From NPS:
During the 19th and 20th centuries, Black women played an active role in the struggle for universal suffrage. They participated in political meetings and organized political societies. African American women attended political conventions at their local churches where they planned strategies to gain the right to vote. In the late 1800s, more Black women worked for churches, newspapers, secondary schools, and colleges, which gave them a larger platform to promote their ideas.
But in spite of their hard work, many people didn’t listen to them. Black men and white women usually led civil rights organizations and set the agenda. They often excluded Black women from their organizations and activities. For example, the National American Woman Suffrage Association prevented Black women from attending their conventions. Black women often had to march separately from white women in suffrage parades. In addition, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony wrote the History of Woman Suffrage in the 1880s, they featured white suffragists while largely ignoring the contributions of African American suffragists. Though Black women are less well remembered, they played an important role in getting the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments passed. Black women found themselves pulled in two directions. Black men wanted their support in fighting racial discrimination and prejudice, while white women wanted them to help change the inferior status of women in American society. Both groups ignored the unique challenges that African American women faced. Black reformers like Mary Church Terrell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Harriet Tubman understood that both their race and their sex affected their rights and opportunities.
Because of their unique position, Black women tended to focus on human rights and universal suffrage, rather than suffrage solely for African Americans or for women.
More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will honor The Black History Month. This year’s theme is “African Americans and the Vote.” Readers are encouraged to send in their suggestions)
THE ERASURE OF the Palestinians on display this week as President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled a one-sided “
While some details of the mechanisms of splicing remain to be worked out, it’s known that mature, edited mRNAs result from an interplay between multiple factors within and outside the transcript itself. Among these is the spliceosome, the machinery that carries out the splicing. Each splicing event requires three components: the splice donor, a GU nucleotide sequence at one end of the intron; a splice acceptor, an AG nucleotide sequence at the opposite end; and a branch point, an A approximately 20–40 nucleotides away from the splice acceptor. These three “splice sites” are recognized by two core small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs) of the spliceosome, U1 and U2, followed by a protein, U2AF. The binding of these molecules to a transcript recruits a complex of three more snRNAs—U4, U5, and U6—which facilitates the splicing reaction. A variety of factors affect how transcripts from a particular gene are spliced. Exon recognition by the spliceosome can be influenced by RNA binding proteins (RBPs), which bind to enhancer and silencer motifs within the mRNA and help or hinder spliceosome recognition of the splice sites. And because pre-mRNAs are frequently spliced as they’re transcribed, the speed of transcription by RNA polymerase II further tunes the window of opportunity for splice site recognition by the spliceosome.
In this essay, I discuss Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (hereafter From Bacteria) and Godfrey Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus and The Evolution of Intelligent Life (hereafter Other Minds) from a methodological perspective. I show that these both instantiate what I call ‘synthetic philosophy.’ They are both Darwinian philosophers of science who draw on each other’s work (with considerable mutual admiration). In what follows I first elaborate on synthetic philosophy in light of From Bacteria and Other Minds; I also explain my reasons for introducing the term; I look at the function of Darwinism in contemporary synthetic philosophy; and I close by analyzing the sociological challenges to synthetic philosophy.
I’m not just a remainer. I’m a European through and through, and the rats have taken over the ship, I want to tell him. It’s breaking my heart and I want it to break yours. We need your voice to wake us from our sleepwalk, and save us from this wanton act of political and economic self-harm. But you’re too late.
Boasting wingspans of up to 11 feet—the largest of any bird alive today—these feathered goliaths, native to the Southern Ocean and North Pacific, are built to soar. Gliding at speeds that often exceed 50 miles per hour, they can 
At one point in A Very Stable Genius, the conservative lawyer 
On Feb. 3, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting “the federal government and each state from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen’s race, color, or previous condition of servitude” giving Black men the right to vote across the nation. Just under a month later the first African American vote was cast in Perth Amboy, N.J. on March 31, 1870 by Thomas Mundy Peterson. Born in 1824 in Metuchen, N.J., Peterson was the son of ex-slave Lucy Green. Peterson worked as a janitor and handyman in Perth Amboy. After the Fifteenth Amendment was enacted, Peterson participated in Perth Amboy’s local election held at city hall over the city’s charter. A member of the Republican and Prohibition Parties, he cast his ballot in favor of revising the existing charter, making him the first African American to vote in any election in the nation. Along with being the first Black person to vote in America, he was also the first Black person in Perth Amboy to serve on a jury. Peterson would go on to be one of seven people appointed to make amendments to the charter’s revisions he voted in favor of.
Samuel Moyn in The LRB:
As late as the 20th century, grafting a monkey’s testicle on to your scrotum was considered a plausible cure for impotence and general sluggishness. As early as 1139, it was signed into canonical law that impotence was grounds for the annulment of a marriage, so you can see why the try-anything approach persisted, when a person could be unmade by physical failure, publicly ejected from the organising bond of society. Dough has reminded humans of sex, one way or another, pretty much since the cultivation of wheat began; any loaf of bread worth its salt was originally designed to resemble either a penis or a vagina. But much of the significance of food, especially in the early modern period, was not its erotic redolence but its mediating role in the bewitchery of carnal urges. So a wife might increase her husband’s ardency by keeping a live fish in her vagina for two days, then roasting it and feeding it to him. Or she might, conversely, set out to kill him by covering herself in honey and rolling in wheat, before grinding the wheat and turning it into bread, which she then fed to him. But she’d have to remember to mill it in the opposite direction to the sun, whatever that means.
For those who don’t know about America’s involvement in Laos, which at the time U.S. officials called the “
The early years of the American nuclear program were dominated by men in the mold of 
Getting rid of Trump means taking seriously “shit-life syndrome”—and its resulting misery, which includes suicide, drug overdose death, and trauma for surviving communities. My state of Ohio is home to many shit-life syndrome sufferers. In the