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History professors pen new booksA strong woman dedicated to social reform, children who grew up in bondage, and the effect of environmental poisoning on democracy in postwar Japan are subjects of three books by history professors at the University of Rhode Island. Social Reform. Sharon Hartman Strom, professor of history and women's studies and graduate director of URI's History Department, first learned of Florence Luscomb from a friend who lived near Luscomb in Cambridge, Mass. Strom, who was in her second year of teaching at URI in 1971, invited the 84-year-old ardent suffragist to speak to a class. Luscomb, energetic, witty, and engaging, spoke of her life experiences including organizing CIO office workers' unions, protesting against fascism, McCarthyism and Vietnam and her unsuccessful bid for Congress. Strom, whose own activism was ignited during the civil rights movement, discovered in the woman a kind of maternal political guide. A friendship was born. The result is Strom's book Political Woman, Florence Luscomb and the Legacy of Radical Reform (Temple University Press). Using Luscomb's lifelong commitment to activism and women's rights-- sparked at age 5 when she heard Susan B. Anthony speak -- Strom deftly explores those important connections and more. Childhood Slavery. When URI historian Marie Jenkins Schwartz learned that one half of the slaves in the antebellum south (from 1820 to 1860) were under the age of 16, and a third were under 10-years-old, she wondered: "How did the children survive?" After researching the question, Schwartz wrote Born in Bondage, Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Harvard University Press). Congress ended the slave trade in 1808, therefore the only "new" slaves were those born in bondage. That placed slave children in a complex position, says Schwartz. They were of particular economic interest to slave owners who wanted them to be loyal, productive, and obedient workers. The children's parents, on the other hand, wanted their children to be loyal to the enslaved community. Particularly rich sources for the book were the published interviews of thousands of former slaves during the 1930s. The interviews were part of the federal Work's Progress Administration (WPA) initiative. Mercury poisoning in Japan. Minamata is a word, like Vietnam or Pearl Harbor, that has become much more than a location. The manmade environmental and human tragedy that unfolded there symbolizes both the dark side of high growth and the flowering of Japan's citizens' movement. In 1956 Chisso, a company on the island of Kyushu, used mercury in the process of creating plastic products. Discharged into Minamata Bay, the mercury was ingested by fish that were later eaten by area residents who then became ill. In 1959, Chisso discovered it was responsible. In his book, Minamata, Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (Harvard University Press), Timothy George, assistant professor of history, describes the first two of three rounds of responses for redress by the thousands of victims of the mercury poisoning. George says that by 1968, Minamata became a national issue, largely because of the grassroots effort and media exposure. More than an Erin Brockovich story, George says it is a story of collusion and confusion at all levels of government that illustrates that post-war democracy in Japan is ad hoc, and is redefined every time a new issue comes up. By Jan Wenzel |
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