History

The Penn Museum contributed objects to a new exhibit at the Barnes Foundation that combines older and contemporary Native artworks. Penn’s Lucy Fowler Williams said she and her fellow curator “sought out artists whose work is really substantively engaging with the community and with the historical traditions.”

Taylor Dysart, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Arts & Sciences, wrote an opinion piece about the legacy of settler colonialism and white supremacy in Canada. “Canada’s history of freedom then, was founded in the unfreedom of Indigenous people,” she said. “This dynamic has been unnoticed and misconstrued by organizers, attendees, and supporters of the Freedom Convoy.”

Kermit Roosevelt III of the Law School wrote about Martin Luther King Jr.’s lesser-known speech, “The Negro and he Constitution,” which argued that “American values” were more shaped by the ratification of the 14th Amendment than by the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “The values we must carry forward are not those of Thomas Jefferson and the Framers of the Constitution; they are the values of Abraham Lincoln and the Reconstruction Congress,” wrote Roosevelt.

Kermit Roosevelt of the Law School said the Reconstruction Acts that followed the Civil War marked a rebirth of the United States. “A small number of brave men and women risked their lives to fight for the rights we now hold dear — not Revolutionaries fighting the British in 1776, but Black Americans fighting Confederates in 1863,” he wrote. “That is the moment a nation dedicated to equality was conceived.”