For Black History Month 2021, I’ve curated a YouTube playlist and additional study resources that have been helping to fill gaps left in my public school history education.
Every video in it is associated with longer documentaries, films, podcasts, and/or books and audiobooks, as well as museums. The last video featuring Stanford Psychology Professor, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt talks about what needs to be done to slow automatic bias within the brain.
Roughly organized along a historical timeline, the video collection includes the following topics; cotton and sugar industries, the New York Times 1619 project, early free Black communities, slavery, Reconstruction, The Lost Cause, lynching, policing, Civil Rights, Confederate statue removal, historic figures, and contemporary work on caste, racism, and implicit bias.
Make It Right (MIR) Project was a multimedia campaign from 2018 to 2020 dedicated to educating the public and strengthening the media capacity of the national movement to remove and replace Confederate monuments and memorials.
In order to authentically write about a railroad worker camp cook, I had to cook and eat like one.
Below are links to resources I’ve experimented with to get the feel and flavors just right for the railroad camps.
click the image to link to the recipe
*click image for book link* This book was written by a descendent of a Chinese railroad worker. It includes family stories that were passed down through the generations.
For me, beginning a lengthy writing project takes determination and vision. Not a ‘vision’ synonymous with a goal, but a picture, a face, and a setting. It is the first step in getting acquainted with a character I’ll be living with for a long time.
John William Waterhouse, an English oil painter – dead over one-hundred years – served up the face of Martina, a Chilean prostitute, a character in Haylee and the Traveler’s Stone.
“Mr. Waterhouse adds to his designs a certain mystic suggestion—a touch of that sad wonderment which troubles the deep thinker.” (The Art Journal, 1896)
That beguiling, haunting face along with Waterhouse’s rich clothing textures, set among nature, lovers, and water provides the tone and feeling that I wanted to convey with the Haylee stories.
His model, with the face that appears a significant number of the 200 paintings he produced during his life, must have been someone close, a next door neighbor or a niece?
“Waterhouse’s paintings are famous for the feminine beauty depicted in them. His genre of female beauty became known as ‘The Waterhouse Girl’. The identity of Waterhouse’s models range from family members and friends, to professional artists’ models. Some of the young female models would later become famous in their own right as renowned stage actresses and movie stars.” – www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.com
“John William Waterhouse (1849 – 1917) was an English painter. He was enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art.” – Wikipedia.org
“Most of Waterhouse’s work is based in Ancient or Medieval myth and legend. Such stories feature the strong female beauties and tragic love stories which Waterhouse was seemingly fascinated by.” – Artable.com
The character, Martina, developed from the Waterhouse face turned out to be a strong and determined young woman. She experienced tragedy, but she also knew love. Her struggle to protect her lover and right her wrongs echo the story arch of the main character, Haylee.
