Women’s History Month at the American Library

To celebrate Women’s History Month, the American Library hosted a talk on 8 March by Professor Emma Long from the University of East Anglia, who spoke to an engaged and appreciative audience about the women justices of the United States Supreme Court. You can read all about it in fellow Library Scholar Lauren Cortese’s blog post. 

Professor Long highlighted a few books about the justices that are available to check out from the Library, shown at bottom. If you’re interested in the Supreme Court and the American legal system, we have additional titles, so pay us a visit and ask one of our knowledgeable librarians to assist you. 

There are a number of pressing issues facing the nation when it comes to women’s rights. One is the pending Supreme Court case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which could overturn the Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, upholding a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion and control over her own reproductive decisions. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights:  ‘The right to safe and legal abortion is a fundamental human right protected under numerous international and regional human rights treaties and national-level constitutions around the world.’ [UPDATE: On 24 June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, holding that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, in a case that has troubling implications for due process protections in America. The text of the decision can be found here. I recommend reading the dissent by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.]

There is also the necessity of confirming President Biden’s nominee to fill the vacancy left by the announced retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is a highly qualified candidate and would be the Court’s first Black female justice, not to mention being from this writer’s hometown of Miami, Florida. I venture to predict that despite the political sideshow surrounding Judge Jackson’s nomination, Congress will do the right thing in confirming her. [UPDATE: On 7 April 2022, a bipartisan group of Senators confirmed Judge Jackson’s nomination as the 116th Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. She was sworn in and took her seat on 30 June.]

There is another, perhaps surprisingly, unresolved issue: the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the US Constitution, guaranteeing equal rights for women.^[1] First drafted in 1923 by leaders of the suffrage movement and finally taken up by Congress in 1972, the ERA requires the ratification of three-quar­ters, or 38 of the 50 states. Virginia became the 38^th state to ratify it in 2020. However, according to the Brennan Center for Justice: ‘The rati­fic­a­tion dead­lines that Congress set after it approved the amend­ment have lapsed, and five states have acted to rescind their prior approval.’  

The resolution to this legal nail-biter rests on the issues of whether Congress can waive the time bar (a procedural limitation not mandated by the Constitution) and whether states are permitted to rescind their ratifications. The 50.8% of ‘female persons’ who make up the US population, according the 2020 US census, await the answer. It’s been nearly a century since the ERA was first put forward by suffragists. I have no doubt that even if it eludes passage this time around, it will eventually prevail. 

The text of the ERA reads: ‘Equal­ity of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appro­pri­ate legis­la­tion, the provi­sions of this article.’ If ratified, it will be the 28th Amendment to the US Constitution.  

I’ll close by noting that all opinions expressed in this post are those of the writer, and do not represent the position of the American Library, which is one of neutrality. 

–post by Suzanne Solomon 

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^[1] Gender equality is guaranteed under the 14th Amend­ment’s Equal Protec­tion Clause, in great part due to the brilliant legal strategy of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer Ruth Bader Gins­burg, who would go on to become the Court’s second woman and first Jewish female Justice.

Amanda Gorman, 2021 U.S. Inaugural Poet

The inauguration of Joe Biden, the 46^th President of the United States, on 20 January 2021, was historic in a few ways. One was its virtual nature, the physical absence of crowds, necessary because of the global pandemic. Another was the swearing in of America’s first female Vice President, Kamala Harris, who is also the first woman of color to be elected to the position. It was notable for another reason, too: Amanda Gorman, the sixth inaugural poet, brought down the house with an electric reading of her poem The Hill We Climb. Selected for the spot by First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, she follows in the footsteps of poets like Maya Angelou, Richard Blanco and Robert Frost. At 22, Gorman is the youngest person to receive the honor.

Gorman begins her poem by asking how, as a nation, we can overcome adversity, alluding to the challenges the country has experienced over the past few years: the bitter political divisions, the grievous losses caused by the pandemic, and the renewed struggle for civil rights and equality for all Americans. She answers her question by invoking a just pride in the country’s past, but reminds us how that past inevitably shapes the promise of our future:

If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.

That is the promised glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.

It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.

It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

You can hear Gorman’s inaugural reading of The Hill We Climb here.*

Gorman, who, as is customary, composed the work for the inauguration (in poetry speak, this is known as an ‘occasional poem’), had a little over a month in which to write it. She sought inspiration in the work of her predecessors, as well as in speeches by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Winston Churchill. The young poet was not a novice, however. She served as the first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017, when she read her work at the Library of Congress at the inaugural ceremony for U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith.

Gorman grew up in Los Angeles, where her mother is a middle school teacher, with her twin sister, Gabrielle. She was an avid reader and fell in love with poetry at a young age. As she said in a 2018 TED talk to students in New York City: ‘Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it’s this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.’ Gorman graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 2020, and along the way has received a number of awards and honors, including the Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. She was also a 2020 Writer-in-Residence at our ‘sister’ American Library in Paris. 

Gorman’s poem is emblematic of spoken word poetry, with its rousing repetition and incantatory passages. Spoken word, as scholar Kathleen M. Alley has written, has its origins in ‘oral traditions and performance’ and is ‘characterized by rhyme, repetition, word play and improvisation’. Which brings me to another notable fact: like President Biden, Gorman has a speech impediment, which she overcame in part by writing poetry and reading her work aloud. ‘I don’t look at my disability as a weakness,’ Gorman told the Los Angeles Times. ‘It’s made me the performer that I am and the storyteller that I strive to be.’ 

This young American poet inspires for any number of reasons: her talent, her drive, her sense of style, her bravura performance, her confidence. But any writer’s measure of success ultimately lies in the work, in the words she crafts, and by that measure, Gorman succeeds brilliantly. ‘A poem should arise to ecstasy, somewhere between speech and song,’ wrote poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a long-time champion of spoken word, who died in San Francisco this week. Amanda Gorman’s poem soars over that bar, moving this writer to tears and hope for a future in which Americans ‘will rebuild, reconcile, and recover’:

For there is always light,

if only we’re brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Gorman’s poetry collection, The Hill We Climb, will be published by Penguin Random House in September, along with her children’s book, Change Sings: A Children’s Anthem.

*I was advised by a Researcher and Reference Services librarian at the Library of Congress that the poem is protected by copyright, so the text is not reproduced here in full. 

 — post by Suzanne Solomon

This Day In History!

At a loss for what to write that could spark my interest today I decided to look up events of this day in history and was pleasantly surprised to discover an event which had, possibly, a transformative impact on the world. In this day in 1941 the Lend-Lease Act was signed into law allowing the transfer of free provisions and materiel from the United States to Allied countries at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan.

This was quite a controversial move for a country that was still technically neutral until events later that same year. However, strong arguments can be made that it was the transfer of materiel, especially aircraft and food, which tilted the balance in the Battle of Britain and in gaining air superiority over the English Channel.

While I had known about the Lend-Lease agreement in doing a bit of digging for today’s blog I learned a few interesting new things. Firstly, the agreement was to return anything at the end of the war unless it had been destroyed, however in practicality most materiel was in unusable condition for peacetime and as such allies were allowed to keep, free of charge, most remaining supplies. Interestingly, the agreement was ended without warning though after the surrender of Japan and any shipments which were already enroute to the Allies were charged for, although at a severe discount.

Secondly, the Lend-Lease agreement also accommodated reciprocal  exchange in the use of zero-cost leases for army and navy bases in allied countries, many of which still exist though of course no longer for free.

By the end of the war the equivalent of over $50 billion in supplies (over $500 billion in modern terms) had been donated to Allied nations with the lion’s share going to the UK. Conversely the use of land for bases and other reciprocal deals are estimated to have been at a value of almost $8 billion over the course of the war. This figure was very surprising to me in serving to show just how immense the industrial and transportation capacity of the US was in the 1940s.

All told, the signing and continuance of the Lend-Lease Act over the course of the war was vital to Allied victory and almost certainly altered history in a fundamental way. And it all started 78 years ago on this day.

Spring 2019 Lecture Series

The 2AD Memorial Library’s Spring 2019 Lecture Series spotlights the multifaceted nature of studying the United States and World War II. The series features a range of scholars from different disciplines as they discuss the changing face of American culture and our understanding of our own history.

All talks will take place at the Millennium Library on Thursday evenings at 7PM. To book tickets email 2admemorial.lib@norfolk.gov.uk, find us on Eventbrite, or phone us on 01603 774747.

 

“The current period of Nazi frightfulness”: Cinemagoing in the Blitz (25 April)

A night at the pictures often offers the prospect of escape, but was that possible under the threat of enemy bombers? This talk will discuss what happened to British cinemas and British cinemagoers during the Blitz.

Richard Farmer is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of East Anglia.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-current-period-of-nazi-frightfulness-cinemagoing-in-the-blitz-tickets-57878104970

 

Jazz and Disability (2 May)

This talk explores how early jazz reception thought of the new music and dance as disabled and even disabling. It also considers the musical careers of key jazz musicians with disabilities, inviting us to think of jazz as an enabling musical practice.

George McKay is a Professor Media Studies at the University of East Anglia and Humanities Research Council Fellow for its Connected Communities programme.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/jazz-and-disability-tickets-57878776980

 

Of Mice and Krazy Kats: The History and Art of American Comics (9 May)

This talk will provide an in-depth examination of the complex history of American comics from early newspaper strips to contemporary graphic novels, including the birth of superheroes, WWII propaganda comics, controversial 1950s horror comics, and contemporary graphic novels.

Frederik Byrn Køhlert is a Lecturer in American Studies at the University of East Anglia.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/of-mice-and-krazy-kats-the-history-and-art-of-american-comics-tickets-57878242381

 

Indigenous London and Beyond: Native Travellers at the Heart of Empire (16 May)

The stories of Indigenous travellers, willing or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, the US, New Zealand, and Australia show the ways in which London and Britain have for centuries been bound up in the Indigenous experience.

Coll Thrush is a Professor of History and Associate Faculty in Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is also the International Investigator on the AHRC-funded project Beyond the Spectacle: Native North American Presence in Britain.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/indigenous-london-and-beyond-native-travellers-at-the-heart-of-empire-tickets-57878315600

 

American Apocalypse: 21^st Century Climate Change Fiction (23 May)

This talk considers how the apocalyptic dangers of climate change are being addressed by American fiction. Climate change fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, offers us a way to assess, understand, and address the phenomenon of global warming and the impact of humans on their environment.

Rebecca Tillett is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of East Anglia.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/american-apocalypse-21st-century-climate-change-fiction-tickets-57878709779

 

A Heroic Mass Shooter? The Politics of Netflix’s The Punisher (30 May)

Due to his unyielding methods of exacting violent justice, much has been discussed about the Punisher. What is the place of Marvel’s controversial antihero within today’s politics? How has his new Netflix series been received in the Trump era?

Miriam Kent is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of East Anglia.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-heroic-mass-shooter-the-politics-of-netflixs-the-punisher-tickets-57878147096