history

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The Gray Zone podcast

I’ve been enjoying the Substack series by author Judith A. Davidson, which explores the in-between spaces of identity, family, and belonging.

The Substack draws from her memoir, Black and White Makes Gray: A Memoir of an Interracial Childhood. The book chronicles her coming-of-age between 1966 and 1971 in Portland, Oregon. It delves into segregation codes, personal safety, jazz, and social upheaval, revealing a fascinating and important story.

Starting when Judith is twelve, the book relates how mother leaves her father to marry Evan, a Black jazz musician. The family moves into transitional Portland neighborhoods, navigating race, societal expectations, and personal identity during the Civil Rights era.

The Gray Zone podcast is a spin-off, or expansion, featuring interviews with people from Judith’s life, and exploring the many aspects of the memoir in depth.

I was honored recently as an interviewee for Episode 7 of the podcast, with a focus on my book, Democratic Education: Finding Hope in Challenging Times. Like her memoir, it asks how we can build a better society and what kind of learning do we need to navigate a complex world.

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Freedmen and Southern Society Project

In a discussion group focused on John Dewey, we’ve been reading Eddie S. Glaude, Jr’s 2007 book, In a shade of blue: Pragmatism and the politics of Black America. It’s an excellent application of Deweyan pragmatism to the current challenges facing African Americans today.

Last week, we discussed Glaude’s chapters 3 and 4, including a section on Ira Berlin (pp. 99-105). What Glaude has to say about Berlin was fine on its own, but it seems abstract and narrowly focused on only one, albeit important, issue: forced conversion to Christianity.

Freedmen and Southern Society Project

Glaude missed a great opportunity to talk about the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP). Leslie Rowland and Ira Berlin started the FSSP in 1976.

A central aim of the project was edit a documentary history of the transition from slavery to freedom in the US South. The documents include letters, affidavits, testimony, reports, petitions, legal proceedings, and other material by slaves and former slaves, slaveholders and former slaveholders, military officers and soldiers, agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and other participants in the drama of emancipation. The project built a social history of emancipation during the time when four million people gained their freedom (paraphrasing text from FSSP).

Pragmatism as a tool for inquiry

In contrast to the section in Glaude’s book, the FSSP offers an amazingly comprehensive look at slavery in the US, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and the after-effects. It documents the experience through the words of slaves and ex-slaves themselves, as well as others, making a compelling case for Glaude’s theory of African-American agency in a time of unconscionable institutional oppression.

Along the way, though probably without intending to do so, FSSP demonstrates Glaude’s goal of showing the value of Deweyan pragmatism—considering the whole situation and grounding conclusions in ordinary experience.

Additional reading

Note that four volumes for general readers and classroom use have also been published by the Project:

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Happy birthday, ENIAC

There are two epochs in computer history: Before ENIAC and After ENIAC. The first practical, all-electronic computer was unveiled on Feb. 14, 1946, at the U. of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electronics. ––Alexander Randall 5th

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was a programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. It was the first to have all of these features in a generally useable machine.

The photo shows four mathematicians/programmers for ENIAC, from L to R, Patsy Simmers (ENIAC), Gail Taylor (EDVAC), Milly Beck (ORDVAC), and Norma Stec (BRLESC-I). The original “computers,” also women, were soon to be replaced by an electronic computer.

The women in the photo above are holding circuit boards from the first four Army electronic computers, illustrating the rapid evolution and miniaturization of computing technology. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

ENIAC’s 80th birthday is significant to me because it comes during a year when most of my classmates are also turning 80. We’ve shaped and been shaped by the digital world that ENIAC helped to spawn.

It’s appalling to see how that digital world is being used to oppress ordinary people. Regimes from Teheran to Washington, DC are using the technologies of ENIAC’s spawn to spy upon, categorize, track down, deport, and otherwise persecute people who are simply asserting their rights, or often just quietly trying to live their lives.

References

“ENIAC,” Wikipedia, February 6, 2026.

Scott McCartney, ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World’s First Computer, Berkley, 2001).

Alexander Randall 5th, “Q&A: A Lost Interview with ENIAC Co-Inventor J. Presper Eckert,” Computer World, February 14, 2006.