Good Tuesday morning!
A number of Senate committees will hold confirmation hearings today for several of President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet picks.
Janet Yellen, Avril Haines and Alejandro Mayorkas will testify in front of Senate committees this morning, while Tony Blinken and Lloyd Austin are scheduled to appear before the Foreign Relations and the Armed Services Committees, respectively, this afternoon. More below.
A report in
Politico indicates that Biden’s transition team is alarmed about the number of Trump appointees “burrowing into career positions throughout the federal government.”
Biden has selected Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine to be assistant secretary of health. If approved, Levine would be the first openly transgender official confirmed by the Senate.
How Igbo women used petitions to influence British authorities during colonial rule
By Bright Alozie Listen to article
Selected petitions and written correspondence between Igbo women and British officials between 1892 and 1960 shed fresh light on how women navigated male-dominated colonial institutions and structures of the time.
African women acted in varied and complex ways to the situations they found themselves in. This ranged from subtle to overt opposition, and sometimes violent resistance.
One response was through petition writing as women took to the pen to articulate their concerns. In my research , I examined several petitions written by Igbo women to British officials during the colonial period. I found that petition writing was part of the complex power politics between the women and the colonial state.
Rare soldier s diary reveals secret massacre of Indigenous Tasmanians after almost 200 years
SunSunday 27
updated
MonMonday 28
DecDecember 2020 at 2:29am
McNally s diary is the only account by an ordinary soldier of life in the penal colonies, says Professor Sharpe.
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A soldier s diary disintegrating in Ireland s national library has revealed disturbing evidence of an undocumented massacre of Aboriginal people in Tasmania in the colony s early years.
The diary belonged to Private Robert McNally, posted to Van Diemen s Land in the 1820s, and records in gritty detail colonial life and encounters with settlers and a notorious bushranger.
But it s his account of his part in the cover up a massacre of men and women on March 21, 1827, near Campbell Town in the Northern Midlands, that stunned University of Tasmania history professor Pam Sharpe.
A young girl s grisly murder in 1937 shocked the world and made headlines around the globe. But as Beijing teetered on the edge of war with Japan, her death - and the search for her killer - were soon forgotten. The author Paul French stumbled upon an unlabeled box of dusty yellow paged files at the British National Archives. The documents inspired him to write his novel
Midnight in Peking that became an instant bestseller.
“Murder and Mulled Wine” is a portrait of a young girl, Pamela Werner, and her Beijing. A collection of historical photographs and antique maps will open a window to the city that she knew. Using three original maps from the 1930s we will retrace her steps presenting places like the Fox Tower, the French ice skating ring, Hotel Des Wagons Lits and the notorious badlands.