Keys to the past and the future of a community descended from enslaved Africans lie in a river bottom on Alabama's Gulf Coast, where the remains of the last known U.S. slave ship rest a few miles from what's left of the village built by newly freed people after the Civil War.

Work performed this month will help answer a question residents of the area called Africatown USA are anxious to resolve: Can remnants of the slave ship Clotilda be retrieved from the water to both fill out details about their heritage and to serve as an attraction that might revitalize the place their ancestors built after emancipation?

A crew hired by the Alabama Historical Commission, working over 10 days ending Thursday, took fallen trees off the submerged remains of the ship, scooped muck out of the hull and retrieved displaced pieces to see what's left of the Clotilda, which is described as the most intact slave ship ever found. The work will help determine what, if anything, can be done with the wreckage in years ahead.

Some want a museum featuring the actual Clotilda, which was hired by a rich, white steamship captain on a bet to violate the U.S. ban on slave importation the year before the Confederacy was founded to preserve slavery and white supremacy in the South.

"The question is, give me a timetable. What's the date for getting that boat out of that doggone water?" Africatown resident and activist Joe Womack asked team members during a public forum as work began. Nearby, a new "heritage house" that could display artifacts is under construction.

You can read more in an article published in the CBS News web site at:  https://cbsn.ws/3FOaZpW.

A new statewide initiative of the Texas Oral History Association (TOHA) and the Baylor University Institute for Oral History (BUIOH) seeks to create a publicly-accessible listing of all known oral history collections in Texas thanks to a new project called the Texas Oral History Locator Database, or TOLD.

Tens of thousands of interviews on various historical topics are currently scattered across the State of Texas, but just where they can be found and what content they possess largely remain a mystery to all but the most diligent of researchers. The goal of the TOLD project is to identify as many of these collections as possible and to provide a free searchable platform on which to discover them. Collection holders interested in participating can fill out a brief survey at www.baylor.edu/toha/told.

You can read more about this initiative at: https://www.baylor.edu/library/news.php?action=story&story=228860.

Morocco’s Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Communication is set to digitize 200 public libraries across the country. The project aims to provide Moroccans with online access to libraries' contents.

The ministry announced in a facebook post that the book directorate has recently created digital spaces within the libraries under the ministry, with an aim to digitize their services.

The project is part of the digitization process carried out by the various ministerial departments.

The list of libraries can be found on the ministry's website.

You can read more at: https://bit.ly/3LbuIRc.

From Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media
Published on 11 May 2022
Last updated on 11 May 2022

Dublin Port Company is supporting the State’s effort to recover from the Four Courts fire of 1922 by funding the conservation of 200-year-old records concerning Dublin Port.

On 30 June 1922, the Public Record Office of Ireland at the Four Courts was destroyed in the opening engagement of the Civil War. In the aftermath of the fire of 1922, over 25,000 sheets of paper and parchment were retrieved from the rubble. These records, which date from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, are known as the ‘1922 Salved Records’. They are now held at the National Archives.

Most of this collection remained unopened until the last 5 years. As the successor of the Public Record Office of Ireland, the National Archives is a Core Partner in the Beyond 2022 project—an all-island and international research programme hosted at Trinity College Dublin and funded by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under Project Ireland 2040. The project is working to reconstruct what was lost in 1922.

During a recent investigation of unopened parcels of salved records through the Beyond 2022 project, archivists identified 5 parcels of significance to the history of Dublin Port.

Now, with generous support from Dublin Port Company, these records are being restored by the conservation team at the National Archives of Ireland. The conservation work is being undertaken by the Beyond 2022 Project Conservator, Jessica Baldwin, under the guidance of Zoë Reid, Keeper, Public Services and Collection. The documents all show some evidence of damage from the heat of the flames, as well as damp and rain from exposure to the weather following the fire. Despite the damage, conservation will mean that documents not seen for 100 years can soon be consulted again by historians and the public.

The thousands of sheets of paper are historically significant both as survivors of the destruction of 1922, and as fresh evidence for the historical development of Dublin Port. These papers create an incredible snapshot of the bustling life of the busy port with hundreds of people from around the country, from ports in Killybegs, Strangford and Youghal coming to collect salaries, pensions and trade in goods. They contain details on salaries and compensations, and many names of inspectors and collectors of customs taxes. They provide accounts about wine, bounties on beef and pork, allowances on silk, detail repayments of taxes on fish, ash, salt, and linen. For example, over 50 documents relating to the Bounty Payments for Fish in the summer of 1817 give a fascinating insight, as they include information on the ship, listing crew members and detailing the size and type of catch. These are important details of trade and commerce in Dublin Port that do not exist elsewhere.

Following the conservation, the documents dating from 1817–1818 will be available for research and suitable for digitisation.

Speaking about the partnership, Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin, said:

“This partnership between Beyond 2022, the National Archives and Dublin Port is an important and significant one. The process of saving the recovered records from the fire at the Public Record Office in June 1922 is a flagship project under the government’s Decade of Centenaries Programme led by my department's Commemorations Unit.

“The care that staff in the Public Record Office demonstrated over 100 years ago in their mission to save as many records as possible is now being continued by a highly skilled and committed team of archivists and conservators working together to uncover and reveal a snapshot of what life looked like at Dublin Port in 1922.”

Eamonn O’Reilly, Chief Executive, Dublin Port, said:

“Our own rich archive is an important and actively used resource which we routinely rely on to tell the story of Dublin Port. We are delighted now to be able to add to the additional archive materials related to Dublin Port which the National Archives holds by supporting the conservation of records recovered after the burning of the Four Courts a century ago.”

Orlaith McBride, Director of the National Archives, said:

“The conservation of these records represents a significant contribution to the State’s key legacy project from the Decade of Centenaries. The National Archives as successor institution to Public Record Office has held these records, salvaged from the fire in 1922, in its care for almost 100 years and has now begun the process of conservation. This support from Dublin Port is invaluable in terms of allowing us to progress this work.”

Dr Peter Crooks, Trinity College Dublin and Academic Director of the Beyond 2022 project, said:

“As each page of these fascinating archives is restored, another page of Irish history is returned to the public record. These documents provide a fascinating insight into everyday life 200 years ago - not only in Dublin, with its extensive trading network, but also across Ireland at large.”

The following is a press release issued by the U.S. Interior Department:

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — A first-of-its-kind federal study of Native American boarding schools that for over a century sought to assimilate Indigenous children into white society has identified more than 400 such schools that were supported by the U.S. government and more than 50 associated burial sites, a figure that could grow exponentially as research continues.

The report released Wednesday by the Interior Department expands the number of schools that were known to have operated for 150 years, starting in the early 19th century and coinciding with the removal of many tribes from their ancestral lands.

The dark history of the boarding schools — where children who were taken from their families were prohibited from speaking their Native American languages and often abused — has been felt deeply across Indian Country and through generations.

Many children never returned home. The investigation has so far turned up over 500 deaths at 19 schools, though the Interior Department said that number could climb to the thousands or even tens of thousands.

“Many of those children were buried in unmarked or poorly maintained burial sites far from their Indian Tribes, Alaska Native Villages, the Native Hawaiian Community, and families, often hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away,” the report said.

A second volume of the report will cover the burial sites as well as the federal government’s financial investment in the schools and the impacts of the boarding schools on Indigenous communities, the Interior Department said.

“The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies — including the intergenerational trauma caused by the family separation and cultural eradication inflicted upon generations of children as young as 4 years old — are heartbreaking and undeniable,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.

Haaland, who is Laguna, announced an initiative last June to investigate the troubled legacy of boarding schools and uncover the truth about the government’s role in them. The 408 schools her agency identified operated in 37 states or territories, many of them in Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico.

The Interior Department acknowledged the number of schools identified could change as more data is gathered. The coronavirus pandemic and budget restrictions hindered some of the research over the last year, said Bryan Newland, the Interior Department's assistant secretary for Indian Affairs.

The department has so far found at least 53 burial sites at or near the U.S. boarding schools, both marked and unmarked.

The U.S. government directly ran some of the boarding schools. Catholic, Protestant and other churches operated others with federal funding, backed by U.S. laws and policies to “civilize” Native Americans.

The Interior Department report was prompted by the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential school sites in Canada that brought back painful memories for Indigenous communities.

Haaland also announced Wednesday a yearlong tour for Interior Department officials that will allow former boarding school students from Native American tribes, Alaska Native villages and Native Hawaiian communities to share their stories as part of a permanent oral history collection.

“It is my priority to not only give voice to the survivors and descendants of federal Indian boarding school policies, but also to address the lasting legacies of these policies so Indigenous Peoples can continue to grow and heal,” she said.

Boarding school conditions varied across the U.S. and Canada. While some former students have reported positive experiences, children at the schools often were subjected to military-style discipline and had their long hair cut.

Early curricula focused heavily on outdated vocational skills, including homemaking for girls.

Tribal leaders have pressed the agency to ensure that any children’s remains that are found are properly cared for and delivered back to their tribes, if desired. The burial sites' locations will not be released publicly to prevent them from being disturbed, Newland said.

Accounting for the whereabouts of children who died has been difficult because records weren’t always kept. Ground penetrating radar has been used in some places to search for remains.

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which created an early inventory of the schools, has said Interior’s work will be an important step for the U.S. in reckoning with its role in the schools but noted that the agency’s authority is limited.

Later this week, a U.S. House subcommittee will hear testimony on a bill to create a truth and healing commission modeled after one in Canada. Several church groups are backing the legislation.

Here is an interesting recent twist to use of public DNA databases by New York law enforcement agencies: such a policy will put some people under greater scrutiny by law enforcement simply because they are related to a person who has been convicted of a crime.

Dave Pollock, a staff attorney for the DNA Unit at the Legal Aid Society of New York, which represented the plaintiffs, said familial searches unfairly target people of color.

You can read more at: https://bit.ly/3wl5fPZ.

Over the last few decades an increasing amount of our lives has been moved online. With the advent of social media and cloud storage, things that were once analog or physical have become digital. In most ways, this is terrific: we can share and communicate effortlessly, creation has become simpler and more powerful, and we can represent ourselves with a few mouse clicks or taps of our finger. The days of mailing out paper resumes on fancy paper are long gone, for example—nowadays we spend our time building awesome LinkedIn profiles and portfolio web sites.

But as more and more of our lives winds up online, the question of what will happen to it all when we move on from the earthly realm begins to loom. This goes beyond asking your buddy to delete your porn stash when you die unexpectedly—your digital legacy includes just about every aspect of your life these days, from the photos you have on your phone that you never get around to naming and organizing to the social media followings you worked hard to build (and possibly monetize). Some of us put so much effort into our Facebook pages they remain powerful monuments to our lives, complete with photos, correspondence, and major events, and you might want your kids or grandkids to have access to the record of your life, the same way you have an ancestor’s photo albums or journals. There’s also the question of the stuff you paid for—from music files to digital movies to cryptocurrency. Who controls those when you’re gone?

One thing is for sure: We’re all going to die someday, and that means we’re going to leave behind a mountain of digital files and online accounts. Spending a little bit of time planning what happens to all of that will spare your loved ones (and your lawyers) a lot of trouble

You can read more in an article by Jeff Somers and published in the Lifehacker.com web site at: https://bit.ly/3N2UQze.

Given how it’s often discussed and described, particularly in the more brazen and annoying ads for puzzle-based app games, you’d be forgiven for assuming that intelligence is something well understood and easily measured, like your weight or height.

The truth is far more complicated, confusing, and even controversial. For one, while the dictionary definitions are fairly straightforward, describing intelligence as, for example, ‘the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills’, the scientific consensus on what intelligence actually is, regarding how it should be defined and assessed, is still disputed.

You can read more in an article by Dean Burnett and published in the BBC Science Focus magazine at: https://bit.ly/3Nbh4PH.

The following announcement was written by the Allen County Public Library:

EVENT SCHEDULES

Due to ongoing precautions during the COVID-19 Pandemic, events may be subject to changes, attendance restrictions, or cancellations. Please check with the event host and or venue for any events you are planning to attend.