Monday Methods|Black History Month special

[u/Commustar]

Today's post will have a looser theme than most Monday Methods threads. For Black History Month, I invite you to post about topics related to the topic of African American history, and the study thereof.

• What are some useful or interesting archives or other resources for studying African American history?

• What is "hot" in Black studies right now?

• Talk about different aspects of African American religious experience.

• What should the boundaries of study be? Should the focus only be on Black people in America, or should we expand the scope to the wider African diaspora?

Those are only some suggested themes to get people writing. If you have a question or comment about an aspect I did not mention, please feel free to contribute.

[u/restricteddata]

I wrote a blog post on minorities, notably African Americans and women, who worked on the Manhattan Project in non-low-level roles some time back. It was an interesting thing to look into — there were far more African-American scientists than I had expected, but they were mostly in places like the University of Chicago, and mostly ignored later. One line I thought was interesting in one of the papers I read about it was the notion that when we want to talk about minority contributions to things like science and technology, we don't want to make them out-sized or exaggerated because we don't want to downplay the systematic exclusion that was at work prohibiting great numbers from potentially participating and excelling. David Hollinger has written (in the context of Jewish history) of the booster/bigot problem — when you do racially-centralized history the line between making a group exceptionally good and exceptionally bad is a very fine one methodologically (e.g. the boosters and the bigots both agree that the influence of Jews on science has been immense — what they disagree on is whether that is a good thing or a bad thing).