Access America

Pop­u­lar Cul­ture, His­to­ry, and Cur­rent Events

Happy Hanukkah 2022!

By Sabrina Völz

If you live in the Unit­ed States or in many oth­er places in the world, it’s impos­si­ble not to know any­thing about Christ­mas. How­ev­er, the same can­not nec­es­sar­i­ly be said about the Jew­ish hol­i­day of Hanukkah, which begins tonight, on Decem­ber 18, and runs until Mon­day, Decem­ber 26. In hon­or of the Feast of Ded­i­ca­tion, some­times referred to as the Fes­ti­val of Lights, I’d like to invite you to watch this short, infor­ma­tive video:

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDMoklVYsvU

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Six Tips for Perfect Presents – And They’re Sustainable!

By Veronika M. Heinrich

Like every year, Christ­mas always sneaks up and sud­den­ly you’re con­front­ed with one of the most impor­tant tasks of the sea­son: gift shopping.

The shop­ping malls are crowd­ed, every­thing seems to be on sale, and above all, you feel that the gift should be sus­tain­able. Find­ing some­thing that ben­e­fits your wal­let and the envi­ron­ment is hard. But fear not! This year, I’ve cre­at­ed a check­list to make find­ing the right present eas­i­er for you.

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Put On Your Mourning Clothes, it’s Black Friday

By Hannah Quinque

Pho­to Cred­it: Final­ly, an occa­sion to go shop­ping! Pic­ture by Powhusku under cc-by-sa‑2.0.

Set­ting the scene: Gray Novem­ber skies, sea­son­al blues at full vol­ume. This Fri­day: Black. There’s no escap­ing the loud adver­tise­ments in the shop win­dows, at bus sta­tions, in every mail­box and inbox. They all pro­claim that this Fri­day, the one after Thanks­giv­ing, is the time to start shop­ping. Even if your coun­try, like Ger­many, doesn’t cel­e­brate Thanks­giv­ing. Black Fri­day, con­sumer culture’s biggest hol­i­day, is one very suc­cess­ful Amer­i­can export. Yet, how we cur­rent­ly view suc­cess might not be in tune with the suc­cess­ful con­tin­u­ance of human­i­ty or even a hab­it­able plan­et earth.
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America and the Holocaust

By Michael Lederer

Beyond a severe­ly lim­it­ed immi­gra­tion quo­ta kept to a bare min­i­mum, few­er than a thou­sand Jew­ish refugees from Europe were admit­ted into the U.S. dur­ing World War II. In August 1944, they were brought on a sin­gle U.S. Lib­er­ty ship, then interned behind barbed wire on an old U.S. Army camp upstate New York until after the war had end­ed. That small lucky group includ­ed my father Ivo, his sis­ter Mira, and their par­ents Otto and Ruza.

Pho­to Cred­it: Michael Led­er­er: Otto, Mira, Ruza, and Ivo Led­er­er in Oswego, New York, 1945.

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Native American History Month and Hostile Climates

By Hannah Quinque

The peak of progress and democ­ra­cy? Dził Nchaa Si An or Mount Gra­ham (AZ) is an unmov­able reminder that some are more equal than oth­ers. Pic­ture by Jbpar­rish at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mount_graham_in_2020.jpg under CC-BY-SA‑4.0.

This arti­cle has been start­ed and scrapped time and time again. An Amer­i­can stud­ies blog should run Native Amer­i­can sto­ries reg­u­lar­ly and most def­i­nite­ly for Native Amer­i­can Her­itage Month this Novem­ber. But then I, the author, am just anoth­er white Euro­pean try­ing to share some­body else’s sto­ries. So here’s what I decid­ed to do: I’ll use this plat­form as a reminder to lis­ten else­where, all year around.

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Special Events You Won’t Want to Miss

By Maria Moss and Sabrina Völz

What do pornog­ra­phy, fake Indi­ans, the cli­mate cri­sis, and fire­fight­ers in New York City have in com­mon? Well, these are all top­ics of this season’s lec­ture series “Maple Leaf & Stars and Stripes.”
As usu­al, the lec­ture series starts out with a bang: Award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er and one of Canada’s lead­ing writ­ers, Drew Hay­den Tay­lor, will present his new movie, The Pre­tendi­ans. The film, which cel­e­brates its Ger­man pre­miere at Leuphana Uni­ver­si­ty Lüneb­urg, asks the ques­tion why so many peo­ple in the pub­lic eye claim Native her­itage. Tay­lor, him­self an Anish­naabe and res­i­dent of Curve Lake First Nation reserve, is mak­ing his 5th trip to Lüneburg.
And if that’s not enough, we also fea­ture Anne Nel­son, Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist, author, play­wright, and lec­tur­er at Colum­bia University’s School of Inter­na­tion­al and Pub­lic Affairs. She’ll join us via Zoom to dis­cuss her play, The Guys. Writ­ten short­ly after 9/11, it fea­tures a fire­fight­er who seeks the help of a writer to com­pose eulo­gies for his dead comrades.
Art and pornog­ra­phy are at the heart of Anne Breimaier’s talk, which will crit­i­cal­ly recon­struct a lec­ture of rad­i­cal fem­i­nist Dorchen Lei­d­holdt in 1980. Breimaier will relate Leidholdt’s cri­tique of a com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of vio­lence against women in visu­al media of the 1980 to con­tem­po­rary image cultures.
The lec­ture series wraps up with a talk by Johan Höglund, “An end to Eat­ing? Future Food Imag­i­nar­ies and the Cli­mate Emer­gency.” Höglund will dis­cuss how fic­tion set in a future trans­formed by cli­mate change describes the act of ingest­ing food as “feed­ing” (what babies and ani­mals do) rather than “eat­ing” (what humans are typ­i­cal­ly under­stood to be doing and what counts as a social and cul­tur­al practice).
For the poster as well as the dates and times:

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