Access America

Pop­u­lar Cul­ture, His­to­ry, and Cur­rent Events

ASB 2019 Contest Winner in the Category “Access America”

By Pune Karimi

 

From left to right: Amer­i­can author Peter Worts­man, Pune Kari­mi, and ASB edi­tor, Dr. Sab­ri­na Völz. Pho­to cred­it: Hen­rike Kattoll

On behalf of the Amer­i­can Stud­ies Blog, we would like to extend our sin­cer­est con­grat­u­la­tions to Pune Kari­mi whose win­ning entry in the 2019 ASB con­test in the cat­e­go­ry “Access Amer­i­ca” can be read below. Although the Amer­i­can Stud­ies Blog does not usu­al­ly print polit­i­cal pieces, we felt that the win­ning blog voic­es a point of view large­ly absent from Amer­i­can pol­i­tics and media, and, there­fore, deserves to be heard. We hope it gives you some food for thought.

 

Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tions 2020 – Still No Coun­try for Indige­nous People

 

“Repub­li­can Ele­phant & Demo­c­ra­t­ic Don­key – Icons” by DonkeyHotey

While Repub­li­cans have made it abun­dant­ly clear that they have lit­tle desire to improve the lives of peo­ple of col­or or mar­gin­al­ized groups, Democ­rats have often prid­ed them­selves on fight­ing for the dis­ad­van­taged. Still – hard­ly ever have the rights of Indige­nous peo­ple been a top­ic dur­ing the U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, and it seems unlike­ly that this is going to change any time soon. At least that’s what it looked like dur­ing the first Demo­c­ra­t­ic debates.

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Maple Leaf & Stars and Stripes 

By Maria Moss and Sabrina Völz

We’re in our ninth year of Maple Leaf & Stars and Stripes– if this lec­ture series were a child, it would be in third grade by now.

We’re espe­cial­ly proud to announce this year’s bilin­gual (German/English) kick­off talk by Peter Worts­man, New York author and trans­la­tor of Aus­tri­an-Jew­ish descent. Inter­est­ing­ly, he’s the recip­i­ent of the Geert­je Potash-Suhr Pros­apreis. Cit­i­zens of Lüneb­urg will rec­og­nize this pres­ti­gious award, named after for­mer Lüneb­urg res­i­dent Geert­je Suhr.

On Octo­ber 24, we will also be announc­ing the win­ner of the Amer­i­can Stud­ies Blog con­test in the Access Amer­i­ca cat­e­go­ry. The writer of the win­ning blog, which will be post­ed on Octo­ber 30, will be present.

Please join us for an excit­ing evening in build­ing 12, room 013, from 18:15 to 19:45 at Leuphana Uni­ver­si­ty Lüneb­urg, Uni­ver­sität­sallee 1. Click here for the cam­pus map.

All lec­tures are open to the pub­lic – and feel free to bring a friend!

Oct. 24

Peter Worts­man (writer and trans­la­tor, New York), “Read­ing from Stimme und Atem. Out of Breath, Out of Mind

Nov. 14

Michael Louis Moser (TU Dres­den), “The Evo­lu­tion of Polit­i­cal Moments on Net­work TV: Late Night from Steve Allen to Stephen Colbert”

Nov. 21

Andreas Hüb­n­er (Leuphana), “’Their mot­to is not lib­er­ty, but slav­ery’: Con­fed­er­ate Mon­u­ments, White Suprema­cy, and the Lega­cy of Jim Crow”

Dec. 12

Hel­ga Bories-Sawala (Uni­ver­sität Bre­men), “Indi­ens, Sauvages, Amérin­di­ens, Pre­mières Nations: Das Bild der Indi­ge­nen in den Geschichts­büch­ern Québecs”

Jan. 9

Silke Hack­e­nesch (Uni­ver­sität zu Köln), “Tran­sra­cial Adop­tions in Post­war America”

Jan. 23

Mieke Rosch­er (Uni­ver­sität Kas­sel), “Cur­rent Objec­tives of His­tor­i­cal Human-Ani­mal Stud­ies: Inter­species Soci­eties after the Ani­mal Turn”

It’s Campaign Season – So “Keep the Ball Rolling”!

By Sibylle Machat

Have you ever heard the expres­sion “keep the ball rolling” and won­dered about its origins?

An antecedent of the phrase stems from the British “keep the ball up,” but the phrase itself is only 180 years old and orig­i­nat­ed dur­ing the 1840 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion between Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­date Mar­tin van Buren and Wig can­di­date William Hen­ry Har­ri­son. In this elec­tion, Harrison’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign intro­duced so-called vic­to­ry balls – globes made from tin and leather, about ten feet in diam­e­ter, that were pushed from one cam­paign ral­ly and from one town to the next. Pho­tog­ra­phy was not around in the 1840s, of course, but accord­ing to illus­tra­tions from the time, these vic­to­ry balls looked some­thing like this:

Cred­it: “1840 Vic­to­ry Ball illus­tra­tion” in Carr, T. Turn out! To the res­cue!. G. E. Blake, Philadel­phia, mono­graph­ic, 1840. Notat­ed Music. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

 

But this is only the begin­ning of the story:

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Yay! People love her!

By Bobbie Kirkhart

pho­to cred­it: Jamie Smed @ flickr

Soc­cer star Megan Rapi­noe has a twin sis­ter, but every­one rec­og­nizes that they are fra­ter­nal twins because Megan cer­tain­ly is one of a kind. She’s unique from her bright pink hair to her red hot feet. It’s her feet that made her famous, start­ing in 2005 with her role in the NCAA cham­pi­onship win for the Uni­ver­si­ty of Port­land; she made the U.S. nation­al team the next year.

In the 2011 World Cup, she played in all U.S. games. After one goal, she grabbed a micro­phone and sang Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” At the 2012 Lon­don Games, she scored direct­ly from a cor­ner kick, mak­ing her the only play­er to have done that in Olympic com­pe­ti­tions. In this year’s World Cup, she scored six goals, one of only four play­ers in the tour­na­ment to achieve that. She was the only play­er in this year’s tour­na­ment to score two goals each in con­sec­u­tive games.

Off the field, her mouth and her heart are as active as her feet.
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Apollo 11 – An Alternate Universe

By Sibylle Machat

No, this blog post is not about con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries con­nect­ed to the Apol­lo pro­gram, Apol­lo 11, or the moon land­ing. Instead, it is about an alter­nate uni­verse in which the first moon land­ing had a less for­tu­nate end­ing, a “there but for the grace of god” in reverse.

The day: June 20, 1969, around 6 p.m. UTC (Coor­di­nat­ed Uni­ver­sal Time).

Neil Arm­strong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin have suc­cess­ful­ly land­ed on the moon, com­plet­ed their famous moon walk, tak­en pho­tographs, col­lect­ed about 20 kg worth of lunar rock and soil sam­ples, and have final­ly re-entered Eagle (as they named their lunar lan­der). They’ve slept for a good sev­en hours, and, now that they are both awake again, the time has come to lift off from the moon, to get back into lunar orbit, ren­dezvous with Colum­bia, where their crew­mate Michael Collins is await­ing their return, and to, ulti­mate­ly, head back to earth.

So Arm­strong and Aldrin fire the Eagle’s engine.

And … … … noth­ing happens.

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