the President’s Office, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Friends Historical Library, History Department, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Women’s Resource Center, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, English Literature Department, and Political Science Department.
Mark your calendars: Alice Paul ’05, Mabel Vernon ’06, and the Battle for the Ballot
Mark your calendars for the College’s first sesquicentennial celebration event, a talk by author Mary Walton:
A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul ’05, Mabel Vernon ’06, and the Battle for the Ballot
Mary Walton
September 19, 2013; 4:15 p.m.
Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College
On September 19th, Peace and Conflict Studies and co-sponsors will celebrate the International Day of Peace, 125 years of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore College, and the start of the College’s Sesquicentennial with a talk by Mary Walton, author of A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot. The focus of Walton’s talk will be Alice Paul (Class of 1905) and her friend and fellow Swarthmore alum, Mabel Vernon (Class of 1906).
A New Jersey Quaker, Alice Paul was the leader of the militant wing of the suffrage movement from 1913 to 1920. Hers was a David-and-Goliath struggle to convince a reluctant congress and a stubborn president to give women the vote. Paul and her followers were the first people to picket the White House. They were arrested, thrown in jail, brutalized and force fed when they went on hunger strikes. A pioneer in non-violent resistance, she was to suffrage what Gandhi was to Indian independence, what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights.
In 1913, Mabel Vernon gladly gave up teaching to join her college friend, Alice Paul, in working full time for the Congressional Union. From that day on, she devoted her life to suffrage and other causes. Mabel Vernon was among the most militant suffragists. In 1916, she stood up in a full auditorium and heckled President Wilson as he spoke about democracy. Vernon picketed the White House and was among the first suffragists to go to jail.
Mary Walton is the author of four previous works of nonfiction. She was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer for many years where she wrote more than a hundred magazine stories as a staff writer for the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. She has also written for the New York Times, Washingtonian, theWashington Monthly, and the American Journalism Review. After graduation from Harvard University, and a turn at social work and community organizing, Walton began her journalism career in 1969 as a reporter for the Charleston (WV) Gazette.
International Day of Peace 2013
Sponsors: Peace and Conflict Studies, the President’s Office, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Friends Historical Library, History Department, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Women’s Resource Center, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, English Literature Department, and Political Science Department.
Bibliographic links for photographs.