Society & Culture
Remembering Frederick Douglass on his 200th birthday
Like most African Americans born into slavery, Frederick Douglass was never told the date and year of his birth. He chose February 14 as the day on which to celebrate it, and in 2018 we celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth. At the University of Rochester, one of the most extensive collections of Douglass artifacts in the country can be found in Rush Rhees Library.
Suffragist Votetilla volunteers win inaugural Community Champion Award
The “Votetilla,” a week-long floating theater of canal boats ferrying reenactors of key suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton along the Eric Canal, was a multi-agency creative partnership that included the Susan B. Anthony Center (SBAC).
Can you read my handwriting?
The teaching of formal cursive handwriting may have declined in our digital age, but to show our appreciation for scribes and their tools of the trade, we dug into our special collections to highlight a sampling of hand lettering, from ancient hieroglyphs to modern conscripts.
Rochester professor part of national campaign finance task force
In a new research report, professor David Primo argues that there’s a disconnect between what the public believe about campaign finance law and the reality, and that many popular reform proposals unlikely to bring the desired results.
‘Martin Luther King Jr. was my first American hero’
Four-time Emmy Award-winner and pioneer of Latino broadcasting Maria Hinojosa says “it’s pretty surreal” to be delivering the University’s MLK Commemorative Address this week. She calls Martin Luther King Jr., her “first American hero, the first person who made me believe I had a voice in this country.”
Looking at urban history as a fight for space, power
Chicago and Delhi. Rome and Rochester. The students in the 100-level course “The City: Contested Spaces” take a virtual tour of them all, while pondering an overarching question—can people’s lives be reshaped by redesigning urban spaces?
New book explores ‘ethical turn’ of critical theory
Professor Robert Doran focuses on iconic 20th-century philosophers like Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Gayatri Spivak, and Richard Rorty, and explores critical theory’s pivot away from a narrowly focused investigation of meaning and text.
The mysterious aftermath of an infamous pirate raid
Just before dawn on May 18, 1683, pirates stormed the port city of Veracruz, capturing around 1,500 people and selling them to the slave markets of Haiti and South Carolina. Pablo Sierra Silva, assistant professor of history, is on a mission to trace what happened to them.
Finding roots of globalization in Ottoman Empire’s railway
In his new book, assistant professor of art history Peter Christensen focuses on infrastructure–railway stations specifically–and their place in architectural history not just as technology, but also as art.
Posters present a visual history of AIDS epidemic
For decades, Edward Atwater ’50, a professor emeritus of medicine at the Medical Center, has collected medical history artifacts. In 2007, he began turning his collection of more than 8,000 AIDS education posters over to the University and it is now the world’s largest single collection of visual resources related to AIDS and HIV.