As part of their response to the protests and riots following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, faculty in the history department started a series examining the long and global history of protests and riots.
Chris Magra notes the long history of casting blame on outsiders to deflect the weight of political protest in the first piece of the series: The Optics of Riot Participation: Then and Now.
Professor Nicole Eggers draws our attention to how past experiences of state violence have impacted religious minority responses to COVID-19 in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the second entry of the series: Black Bodies, State Violence, and COVID-19: Lessons from Congo.
Professor Margaret Andersen looks at the uprisings in Paris, France, in 1968, and the impact of the scale of the protests and images of police brutality on French politics in the third entry of this series: Beneath the Pavement, the Beach: Paris in 1968.
Professor Robert Bland looks at riots, strikes, and Black citizens’ struggle for justice in the South Carolina low country in 1876 in the fourth entry of the series: Riot on the Combahee: Organized Black Resistance and the End of Reconstruction.
Bob Hutton takes us back to campus protests over Vietnam, Richard Nixon, and Billy Graham in the fifth entry of the series: Volunteers for America, 1970 & 2020.
Read more from this series as they are published.