[Jelly Roll Mortons hit single in 1923. Womens Rights Convention
in 1848. Disability rights a winner in 1968. Prepaid comprehensive
healthcare in 1945. Investigation smoke and mirrors in 2004. Prisoner
abuse in 2006. Civil disobedience in 1846.]
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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, JULY 18 – 24  
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_ Jelly Roll Morton's hit single in 1923. Women's Rights Convention
in 1848. Disability rights a winner in 1968. Prepaid comprehensive
healthcare in 1945. Investigation smoke and mirrors in 2004. Prisoner
abuse in 2006. Civil disobedience in 1846. _

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_JULY 18, 1923 (100 YEARS AGO)._ "Wolverine Blues," one of the first
big jazz hits, with its brilliant piano solo, is recorded by Jelly
Roll Morton and later released on Gennett Records. Morton was justly
famous as a performer, but he was also one of the first people to
produce notated jazz arrangements. He didn't invent jazz (as he
sometimes claimed) but his stunning performances and his path-breaking
work as an arranger earned him an unquestioned place in the musical
pantheon. Follow the link to listen to that 1923 recording, and just
try to prevent your toe from tapping for three minutes.
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_JULY 19, 1848 (175 YEARS AGO)._ The Women's Rights Convention, the
first-ever meeting of its kind, begins in Seneca Falls, New York. The
2-day meeting, which was attended by about 300 people, is generally
considered to mark the beginning of the feminist movement's agitation
for an end to political discrimination against women.    
    Women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the
meeting's organizers, started the proceedings off with this eloquent
introduction: "We are assembled to protest against a form of
government, existing without the consent of the governed--to declare
our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the
government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful
laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take
the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and in
case of separation, the children of her love; laws which make her the
mere dependent on his bounty.... 
    "And, strange as it may seem to many, we now demand our right
to vote according to the declaration of the government under which we
live... To have drunkards, idiots, horse-racing, rumselling rowdies,
ignorant foreigners, and silly boys fully recognized, while we
ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens,
it is too grossly insulting to the dignity of woman to be longer
quietly submitted to...."
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_JULY 20, 1968 (55 YEARS AGO). _The first International Special
Olympic Summer Games are held in Chicago, with the participation of
about one thousand athletes with intellectual disabilities. The event
is a watershed moment in the disability rights movement's effort to
encourage and empower people with intellectual disabilities to lead
productive lives and create a more welcoming and inclusive society for
all. 
    Having learned many lessons from the successes of the civil
rights movement, in the late 1960s the disability rights movement
began to advocate powerfully and effectively for an end to the
inactivity, injustice, intolerance and social isolation of disabled
people in the U.S. The inauguration of the Special Olympics in 1968
played a major role in bringing about legal protections for the
disabled and a dramatic shift in public opinion in favor of a new
inclusivity.
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_JULY 21, 1945. _Prepaid comprehensive healthcare for the U.S. public
is unveiled when Kaiser Industries -- a major West Coast shipbuilding,
steelmaking and construction company -- allows anyone to become a
member of the company's medical-care system that was started for
Kaiser employees only. The new healthcare system is run by Kaiser
Permanente, a non-profit subsidiary of Kaiser Industries. From its
original location in California, Kaiser Permanente health maintenance
organization expands to Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Colorado,
Maryland, Virginia, Georgia and the District of Columbia. It now
operates 39 hospitals and 700 medical offices that employ 87,000
doctors and nurses to provide high-quality healthcare services to
nearly 13 millon members.
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_JULY 22, 2004. _The Commission appointed by George Bush to
investigate the 9/11 terrorist attacks publishes its final (and only)
report. The 585-page document goes into mind-numbing detail about
"institutional failings" at the FBI, CIA, State Department, and
Immigration and Naturalization Service, which prevented federal
officials from detecting the attackers (who all had valid visas and
were legally inside the United States) and preventing them from
carrying out the hijackings that resulted in the deadliest-ever
terrorist attack in the U.S.  
    The commission's report proposes numerous procedural  reforms,
but it carefully avoids identifying specific examples of the
boneheaded decisions by FBI, CIA, and White House officials that made
it impossible to stop the attacks in advance. The commission report is
an elaborate presentation in the
"mistakes-were-made-but-not-by-any-individual" method of making sure
that no person is blamed for incompetence or dereliction of duty.
    The report's position that no one is responsible has been
widely attributed to the influence of the Commission's executive
director, Philip Zelikow, who had an "obvious" conflict of interest,
because he had worked closely in and with the Bush White House before
the attacks. At the same time he was managing the Commission's
investigation, he was also spending hours on the telephone with White
House staff members, and having at least four face-to-face meetings
with White House political director Karl Rove. A Commission report
that laid any blame for 9/11 on the Bush Administration could have
jeopardized Bush's reelection, and Zelikow was in a perfect position
to produce a report that found every failure to have been an innocent
one.
    Even the co-chairs of the Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee
Hamilton, concluded that the Bush Administration set the Commission up
in a way that ensured that it would fail, as the argued in their 2006
book, _Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission_.
For more information see "Running from the Truth" by James Ridgeway
here:
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_JULY 23, 2006._ Amnesty International publishes a detailed report on
its investigation of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by the U.S.
military, titled "No Blood, No Foul: Soldiers’ Accounts of Detainee
Abuse in Iraq," which exposes and condemns widespread human rights
abuses by U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. reporting that prisoners
at Abu Ghraib had been exposed to extreme heat, not provided clothing,
and forced to use open trenches for toilets. They had also been
tortured, with the methods including denial of sleep for extended
periods, exposure to bright lights and loud music, and being
restrained in uncomfortable positions
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_JULY 24, 1846. _Massachusetts naturalist, philosopher and essayist
Henry David Thoreau is jailed overnight for his refusal to pay poll
taxes, because paying them would, according to Thoreau, make him
complicit in a regime that does nothing to bring an end to slavery and
is making an unjust war against Mexico. After he is released because
an anonymous person pays the tax he owes, Thoreau begins to write one
of his most renowned works, the essay that is generally titled Civil
Disobedience, which was published in 1849. 
    In Civil Disobedience Thoreau makes his case: "Under a
government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man
is also a prison.... where the State places those who are not with
her, but against her,—the only house in a slave State in which a
free man can abide with honor.... Cast your whole vote, not a strip of
paper merely, but your whole influence."          
    More than a century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. reflected on
Thoreau's work: " . . .  in this courageous New Englander's refusal
to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that
would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact
with the theory of nonviolent resistance. . . . I became convinced
that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is
cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and
passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a
result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a
legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our
civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before.
Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into
Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in
Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that
evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to
injustice."
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* U.S. history
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* Jazz music
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* women's rights
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* disability rights
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* health insurance
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* 9/11
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* prisoner abuse
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* Iraq War
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* war crimes
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* Amnesty International
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* Civil Disobedience
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* Henry David Thoreau
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