https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/scientology-psychiatry/

A discussion of how Scientology got roped into the anti-psychiatry movement of the 70s and lead up to the existence of Psychiatry: An Industry of Death museum as part of the Citizens Commission of Human Rights International.

The first biblical concordance was completed in 1247.

When was the first biblical concordance completed? :: 1247 (anorak)

While there are ancient compilations by writers including Pliny, Diogenes Laertius, and Stobaeus, many authors in the Renaissance credited Aulus Gellius as the founder of the genre.

Leaf numbering was seen in the Middle Ages, but printing in the Renaissance greatly increased the number of books with page numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Cade%27s_Rebellion

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-history-gets-things-wrong

How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories by Alex Rosenberg

Collective memory is our history.

Something interesting here tying collective memory to education. Dig into this and expand on it.

http://hackeducation.com/2022/01/30/bell

Audrey Watters starts out a piece on the history of school bells with just the sort of falsehood that she's probably aiming to debunk. Perhaps she would have been better off with George Lakoff's truth sandwich model as starting off with the false story is too often has the opposite effect and leads readers down the road to inculcating the idea further into the culture.

She doesn't reveal the falsehood until the end of the third graph at which time one's brain has been stewing in falsehood for far too long.

Found on pg. 144 of this document: http://publikationen.badw.de/de/002334747

Also, noted in this annotation: https://hypothes.is/a/7p6ymq4VEeypdGs_FAN43w

George is asking a good question here and one I've even asked myself, but doesn't seem to have spent any time looking at intellectual history.

Almost all great thinkers were not only significant writers as well, but most, at least in Western culture, kept significant notes of their work, had a commonplace book(s), waste books, sudelbücher, zettelkasten, etc.

Of course most were also fairly wealthy and had the free time to be able to do their work which also helped to tip the balance in their favor.

Sönke Ahrens used Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's description of experimental work as a form of material deconstruction as a framework for looking at Niklas Luhmann.

Wrong COVID - Timeline. (n.d.). Retrieved 23 March 2022, from https://time.graphics/line/455000

Humanity for all human As seen on: Free Ads Groups sidebar

What if sanctions catastrophically succeed?

Hierarchical systems of knowledge in Indigenous cultures helps to ensure rigor, competency, and most importantly accuracy of knowledge passed down from generation to generation.

In Warlpiri, the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west associatively correspond with the ideas of "Law", "ceremony", "skin", and "language" respectively. The idea of "Country" lies at the center of these directions in a space that Westerners would describe as "here".

This directional set up underlines the value of each of the related concepts and provides pride of place to "Country" and one's being "in Country".

Compare these with the Japanese pattern of こ (ko), そ (so), あ (a), ど (do) which describe a location with respect to the speaker.

Western readers should notice here, that the author centers the name and position of the origin of this knowledge at the start of the sentence. While it is associated with him, it is also certainly associated with all his preceding ancestors and Elders who passed this information down.

One might suspect that this practice isn't as common with base-level cultural knowledge, but that it becomes more important at succeeding levels of intimate area-based restricted knowledge. Placing the origin of the knowledge here at a more basic level of knowledge may help to instruct Western readers slowly and more surely understand how this foreign culture works.

How closely does this practice generally look like the Western idea of citing one's sources which only evolved slowly over history and became more common with the flood of information in the 1500s?

Developed by Elders Dr. Albert Marshall and Murdina Marshall, the Mi'kmaw word Etuaptmunk describes the concept of "Two-Eyed Seeing". It is based on the lived experience of Indigenous peoples who have the ability to see the world from both the Western and Indigenous perspectives with one eye on the strengths of each practice.

The idea behind Etuaptmunk is designed and geared toward Western thinkers who place additional value on the eyes and literacy. Perhaps a second analogy of "Two-Eared Hearing" might better center the orality techniques for the smaller number of people with lived experiences coming from the other direction?

These ideas seem somewhat similar to that of the third culture kid.

A primary difference between Indigenous science and Western science is the first is intimately connected to the practitioners while the second is wholly separate.

Would Western science be in a healthier space currently if its practice were more tightly bound to the people who need to use it (everyone)? By not being bound to the everyday practice and knowledge of our science, increasingly larger portions of Western society don't believe in science or its value.

Jia, J. S., Yuan, Y., Jia, J., & Christakis, N. (2022, January 30). Risk perception and behaviour change after personal vaccination for COVID-19 in the USA. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/afyv8

The inventor of Waterfall model (as a strawman!).

https://nelc.uchicago.edu/courses

http://www.officemuseum.com/pencil_history.htm

http://www.officemuseum.com/filing_equipment.htm

Stalin had understood the threat posed by leftism in the West societies.

Surprised to see a seemingly old reference to telemedicine here. It's only begun significant movement in the last five years or so though.

An early statement for the desire to add semantic and structural data to the web.

In 1998, Ben Shneiderman acknowledged the influence of Vannevar Bush's vision of the memex on his work on hypertext.

LeCain (2015) - Against the Anthropocene. A Neo-Materialist Perspective - https://is.gd/pUqNmj - urn:x-pdf:ba8ad0181bbfae49b319f835281d61f7

attacks in 2010

We create monsters, large and small through the neglect of the child's needs. We continuously create them and new, large scale events like wars create the next generation.

Downloadable τομοι ιστορικων βιβλίων.

HIstory repeats when we remember the pain of the past and seek retribution in the present.

It's up to us to break the cycle of intergenerational pain. This is the key insight of cultural evolution towards a peaceful species. Today we reap what we sowed decades ago. In the same way, decades from now, our ancestors will reap what we sowed today.

This is how intergenerational pain is transmitted, by planting new seeds today, we sow anger, hatred, violence and conflict tomorrow. Those who don't learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat it.

Putin's twisted logic rests on the assumption that Russia's conquering of Ukraine by war for a brief part of history justifies his (false) assertion that Ukraine was always a part of Russia.

This is the most critical historical fact to understand Putin's propaganda. It is easily fact-checked by historians, and that is why control of the media and power is so critical to Putin.

• Cultural change is a choice, not purely defined by historical trends (e.g. "war is inevitable").
• For one of the first times in history, we see war not as a way to make progress. Intellectual progress can't be conquered like raw resources can. Global cooperation is worth more than a bigger country.
• But this is again subject to our choice. If Russia's war is successful, we will see more wars (since it will be a viable method for political change). It's not just about preventing atrocities in Ukraine.

Schellekens, P., & Indermit, G. (2021, May 27). COVID-19 is a developing country pandemic. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2021/05/27/covid-19-is-a-developing-country-pandemic/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines

https://pennmaterialtexts.org/homepage

How awesome looking is this? Note the regular online meetings/presentations and the backlog of videos on their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Ng6px3fgc4Yjw-en1GcsA

https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-0220-sun-racial-reckoning-apology-online-20220218-qp32uybk5bgqrcnd732aicrouu-story.html

The Baltimore Sun begins grappling with its dark history.

Yang, M. (2022, February 14). Arkansas jail’s ivermectin experiments recall historical medical abuse of imprisoned minorities. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/14/arkansas-prison-covid-19-ivermectin-experiment-minorities-medical-abuse

Spinney, L. (2022). Pandemics disable people—The history lesson that policymakers ignore. Nature, 602(7897), 383–385. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00414-x

https://collect.readwriterespond.com/monks-a-polymath-and-an-invention-made-by-two-people-at-the-same-time-its-all-in-the-history-of-the-index/

Great find Aaron. Thanks for the ping.

I've gone back further than this for the commonplace and the florilegium which helped to influence their creation, though I've not delved into the specific invention or general use of indices in the space heavily. I suspected that they grew out of the tradition of using headwords, though I'm not sure that indices became more popular until the paper by John Locke in 1689 (in French) or 1706 (in English).

I'll put Dr. Duncan's book into the hopper and see what he's got to say on the topic.

Gandhi death and ashes

Mayor (2018) - Gods and Robots - urn:x-pdf:fb3d142ec8af438ea6e8adea2132fa64 - https://is.gd/ZPJU8Q

blue women - history of indigo invasive migration

Chapter 3: The First Card Index?

Markus Krajewski outlines some of the history of the creation of the first library card catalog and structures it in such a way as to create parallels between its structure and that of the structure of a modern day computer.

He covers the creation of catalogs at the court of Vienna, the Vienna University Library, an an attempted but failed national cataloging effort in France called the Bureau de Bibliographie at the Louvre. By 1974 the French effort had at least 1.2 million cards for 3 million volumes.

catalog, until a successor card catalog comes along in 1848. Only the<br /> absence of a bound repertory allows the paper slip aggregate to answer all inquiries about a book ’ s whereabouts after 1781. Thus, a failed undertaking tacitly turns into a success story.

The Josephinian card index was created, in part on the ideas of Konrad Gessner's slip method, by accumulating slips which could be rearranged and then copied down permanently. While there was the chance that the original cards could be disordered, the fact that the approximately 300,000 cards in 205 small boxes were estimated to fill 50 to 60 folio volumes with time and expense to print it dissuaded the creation of a long desired compiled book of books. These problems along with the fact that new books being added later was sure to only compound problems of having a single reference. This failure to have a bound catalog of books unwittingly resulted in the success of the index card catalog.

Austrian National Library; it is widely, and often proudly, considered the first card catalog in library history.

The first card catalogue in library history, later known as the Josephinian catalog, began on May 22, 1780 in the Austrian National Library.

Ainnurruvar ஐந்நூற்றுவர்

Frege, Hankel, and Formalism in the Foundations discusses this text in relation to Frege's Grundlagen

Gulf of Khambat

• importance of port trade in harsha and chalukya period

The scarcity of primary sources making it difficult to tell meaningful and accurate history is a common argument against incorporating the history of enslaved people. These excuses as well as denial, sarcasm, and apathy are used to erase the value of these people and our shared history.

Gasparetto (2016) - Robots in History - https://is.gd/71p9py - urn:x-pdf:da2c8b7427643df23e426e70fdc2569e

Deepti Gurdasani. (2022, January 29). Going to say this again because it’s important. Case-control studies to determine prevalence of long COVID are completely flawed science, but are often presented as being scientifically robust. This is not how we can define clinical syndromes or their prevalence! A thread. [Tweet]. @dgurdasani1. https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1487366920508694529

Ahrens focuses almost exclusively on Niklas Luhmann in his book How to Take Smart Notes. Sadly he misses that many others used not only the zettelkasten but other closely similar techniques including the commonplace book as a means of knowledge gathering and productivity.

There are thousands of productive researchers and writers who have broadly used many of these techniques to great advantage. In fact, it's almost hard to find famous writers or thinkers in the early Renaissance or since who did not use these systems.

Certainly Luhmann's system was one of the most refined of the group and his success is heavily underlined by his gargantuan output, but by not highlight other users of these systems, we're missing a lot more of the power of these systems.

https://www.slavevoyages.org/

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/opinion/slavery-voyages-data-sets.html

As a concession to the south, the Constitution provided a 20 year clause before allowing a ban on the foreign slave trade. In 1807, Congress passed a measure to abolish the importation of enslaved Africans to the united states, which went into effect on January 1, 1808. Of course this didn't stop illegal trade which continued until at least the start of the Civil War.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/opinion/holocaust-poland-europe.html

Hello please join me for a group annotation session

there is animosity between proletariats of colonial and colonized nations, especially when the socialist parties in imperial countries like UK, France, Germany etc actually mobilized in favor of the WW1 war effort

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caledonia

What about applied anthropology as well?

Knowledge of progress doesn't mean that it will be applied properly (at all) as the result of politics. This is one of the areas where applied anthropology would be interesting. Its also where a larger group determination of progress is important.

https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/about/mnemosyne-themes

Looking at the broad themes here makes me wonder if they line up potentially with the larger groups of cards in Warburg's zettelkasten?

While the non-discursive, frequently digressive character of the Atlas frustrates any smooth critical narrative of its themes and contents, nine thematic sequences may still be discerned:

The ideas of non-discursive, digressive, and frustrated narrative could easily be applied to a stranger approaching another person's collection of notes.

saw that tumblr post again about this being a culture of people who built MASSIVE settlements and then every 60-80 years just burnt them to the ground, so need to read up on the wikipedia page at some point

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Anne Ganzert</span> in (1) Anne Ganzert on Twitter: "@ChrisAldrich @gipperfish @jdconnor @vaultofculture This is early 17th century right? Nice! I always considered Aby Warburg my favorite „early adopter“ but this sounds great. One clear Warburg benefit: the Mnemosyne Atlas is still around and even digitized 👏🏻" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>01/16/2022 12:54:03</time>)</cite></small>

Σοκαριστική λύση στο πρόβλημα της ανισότητας: καταστροφή των πλεονασμάτων!

https://www.noemamag.com/the-other-invisible-hand/?utm_source=indieweb&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=indieweb

Raw capitalism mimics the logic of cancer within our body politic.

Folks who have been reading David Wengrow and David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything are sure to appreciate the sentiment here which pulls in the ideas of biology and evolution to expand on their account and makes it a much more big history sort of thesis.

Future Reading: Digitization and its discontents. By Anthony Grafton October 29, 2007 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/05/future-reading

Likely from Aurifondina artium et scientiarum omnium excerpendi solerti, omnibus litterarum amantibus monstrata. worldcat

h/t: https://hyp.is/tz3lBmznEeyvEmOX-B5DxQ/infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2007/11/future-reading-.html

A Roman general who conquered Corinth in the 2nd c. BCE

https://getpocket.com/collections/the-backstories-behind-your-favorite-christmas-songs

<figure> </figure/>

Archive</a> </hr>

<figure> <figcaption>history flow is a tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. In its current implementation, history flow is being used to visualize the evolutionary history of wiki* pages on Wikipedia. </figcaption> </figure>

Maxwell wrote the Treatise

reading the texts in parallel.

Just as Western historians erase indigenous ideas as misunderstandings or fabrications or outright appropriation of those ideas as pre-existing ideas in European culture, is it possible that we do the same thing with orality and memory? Are medievalists seeing mnemotechniques of the time and not properly interpreting them by not seeing them in their original contexts and practices?

The idea of talking rocks, as an example, is dismissed as lunacy, crazy, or some new-age hokum, but in reality it's at the far end of the spectrum. It's so unknowable for Western audiences that it's wholly dismissed rather than embraced, extended, and erased.

What does the spectrum of potentially appropriated ideas look like? What causes their adoption or not, particularly in cases of otherwise cultural heterodoxy?

The Great Man theory of history is the misconception that all the most important ideas can be traced back to a single great individual—usually a man—and ignoring the fact that they had likely been brewing in the social milieu of their time before being encapsulated, like a bug in ember, by a particular writer who then gets an outsized amount of credit for "inventing" the idea.

I wonder if the effect of social media and ubiquity of communication will dampen this effect?

Part of their point here seems to be that Pinker is suffering from a form of bias related to the most sensational cases which will tend to heighten the availability bias. (Is there a name for this sort of sensationalism effect?)

Is there also some survivorship bias at play here as well?

We don't have access to a wide statistical survey of dead bodies from a large swath of times and places which makes it difficult to determine actual numbers.

Continuing on the analogy between addresses for zettels/index cards and for people, the differing contexts for cards and ideas is similar to the multiple different publics in which people operate (home, work, school, church, etc.)

Having these multiple publics creates a variety of cross links within various networks for people which makes their internal knowledge and relationships more valuable.

As societies grow the number of potential interconnections grows as well. Compounding things the society doesn't grow as a homogeneous whole but smaller sub-groups appear creating new and different publics for each member of the society. This is sure to create a much larger and much more complex system. Perhaps it's part of the beneficial piece of the human limit of memory of inter-personal connections (the Dunbar number) means that instead of spending time linearly with those physically closest to us, we travel further out into other spheres and by doing so, we dramatically increase the complexity of our societies.

Does this level of complexity change for oral societies in pre-agrarian contexts?

What would this look like mathematically and combinatorially? How does this effect the size and complexity of the system?

How can we connect this to Stuart Kauffman's ideas on complexity? (Picking up a single thread creates a network by itself...)

http://editions.byzantini.st/ChronicleME/#/ Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa

A domain-specific language for encoding legal interpretations.

The 1747 book Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary kidnapped Inca princess, is remembered as the first book to suggest the idea of the welfare state.

—Dan Allosso

https://crookedtimber.org/2021/12/14/the-dawn-of-everything-part-1/

A partial review and summary of The Dawn of Everything.

Worth coming back to review over the commentary later.

It is a pagan holiday celebrated on the night of June 23rd and on the day of June 24th. It celebrates the incoming summer season and the commemoration of St. Johns. The day is marked with singing, dancing and making bonfires. It is also associated with supernatural appearances.

It is a pagan holiday celebrated on the night of June 23rd and on the day of June 24th. It celebrates the incoming summer season and the commemoration of St. Johns. The day is marked with singing, dancing and making bonfires. It is also associated with supernatural appearances.

He was Greek warrior who was known for many feats including the killing of the minotaur, a mythical monster. There are many accounts of how his marriage to Hippolyta came to be. The following sources might have influenced Shakespeare narration of the popular story.

Link 1: Plutarch's biographical narrations (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14033/pg14033-images.html#LIFE_OF_PLUTARCH). During the Amazonian war, Hippolyta was influential in brokering, peace between the Athenians and her people. She was set to marry him but died on the battlefield.

1. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream: Texts and Contexts, edited by Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard, Bedford/St. Martins, 1999

Christine De Pizan (1405 - 1521), wrote a popular text about how women should conduct themselves. She also wrote on the relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta. In her version, Theseus ambushed the Amazonians because they were afraid of their influence. On the battle field, Theseus saw Hippolyta and kidnapped her. In order to bring peace, the queen, Orythia, allowed Theseus to marry Hippolyta. Hisotry

The Mamertines were Roman mercenaries who settled in Messana before the Punic Wars. Messana is on the corner of Sicily closest to the "toe" of Italy.

The Claudii Marcelli, a branch of the Claudian patrician gens. M. Claudius Marcellus recaptured a lot of Sicily and Italy from Hannibal in the 3rd c. BCE, which is why there are statues of him all over Sicily. Cicero gave a defense speech of a Marcus Marcellus in 46 BCE (he had two brothers, all high achievers in politics). Another M. Marcellus was briefly Augustus' heir (he was Augustus' sister Octavia's son) before his untimely death in 23 BCE.

Reference that discusses calculating machines and information processors.

With the invention of the index card and atomic, easily moveable information that can be permuted and re-ordered, the idea of commonplacing doesn't simply highlight and repeat the older wise sayings (sententiae), but allows them to become repositories of new and expanding information. We don't just excerpt anymore, but mix the older thoughts with newer thoughts. This evolution creates a Cambrian explosion of ideas that helps to fuel the information overload from the 16th century onward.

aliases for "topical headings": headwords keywords tags categories

In order to become a free-standing tool, the card index needed to have self-referential closure.

This may have been one of the necessary steps for the early ideas behind computers. In addition to the idea of a clockwork universe, the index card may have been a step towards early efforts at creating the modern computer.

This is what I have been arguing all along as I've been doing my research as well.

https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.alumni.jhu.edu/article/837669

Institute of Intellectual History University of St Andrews, Scotland started under Richard Whatmore

https://publish.obsidian.md/danallosso/Bloggish/Actual+Books

I've often heard the phrase, usually in historical settings, "little book" as well and presupposed it to be a diminutive describing the ideas. I appreciate that Dan Allosso points out here that the phrase may describe the book itself and that the fact that it's small means that it can be more easily carried and concealed.

There's also something much more heartwarming about a book as a concealed weapon (from an intellectual perspective) than a gun or knife.

General Historical Context

During the Great Migration (1910–1920), African Americans by the thousands moved into industrial cities to find work and later to fill labor shortages produced by World War I. Though they continued to face exclusion and discrimination in employment, as well as segregation in schools and public accommodations, there were fewer barriers with voting for Northern African American men.

In the 1920s there was a migration of Black Americans from the rural South to urban North which generated an African American cultural renaissance that was named after the popular NYC neighborhood Harlem but spread north and west. This movement marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics paid attention to African American literature, music, art, and politics. This is where this revolutionary black poetry began. Unfortunately, emerging black writers relied heavily on white-owned publications and publishing houses. With the beginning of the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance died down as African American organizations became focused on the economic and political hardships this minority group now faced; however, the renaissance created opportunities and opened doors for a newfound Black culture around the world.

Maya Angelou, born in 1928, lived through some of the worst oppression and inequality for African Americans. World War Two was occurring during her teenage years. Throughout the time of the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the term “Four Freedoms” which included freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear; despite being eager to fight, African Americans lacked these freedoms while residing in the US. Although slavery had been long abolished, Angelou saw its effects on society and the African American people which led to her inspirational writing and attributes to the civil rights movement.

The civil rights movement - which occurred mainly during the 1950s and 1960s - was a social justice movement advocating for equal rights for the African American community. The effects of slavery still pursued post Civil War as African Americans continued to face discrimination, prejudice, violence, and racism. Mass demonstrations, televised racial violence, and the desegregation of segregated institutions alongside works of literature, art, and other cultural expressions as a part of the movement led to the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This act involved the government much more in the civil rights sector as it eliminated tactics to limit voting, assured racial and religious minorities equal access to public accommodations, prohibited job discrimination, strengthened the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and initiated the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

To explore this movement in more detail, visit the Civil Rights Movement informational site.

"History's shame" could be interpreted as an understatement. Slavery generated extensive suffering through tearing apart families, destroying the spirits of African people, and many died. The effects still present today - seen with some still prevalent racist beliefs - demonstrate that slavery changed the course of American history.

To view more about the history during this time period and how Maya Angelou impacted this crucial era of American history, view the Historical Context page note.

When talking about her ancestors, Angelou is referring to her great grandmother who was a slave (and passed away in 1942). By saying she is the dream, Angelou is attempting to set an example for others of her race in regards to rising above hard situations. Her goal with her work is to inspire change. She is demanding that society leave behind the negative effects of slavery and history of oppression with intent to rise above.

Shown through her later works, Angelou's great success with not only poetry, but other aspects of American culture. being a poet of presidents, civil rights activist, filmmaker, actor, dancer, and above all educator. She was the first of many special experiences for the African American community; for instance, she served as the first black female street car driver in San Francisco, she wrote the first script by a black woman to be made into a Hollywood film, and her best-selling, award-winning autobiographical book (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) was one of the first ever written by an African American woman to generate widespread readership. Overall successful in her rise above the deep-rooted racist American beliefs as she played a major role in the civil rights movement.

Referencing her personal experiences, she hopes to distance from the bad memories inflicted upon her and her community - leaving behind her race and moving towards equality. Specifically talking about the abuse that she endured as a child, but generally talking about the pain that African Americans were subjected to as a community. She will not let these events bring her down even if the whole world believes she should.

Another set of rhetorical questions, Angelou is painting a picture of defeat. Being direct and pertinent, she is accusing the oppressor for their actions. She is aware that her success is received with bitterness by the racist society. A few interpretations can be drawn from this stanza. This may literally be a picture of a slave who was abused and she is referring to a broken person. But it can also be taken as a person with a broken spirit as this poem is an autobiography. When Angelou was a young child, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and informed of his death after he was murdered soon after; the traumatic series of events led her to be almost completely mute for several years. This interpretation can be of her broken heart and broken spirit from those traumatic childhood experiences. Finally, a general interpretation applies this brokenness and defeat from challenge as an experience that everyone can undergo throughout their life - making it relatable and applicable to the general public, or someone who is experiencing similar despair.

With this poem, Angelou's goal is to try and highlight the past wrongs and present realities of oppressed minority groups, specifically African Americans. Here, she is directly referencing the long history that this group of people has with slavery. To explore more behind the extensive history of oppression, check out this timeline for Slavery in America.

Angelou is referring to biased literature, opinions, beliefs, etc. that were one-sided and dated. Born in 1928, Angelou was subjected to live through some of the worst oppression and inequality for people of color over the course of her lifetime. Although slavery had been abolished in 1865 following the ratification of the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, she continued to experience its harmful and strong-willed effects on society and the African American people almost a century later. Using writing as an outlet for activism, Angelou and many other colored poets contributed to the great social and political gains for this group with the civil rights movement.