Revival History

The story is not for the weak if you know you are not strong enough please do yourself a favor by not reading this because if you do you will cry your eyes out.  Title: What’s the worst thing that happened to you that nobody believes?* They called it “the year the river took everything” in my village. 2009. I was 11. We lived by the Volta River in Ghana. Poor, but we had each other. My mom, my 3 younger brothers, and me. Dad died 2 years before. That rainy season the river didn’t stop. For 17 days straight it rained. The elders said they’d never seen it like that.  On day 18, at 3am, we heard screaming. “Water! Water!” The river broke its bank.  We ran. No shoes, no clothes, just my mom dragging us 3 kids by the hand. My youngest brother Kofi was 4. He couldn’t keep up. The water was already at our knees, then our waists.  My mom turned back for him. She pushed me + my other brother into a tree and said “Climb. Don’t look down. Don’t let go.” I climbed 3 branches up....

*What’s the most heartbreaking thing you discovered after someone died?* My dad and I fought like enemies. When I was 14, I told him I wanted to be an artist. He slammed the table and said “Artists don’t eat. Get a real job.”   I called him a dinosaur. He called me a dreamer.   For 10 years, we only talked about weather, money, and “have you eaten”. I thought he didn’t love me. I thought love had to be soft, and his was always hard edges. He died at 54. Heart attack. Quick. No goodbye.   At the funeral, everyone cried. I didn’t. I was too angry.   Angry that he left before I could tell him I proved him wrong.   Angry that we wasted years being stubborn instead of being father + daughter. 3 months later, the house had to be sold. I went back to pack his workshop. It smelled like wood, oil, and him. I was throwing away rusty nails when I saw it. A small black notebook, hidden under the toolbox. The leather was cracked. His handwriting was ...

This is a self-portrait of ANA MENDIETA (1948–1985), an influential Cuban-born artist affiliated with 1970s ecofeminism. She died on this day in suspicious circumstances in 1985.  Ana's teenage years were spent in constant upheaval after she was forced to leave Havana at 12 years old. Ana and her sister were two of 14,000 children who migrated from Cuba to the USA through 'Operation Peter Pan' due to fears that children were at risk of being separated from parents under Fidel Castro’s rule. Ana and her sister arrived in a refugee camp, moving between foster homes and orphanages until finally being reunited with their parents and brother. Her father, Ignacio, had spent 18 years in prison for his role in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Ana discovered a love of art which she pursued at college (though she faced discrimination). Her work centered upon identity politics, violence against women (seen in her work ‘Rape Scene’ from 1973), but also Afro-Cuban cultural, religious, and arti...

Calvin Smith: The Wealthy American Planter Who Ran a Slave Breeding Farm for Producing Only Biracial Children Calvin Smith was a wealthy American planter in the antebellum South who operated a notorious slave breeding farm. His plantation was infamous for its focus on breeding biracial children, or mulattoes, who were often sold at higher prices than their Black counterparts. Slave breeding involved the forced reproduction of enslaved people to increase the number of slaves available for labor or sale. This practice became particularly popular after the importation of Africans into the US was abolished in 1808. With the external supply of Africans cut off, plantation owners turned to internal methods to sustain and grow their enslaved workforce. Breeding farms, like Calvin Smith’s, were established to maximize the number of enslaved children born, often through coercive and violent means. As Frederick Douglass noted in his 1892 work, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, and as oth...

"The mistress's husband was impotent... An Angolan slave changed everything and made her orgasm... The year was 1849, and on a farm in the Paraíba Valley, something happened that no one could have imagined. A 48-year-old woman, married for three decades to one of the most powerful people in the region, was about to commit the most forbidden and dangerous act that that slave-owning society could witness. What happened in the following months culminated in two brutal deaths. A betrayal that shook the foundations of that property and a secret that was buried along with the bodies. But the dead do not remain silent forever. And this story needs to be told exactly as it happened, without filters, without softening, because the truth is always more shocking than any fiction. Dona Eulália Mendes de Albuquerque, that was her name, 48 years old, brown hair punctuated by white strands that she hid under lace imported from Paris. Her skin still retained its brightness, despite the relent...

"On the morning of March 16, 1860, five warriors watched a camp in what would one day become Arizona. Inside a tent, a 23-year-old woman named Larcena was trying to sleep off a fever. By nightfall, she would be left for dead — bleeding, stripped of her clothes, and thrown down a ravine. What happened next, no one could have predicted. Larcena Pennington had already survived more than most people twice her age. Born in Nashville in 1837, she lost her mother young and spent her childhood helping raise ten younger siblings while her father kept moving the family west — Texas first, then toward California. In 1857, they joined a wagon train headed for the goldfields. They made it as far as southern New Mexico Territory — land that would one day become Arizona — before Larcena collapsed with mountain fever, too ill to travel another mile. The family stopped. And then, slowly, they put down roots. The Penningtons became the first American family to settle in what is now Arizona, farming...