Tag Archives: Swarthmore

FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO CIVIL LIBERTIES: The impact of black culture and identity on 21st century diplomacy

A presentation by Justin Davis, Deputy Director, Orientation Division, Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State

Friday, December 6th
4:30-6 pm
Sproul 201, Intercultural Center
Swarthmore College

This event is open to the public. You can find directions and a    campus map on the College’s website.

Justin Davis-3

Organized by Peace and Conflict Studies and Co-Sponsored by Black Studies, Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology, the Black Cultural Center, The Intercultural Center, the Office of Inclusive Excellence, and The Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility

How the 1971 Burglary of the Media, PA, FBI Office Changed History: A Conversation with Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Raines, and Betty Medsger

Peace and Conflict Studies is co-sponsoring this awesome event tomorrow!

“How the 1971 Burglary of the Media, PA, FBI Office Changed History”

Round table discussion with:
Keith Forsyth, antiwar activist and burglar, auto worker, optical engineer and jazz guitarist; Bonnie Raines, anti-war activist and burglar, civil rights activist and advocate for the needs of children;
and Betty Medsger, former Washington Post reporter, professor of journalism, and author of The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI

McCabe Library Atrium
Swarthmore College
7 p.m., April 3, 2019
Open to the public

The Swarthmore Campus & Community Store will provide books for purchase and signing during the reception to follow

Co-sponsored by

Swarthmore College Peace Collection
Black Studies
Black Cultural Center
Lang Center for Social Responsibility
Peace and Conflict Studies
Political Science
Peace, Justice, and Human Rights-Haverford College

This event will also recognize Betty Medsger’s donation of her papers to the Peace Collection

Check out the video below for a background on the original event:

 

 

 

Environmental Justice

UPCOMING WORKSHOP — Weaving the Threads: Intersectionality, Sustainability & Environmental Justice

How do we identify and address intersectional concerns (e.g. from racism, to poverty, to militarism, to homelessness, and more) in our sustainability work and activism? How do we connect our various initiatives within a framework of environmental justice? How do we communicate these visions with others?
On Monday, November 20, join Peace and Conflict Studies and Environmental Studies for a workshop with Prof. Randall Amster, former Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.Workshop Flyer

Weaving the Threads: Intersectionality, Sustainability & Environmental Justice

The confluence of contemporary crises represents a direct threat to human existence, yet also a remarkable opportunity to implement alternatives and cultivate visions for a more just and sustainable world. The framework of “climate justice” increasingly subsumes many of these issues and possibilities, providing a basis for transforming our thinking and acting in relation to essential resources including food, water, and energy production. Likewise, critical issues of equity, access, and distribution are brought to the fore, with the nexus of environmental justice and peacebuilding offering potential avenues for change. What theories and actions are informing current movements and responses? How can policymaking and the lived experiences of people and communities equally inform the discourse? How can we promote an ethos of responsibility in both senses of the word, as a form of accountability and a locus of empowerment? Drawing upon examples from local to global scales, this session will seek to spark a collaborative dialogue for cultivating resilient responses to today’s most pressing challenges.

Randall Amster

Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., is Director and Teaching Professor in the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown University. He serves as Editor-in- Chief of the Contemporary Justice Review. He teaches and publishes widely on subjects including peace and nonviolence, social and environmental justice, political theory and movements, and the impacts of emerging technologies. His recent books include Peace Ecology (Routledge, 2015), Anarchism Today (Praeger, 2012), Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (LFB, 2008); and the co-edited volume Exploring the Power of Nonviolence: Peace, Politics, and Practice (Syracuse University Press, 2013). His current research interests include environmental peacebuilding, climate justice, intersectionality and ecology, community and sustainability, and the justice implications of contemporary technology.

 

Peace Ecology Book Cover

The workshop begins at 4:15 pm and will take place in Kohlberg Hall, Room 116.

This event is sponsored by Peace and Conflict Studies, Environmental Studies, the Provost’s Office, the President’s Office, and the Office of Sustainability.

Swarthmore amphitheater

Swarthmore Peace and Conflict Studies Students in the News

Screen Shot 2017-09-12 at 10.13.24 AM

Peace and Conflict Studies special major Maria Castaneda ’18 and Peace and Conflict Studies minor Michael Nafziger ’18 were recently featured in the news.

Read Maria’s story related to President Trump’s order ending the DACA program here.
“From Mexico to Swarthmore, a dream now in danger”

Follow Michael’s involvement in our community in the wake of the alt-right controversy in Charlottesville, VA here.
“Swarthmore Community Reflects on Charlottesville at Collection”

History with a Future: Ben Goossen ’13

Goossen 13

McCabe Library Atrium
Thursday, September 7th, 4:30 pm

Please join us in welcoming back Ben Goossen ‘13! Ben will take you through the experiences at Swarthmore that helped shape his decision to pursue a Ph.D. at Harvard University. A History and German Studies double major, and four-time recipient of the Swarthmore College Libraries’ A. Edward Newton Award, Ben will discuss his new book, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era.

Chosen Nation tells the story of a Christian religious group’s entanglement with German nationalism through Hitler’s Third Reich and the Holocaust. Goossen will share from his experiences researching this history of complicity and cover-up, a journey that began at Swarthmore College and led to Old World Europe, seized Nazi archives, and a remote “religious state” in rural Paraguay.

Light refreshments will be served.

Sponsored by German Studies, Department of History, Friends Historical Library, Peace Collection and Swarthmore College Libraries
John W. Thompson

Science and Compassion: John W. Thompson’s Trajectory From Swarthmore to the Nuremberg Trials

Science and Compassion: John W. Thompson’s Trajectory From Swarthmore to the Nuremberg Trials

A lecture by Paul Weindling
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Kohlberg Hall, Scheuer Room
Swarthmore College (directions)
John W. Thompson

John W. Thompson taught as professor of Physiology and Anatomy from 1929 to 1932.

Paul Weindling’s lecture will focus on his research contained in his new book, John W. Thompson: Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust (University of Rochester Press) is the biography of a doctor whose revulsion at Nazi human experiments prompted him to seek a humane basis for physician-patient relations. As a military-scientific intelligence officer in 1945, Thompson was the first to name “medical war crimes” as a category for prosecution. His investigations laid the groundwork for the Nuremberg medical trials and for the novel idea of “informed consent.” Yet, Thompson has remained a little-known figure, despite his many scientific, literary, and religious connections. Thompson has a connection to Swarthmore College having taught as professor of Physiology and Anatomy from 1929 to 1932.

Paul Weindling is Wellcome Trust Research Professor for the History of Medicine at the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He has served on historical commissions on Nazi science including the Max Planck Society’s Presidential Commission for the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, and is a Trustee of the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA) which originally rescued many scientists from Nazi persecution.

book cover

Sponsors: Sesquicentennial Events, Peace and Conflict Studies, Department of Biology

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.

walton_event_logos

 

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.

150 years ago: A College Founded in Wartime

Cleaning one’s office can be a chore, but it also encourages one to stumble across gems that were set aside in the rush of an academic year.  In my cleaning today, I came across one of Chris Densmore’s sesquicentennial historical pieces from the July 2012 Swarthmore College Bulletin.

150 years ago: A College Founded in Wartime

Christopher Densmore

Curator, Friends Historical Library

By 1862, the Civil War was in its second year. The campaign to raise money for what was to become Swarthmore, which had been temporarily suspended at the beginning of the war, was resumed in earnest. The founders had originally anticipated that the school could be funded by large donations from wealthy individuals, but they now turned their efforts to a grassroots campaign to visit and solicit support from Quaker meetings across the Mid-Atlantic. Later perhaps, the “stewards of a superabundance of this world’s goods” might be persuaded to contribute larger sums.

The war became an impetus for establishing a Quaker school. An editorial in the Friends Intelligencer in September 1862 commented: “The war spirit has penetrated almost every institution in the land; the Public Schools are used as means of promoting the love of military glory, and are increasingly engaged in teaching military drill to their pupils. We should be especially concerned to guard our children against this snare, and to build them up in those principles which will not only preserve them in the practice of peace and good-will towards all men, but will make them fit successors to those who have gone before them as lights in the world, and exemplars of the peaceable spirit of Christianity. To this end Friends should educate all their children under their own care. …”

Today, Swarthmore College seeks diversity among its students, faculty, staff, and administrators and strives to make the campus a safe place for that diversity. Likewise, the College founders sought to create a safe place for diversity, though in the form of a “guarded education” for the children of Friends.

Other sesquicentennial pieces by Chris Densmore include:

150 Years Ago: The Dream of a College (April 2011)

150 Years Ago: “Honest, Useful Men and Women” (July 2011)

150 Years Ago: Friends, We Have a Problem (October 2011)

150 Years Ago: Martha Ellicott Tyson proposes a new school (January 2012)

 150 years ago: Benjamin Hallowell, man of peace (April 2012)

150 Years Ago: The Meaning of Swarthmore (July 2013)

175th Anniversary of the Burning of Pennsylvania Hall

pahall

Photo courtesy of the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College

By Chris Densmore, Curator of the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College

May 14 was the 175th Anniversary of the 1838 opening of Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania Hall was dedicated to “liberty and the rights of man.”

Over the next three days the Hall hosted meetings of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, the Requited Labor Convention and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Stories, some true, that race mixing, abolition and women speaking were openly countenanced in Pennsylvania Hall attracted a hostile mob of reportedly 25,000 “respectable” citizens of Pennsylvania who surrounded the building yelling and throwing rocks through the windows.

On May 17, 1838, the mob burned Pennsylvania Hall to the ground while the police and firemen looked on. Those inside made a speedy exit. Lucretia Mott had been in the Hall and afterwards she and her husband James waited quietly at home for the mob that was coming to burn their house. Fortunately a friend of the Motts sent the mob off in the wrong direction thus sparing the Mott home.

Lucretia Mott confronted mobs several times. On a later occasion a mob broke up the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City. Mott sent the man who was escorting her through the mob to assist some of the more timid women and then approached one of the biggest and roughest leaders of the mob. Taking him by the arm, she declared, “This man… He will see me safe through.” Mott was less than five feet tall, less than ninety pounds in weight, and a grandmother. The man saw Mott safely though and the next day they had lunch together.

Other Swarthmore College related people associated with Pennsylvania Hall included Dr. Joseph Parrish, the father of Edward Parrish, Swarthmore’s first president and Caleb Clothier. One of the Vice Presidents of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women was Mary Magill, mother of Edward Magill, the second president of Swarthmore College. When Swarthmore College opened for instruction in 1869, the examples of Lucretia and James Mott were held up as examples for future Swarthmore students to emulate.

150 years ago: Benjamin Hallowell, man of peace

150 years ago: Benjamin Hallowell, man of peace

By Christopher Densmore

Curator, Friends Historical Library

(This article originally appeared in the April 2012 edition of the College Bulletin.)

collection_hallowell001_portraitBy 1862, the campaign to create what would become Swarthmore College was renewed, but there were conflicting ideas on the nature of what was then being referred to as “the boarding school.” Some supporters wanted a grammar school, some looked toward a “normal school”—to supply teachers to local Quaker primary and secondary schools. Benjamin Hallowell looked further. In a letter to future Swarthmore President Edward Parrish, Hallowell wrote, “The Institution must, from its commencement, possess faculties for pursuing a liberal and extensive course of study … equal to that of the best Institutions of learning of our County. …”

Hallowell’s words carried weight. He was a well-known scientist and educator. His boarding school in Alexandria, Va., was known particularly for mathematics. Paradoxically for a lifelong Quaker, one of his better-known fellow alumni was Robert E. Lee, future commander of the Confederate Army, who studied mathematics with Hallowell to prepare himself for West Point.

In 1860, Hallowell became the first president of Maryland Agricultural College, now the University of Maryland, on the condition that the school would not employ slave labor. During the Civil War, Hallowell was clerk of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting, a body that included Virginia and Maryland. A confirmed pacifist, Hallowell nevertheless rejoiced when his former pupil Gen. Lee was driven from Pennsylvania.

collection_hallowell003_paperAfter the war, Hallowell, acting for the Baltimore Yearly Meeting, wrote to president-elect Ulysses S. Grant, advocating peaceful relations with the Indian nations of the West. Under Grant’s “Peace Policy,” some Indian agencies in the Plains were staffed by Quakers. In 1872, his old friend Edward Parrish, after serving as the first president of Swarthmore College, died in the West while on a mission for the Quakers to broker a peace treaty between the Indian nations of the Plains and the United States.

Hallowell’s last major scientific work Geometrical Analysis (1872) is dedicated “To Swarthmore College, including the Youthful Laborers of both sexes … who are devoting themselves to the pursuit of a knowledge of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good in every Department of Science and Nature.”