Thomas Norman DeWolf

A love of cemeteries

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My whole life I’ve loved cemeteries. Some people find that morbid. I find it fascinating and life-affirming. I’ve been known to pull off the road while driving just to check out a cemetery we encounter. Reading random headstones fires the imagination. I ran across John T. Dana’s headstone in a small cemetery in Massachusetts in [...]

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Excising the “n” word from Huckleberry Finn

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Mark Twain defined a “classic” book as one “which people praise and don’t read.” He should know. How many of you have read Huckleberry Finn? This “classic” has been condemned, banned, or people attempted to ban it, in a variety of locations, and for various reasons, since it was first published in 1885. Back then [...]

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The Hemingses of Monticello

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Comments on the book, The Hemingses of Montecello by Annette Gordon-Reed It turns out that the stories about Thomas Jefferson I learned while growing up don’t exactly tell the whole story. Funny how that happens with “history” sometimes… lots of times. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, was the third president of the United [...]

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On the 50th Anniversary of the Inauguration of President Kennedy “Let the Word Go Forth”

Thumbnail image for On the 50th Anniversary of the Inauguration of President Kennedy “Let the Word Go Forth” by Thomas Norman DeWolf

Fifty years ago, on January 20, 1961, the torch was passed to a new generation when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President of the United States. The address he gave is one of the most inspiring and important speeches of 20th century. The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University has produced [...]

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Scott Sisters to be released from prison

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UPDATE (Jan 1): Gladys Scott calls NY Times columnist Bob Herbert. Read his column about their New Year’s Eve conversation here. “I was happy for the Scott sisters and deeply moved as Gladys spoke of how desperately she wanted to “just hold” her two children and her mother, who live in Florida. But I couldn’t [...]

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So you thought slavery ended in 1865… think again.

Thumbnail image for So you thought slavery ended in 1865… think again. by Thomas Norman DeWolf

              Two years ago a powerful book was published about modern-day slavery: A Crime So Monstrous. It’s a harrowing, eye-opening book. A couple of related stories caught my attention recently. One is about a black family in Mississippi that was enslaved until the 1960′s. That is not a typo; [...]

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Who the heck is John Parker?

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John Parker. Margaret Garner. Robert Smalls. John Rankin. They are not among the most well-known of historic figures yet their impact was profound for those whose lives they touched. I spoke recently at The College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio. Larisa Wright leads the Office of Multicultural Affairs there, which, like similar offices [...]

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The Reporter I trust (and there aren’t many)

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When I was a child television news in our home meant Walter Cronkite. In junior high school history class we watched his “You Are There” series of historical reenactments. There were reasons he was the most trusted man in America; why President Johnson once said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America” and became [...]

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Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome

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Dr. Joy DeGruy (formerly Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary), author of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, is a member of the Bahá’í faith community. Understanding this context breathes deeper meaning into Dr. DeGruy’s work than I would have had without this knowledge. I recently spent a week with a family [...]

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Growing a Global Heart

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“We stood in El Mina slave dungeon, on the Cape Coast of Ghana on a recent trip to West Africa, overwhelmed by despair, grief and rage. Without needing to verbalize it, we were both imagining what reaching this spot must have felt like for some long-ago, un-remembered African ancestor as she stood trembling on the [...]

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