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Nation Topics - Lived History

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Mary Thom

The feminist author and long-time editor of Ms. magazine died tragically in a biking accident.

Bob Edgar

For half a century, Bob walked with the movements for economic and social justice, for peace, and above all for democracy.

The Flatiron Building in 1903, at the end of the last Gilded Age

In the Age of Bloomberg, America’s most iconic big city is also its most unequal.

Hugo Chavez sign

Yes, the Venezuelan president could be a strongman. But he leaves behind what might be called the most democratic country in the Western Hemisphere.

The death of Ronald Dworkin means the loss of the most important advocate in our time – to borrow the title of his last book – of “taking rights seriously.”

Don Shaffer

An original long distance runner, in Michael Harrington's term.

Cuban-born playwright, journalist, and poet Dolores Prida's candid, humored, and often mordant columns about the most pressing social and political issues constituted one of the staples of Latino media.

“Sol had a totally different take on things. Whether it was Marxism, Darwinism, Greek mythology, or Jewish mysticism, he was always interconnecting things at so many different levels.”

Jim Schmidt

Schmidt taught farmworkers about the law, founded the Farmworker Women’s Institute, and started special projects on domestic violence, racial profiling, pesticide education, personal finance, workers’ compensation, and human trafficking.

Ten of the notable individuals we lost in 2012.

Blogs

Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, is dead of a heart attack at the age of 50. Without his extravagant eccentricities and ambiguous, obsessive relationships to race, gender, mortality and childhood (and children)—indeed without the conspicuously tenuous link he had to the category of the human itself—Michael Jackson would have been a B-list has-been.

June 25, 2009

Elizabeth was smart, tough and unafraid of political engagement. Hers was a story that resonated with women across partisan differences.

May 10, 2009

"Clearly the trick in life is to die young as late as possible," wrote Reverend William Sloane Coffin in his last book, Credo. Bill Coffin, as his friends knew him, was one of our greatest and most eloquent prophetic voices.

April 13, 2006

On Monday, March 6, when Anne Braden died, the South lost one of its most dedicated, courageous and feisty fighters for racial justice, civil liberties and economic rights.

I met Anne Braden in the early 1980s when I worked for ABC's "Closeup" unit, one of the last serious documentary divisions at a news network. Our crew spent a week in Louisville, Kentucky, interviewing Anne--and those who had supported, shunned and persecuted her in the 1950s--for The American Inquisition, an hour-long documentary about the impact of the McCarthy era on our nation's politics and society. (It aired in 1983.)

I remember trying to get Anne Braden to tell us about how she came to her radical politics. Some of it was her father, she said. He had been, in Anne's telling--a "committed racist" in a segregationist family. But much of it, as her unusually revealing memoirs The Wall Between explained, came from her work as a newspaper reporter, covering the Birmingham courthouse. That, she told us, "made a radical out of me." As her biographer, Catherine Fosl remembers, Anne explained that seeing "two different systems of justice," where violence against blacks was ignored and violence by blacks was harshly punished, moved her to live a life of radicalism and agitation.

March 12, 2006