Unpacking 1619 - A Heights Libraries Podcast Heights Libraries

Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens discusses her book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology, which traces the origins of American reproductive health to slave hospitals. As white doctors expanded their practices onto plantations, quickly pregnancy and birth became the focus of their practices. Dr. James Marion Sims with other nineteenth-century gynecologists performed […]

Professor Robin Bernstein discusses her book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison For Profit. Auburn Prison in Upstate New York was designed to be a factory prison, incorporating the area’s major industry into its walls. Through harsh conditions, solitary and silent confinement, and constant violence, the inmates’ lives were desolate ones of […]

Professor Jocelyn Simonson talks about her book, Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration. Beginning with a close look at the ideological meaning behind calling the prosecution, “The People,” Prof. Simonson points out how the criminal justice systems defines “community.” By looking at several ways activists and volunteers engage in organized […]

Antonia Hylton discusses her book, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Ms. Hylton’s extensive research into Crownsville Hospital in Maryland, a segregated asylum that was both hospital and prison, serves as physical example of racist systems and black resistance. Tracing the history of Crownsville was difficult since so many of the official […]

Professor Stephen Kenny discusses his article, “A Dictate of Both Interest and Mercy”: Slave Hospitals in the Antebellum South.” Beginning on the shores of West Africa, White doctors began to systematize racialized medicine in the service of slavery. Establishing institutions of idealized models of slave care, the story of slave hospitals became a self-serving lie […]

Professor Sang Kil talks about how “all lives matter” (ALM) has advanced Whiteness in the news. Using critical race theory’s critique of neoliberalism’s use of race-neutral racism, Professor Kil, discusses how “All Lives Matter” works to undermine the civil rights meaning of Black Lives Matter by denying its central critique. Blue Lives Matter, an offshoot […]