Interesting Links for 29-06-2018

[andrewducker]

Yup, Sometimes Your Favorite Children's Books are Racist

(tags: racism children books )

It is mistaken to see sexting as simply harmful

(tags: sex society )

They drained a canal in Amsterdam and put everything they found online

(tags: archaeology canal netherlands viaSarah )

How to cope with a relentlessly awful news cycle

(tags: news advice mentalhealth )

Judging formidability from human vocalizations

(tags: humans voice )

Japan's 'Naked Hermit' Pried from Island Utopia After 29 Years

(tags: japan )

The man in charge of policing during the Hillsborough disaster can face trial for the manslaughter by gross negligence of 95 football fans

(tags: football death law uk )

How transgender people are treated in prison

(tags: transgender lgbt prison )

Comments

[calimac]

What bothers me about taking Ingalls Wilder's name off the award is not that this would erase her from history (the writer says it wouldn't, but seems to conclude by saying we should erase Betty Friedan from history), but that it took 66 years from the time the problem with the book was first pointed out for anyone to notice this.

[cmcmck]

I wish people wishing to police the reading of books would understand something very simple- that was then and this is now.

Give people some credit for being able to know the difference why don't they?

When do we start burning them?

Sigh :o(

[andrewducker]

Who is policing the reading of books?

And who is saying that then is not now?

[cmcmck]

A lot of a certain sort of literati in the US- the kind of people who think bowdlerising older literature is an okay thing.

[andrewducker]

But who specifically is saying that in one of my links?

[cmcmck]

No in one of your links, but I'm seeing just so much of that sort of thinking generally and as a historian I just wish people would recall a well worn phrase: 'The past is a foreign country- they do things differently there'.

[calimac]

There have been attempts at eliminating questionable racial comments from reissued editions of children's literature. Mary Poppins and Dr. Doolittle are both documented instances of this.

1) Remembering that the past had different values; 2) Deciding which pieces of the past we wish to keep current in today's culture; 3) Deciding to actively honor the authors;

Those are three different things. A change in one shouldn't imply a change in any of the others.