Seeing Red: Liberalism, Communism, and the Black Struggle for Human Rights

Carol Anderson , Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 . New York : Cambridge University Press , 2003 . 290 pp.     

Water for the City,Ruins for the Country: Archaeology of the New York City Watershed

Two New York City institutions, the Board of Water Supply (BWS) and Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), have shaped rural regions far outside city boundaries. The BWS depopulated places selected for reservoir construction. Residents were evicted and towns were demolished then submerged. Those who remained struggled to reorganize their lives amid the landscape clearance. Once the reservoirs were complete, the DEP replaced the BWS as the institution in charge of ensuring the city’s water supply. The DEP Police patrols around the reservoirs and enforces land-use regulations. Archaeological survey of city-owned watershed lands reveals a scarred landscape of ongoing colonial conflict.     

Archaeology, the Activist Community, and the Redistribution of Power in New York City

Two New York City projects, one world renown, the other struggling for recognition, exemplify the various ways in which the public defines its engagement with its archaeological past. At African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan and at Duffield Street in Brooklyn, the public battled with local, state, and federal entities in an effort to preserve the resources. As different as the sites are in context, scope and circumstances, public reactions and activism bind them together.     

Reconstructing the massacre at Fort William Henry,New York

Fort William Henry, in upstate New York, was the site of a legendary siege and massacre in 1757 during the French and Indian War. As part of the terms of surrender, the British garrison was to retreat with all their arms and possessions, thus denying the Indian allies of the French their spoils of war. Contemporaneous and fictionalized accounts of the resulting massacre have often been regarded as exaggerations of actual events. Five men buried in a mass grave within the fort, known as the crypt, however, were clearly victims of the massacre. These men were among the sick and wounded who were unable to make the 15 mile (24 km) journey to Fort Edward and were left in the care of the French. Four of the five men sustained pre-mortem leg trauma that would have resulted in their hospitalization and prevented them from walking. The other massive perimortem trauma on these remains vividly depicts the results of the massacre. Three of the five men were shot in the knee; two of these three were shot elsewhere as well. One man was decapitated. Both the front and back of all the bodies bear cut marks, probably from the use of both axes and long-bladed knives as weapons. The numerous gashes in the thoracic and pelvic regions indicate the men were mutilated. Our analysis of the remains from this mass grave confirms and enhances the historical accounts of the massacre at Fort William Henry. The skeletons of these five men provide gruesome testimony of the assault to which they were subjected.     

Washing urban water: diplomacy in environmental art in the Bronx,New York City

Lillian Ball's art project WATERWASH creates a new ecological imaginary in the South Bronx. Building on a tradition of ‘maintenance art’, the work exhibits the power of soil, plants and microorganisms to clean water – in effect maintaining urban water. An overarching goal of WATERWASH is to educate local people about the metabolism of urban water, causes of river pollution, and to familiarize them with the capacity of soil and plants to respond to that problem. As part of its creation, the project provided diverse groups of people with opportunities to participate, including a group of Bronx youth who assisted in planting the wetland. Several of these apprentices will be involved in future monitoring of the effectiveness of the wetland in mitigating parking lot runoff. I use Isabelle Stengers' notion of ‘diplomacy’ to interrogate the efforts of the artist in negotiating and creating an occasion in which people with divergent interests can both recognize and maintain the relationships of care that sustain them. In effect, this effort extends the feminist discourse of maintenance work to include that undertaken by the ‘other-than-human’.