Notices by Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco (deglassco@mastodon.social)

In August 1863, Frederick Douglass stopped recruiting Black soldiers. He forced the Union to confront its contradictions: unequal pay, denied rank…violence against Black troops. He walked into the WH, challenged Abraham Lincoln directly, and left unconvinced by policy but clear about power. He resumed speaking not because justice had been secured, but because pressure, not faith, is what moves a nation forward.
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Image: Recruiting broadside endorsed by Douglass (Gilder Lehrman).
#history

The U.S. economy is sinking. 65 percent disapproval rate. ICE is falling. Inflation is high. Health care in danger for millions. The Epstein files. Wall Street is tanking. Foreign leaders mocking him.

History shows that he will get more desperate.

To understand the modern American state, you have to look at what it learned to do at night. In the slave South, violence didn’t arrive as spectacle. It arrived on schedule. Names checked. Horses assigned. Lanterns lit. By law, patrols could stop, search, whip, detain—without warrant or cause. Suspicion was enough. This wasn’t chaos. It was governance.

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Image: 1823 illustration by Johann Moritz Rugendas. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Capitao-mato.jpg

What makes this moment distinctive is not the violence, but the audience encountering it. When white Americans describe this behavior as “what dictatorships do,” they are not wrong but they are late in recognition. America has long depended on techniques commonly associated with authoritarian regimes, while insulating much of white America from their routine application. That insulation is now thinning. The shock is real. The surprise is telling. But neither is unprecedented.

#ice #history

Silverio Villegas González…unarmed but shot in the neck … murdered by ICE 5 months ago in Chicago at a traffic stop after dropping his children off at school.

A man is dead and his family is forever changed.

He was a human being.

#ICE

Others receive detail. Africa receives blur. Russia is parsed. Asia subdivides. The Americas fracture easily. Only Africa remains whole—in speech and thought. 54 nations characterized not by nature, but by habit. A grammar learned under empire, kept after it left.

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Image; "Rider” by Pierre Cloete (Khoi).

The singular came through administration. Borders were drawn. Kingdoms split. Maps flattened complexity into paperwork. Knowledge followed power: history gave way to classification. Africa became “manageable” once it could be spoken of as one place.

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Image: Map showing the colonization of Africa by European countries in the early 1900s. Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Timeline-of-the-European-Colonization-of-Africa#/media/1/2271296/281547

Intellectual Map

https://youtu.be/0MMifQvuN08?si=0D7T8vFBpZz60wJ8
Video: Bill Gates referring to Africa as a country. Source: Financial Times.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912. New York: Random House, 1991.

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@wesdym Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I meant is that throughout the video—starting around the 43-second mark—Bill Gates repeatedly refers to “Africa” as a single unit, a kind of homogenous mass. When he talks about poverty and population growth, he doesn’t specify countries, regions, or communities; it’s just “Africa” as a problem space.

They were many. Not just rulers, but households, elders, children—lives lived inside systems of memory, labor, belief, and power that did not require a single name. So, to say “Africa is a country” is not a cartographic error. It is the residue of training—what remains after empire leaves but its grammar stays.

Africa moved as many worlds. It still does.

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#history #blackmastodon

Image: Map of the ethnic diversity of Africa, overlaid with country borders. Source: National Geographic.

Long before Europe’s maps, Africa governed itself in plural. Nile states taxed grain and time. Nubia ruled Egypt. Ethiopia traded with Rome and India. Mali controlled gold routes; Timbuktu kept archives. Power moved through institutions, not absence.

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Image: al-Idrīsī's 1154 map of the northern part of the continent —rivered, city-dense, sophisticated trade routes---a connected space, not container. No modern nation-states. No colonial color blocks. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Al-Idrisi%27s_world_map_Rotated_180_degrees.JPG

The myth of “shared suffering” in Vicksburg turned history into faith—and faith into amnesia---for although the first war ended in 1865; the second one still shapes how Southerners see suffering, loss, freedom, sacrifice—and the redemptive struggle for truth.
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Image: Confederate General Lloyd Tilghman dies with flair. Monument at Vicksburg National Military Park, Vicksburg, MS. Source: RoadsideAmerica.
#history #Histodons #CivilWar #Mississippi #BlackMastodon #Photography #BlackAndWhite

The myth of “shared suffering” became a Southern gospel—the Lost Cause rewritten for classrooms. In Vicksburg, it carried weight. The city starved for 47 days in 1863, fell on July 4th, and didn’t celebrate the day again for nearly a century.
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Image: Slave wedding at Hurricane Plantation. Photograph from the J. Mack Moore Collection, Old Court House Museum, Vicksburg, MS.

The message was clear: slavery had been unfortunate, yes—but affectionate, orderly, even mutual. That was the catechism. What they learned was not history. It was amnesia.
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Image: Siege of Vicksburg - Assault on Fort Hill, fighting between Union and Confederate forces on June 25th, 1863, at the 3rd Louisiana Redan, known as Fort Hill during the siege of Vicksburg. Artist: Thure de Thulstrup.

Children there learned the story of the siege of Vicksburg—not as war or liberation, but as faith. They were told that even the enslaved prayed for their masters’ deliverance. It wasn’t rumor, but “heritage.”
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Image: Enslaved people standing outside Hurricane Garden Cottage at Davis Bend, Joseph Davis' plantation. Photograph from the J. Mack Moore Collection, Old Court House Museum, Vicksburg, MS.

In the schools of Vicksburg Mississippi for much of the last century, history hung like scripture. Chalk dust on the window sills, the clank of radiators, and a portrait of Robert E. Lee gazing nobly ahead. Beneath him: “The South Shall Rise Again.” In that room, history wasn’t studied. It was staged.
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Image: Memorial markers overlooking the siege battlefield toward the Mississippi River. Vicksburg Mississippi.

Black children knew better. They could feel the falseness of it, the pressure in the air before a storm. To contradict the myth was rebellion. So they passed the tests, nodded through the pageants, and carried the truth in silence.
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Image:
A segregated classroom at Boykin Elementary School in Wilcox County, Alabama, in 1966. Source: Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Stanford University Library.

In this retelling, the enslaved appeared only as loyal shadows—grateful, obedient, pious. If they prayed for their masters, slavery couldn’t be evil. The war, then, was not about bondage but a beloved home. To question it was heresy.
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Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Memorial – Arlington, Virginia. Removed in 2017.

White Vicksburg remembered defeat not as the fall of a slaveholding citadel but as purification. The siege became sanctification. Suffering became virtue. Defeat became proof of grace.
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Image: Exterior of the Vicksburg home of Joseph Davis, brother of Jefferson Davis, who gave his last public address on this balcony. Source: TripAdvisor

American democracy keeps facing the same test. Reconstruction. Watergate. January 6th. Each was an inkblot: some saw freedom and law, others tyranny and betrayal.

The danger isn’t just the crisis—it’s perception unmoored from fact. A lie, repeated often enough, creates its own inkblot. Not to reveal the viewer. But to control them.

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#history #blackmastodon #histodons #blackandwhite #photo #photography #politics #democracy #fascism #civilwar