Issued on September 1, 2023 After yesterday morning’s press conference, held at the main entrance for the Penn Museum, Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad, Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro, and journalists entered the museum. Abdul-Aliy began demanding to speak to Director Christopher Woods, moving through multiple gallery spaces, ending up in room 1141–7…

Breaking down the Penn Museum’s ignorant misuse of decades of lessons with respectful return of the dead — The past months have largely been dominated by Finding Ceremony’s work to block the Penn Museum’s plan to bury Black Philadelphians in the “Morton Cranial Collection,” for which they sought permission from Philadelphia’s Orphans’ Court. But I wanted to take a step back from the terms set by Penn and…

Written by Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad & Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro Barely one year after we learned that the Penn Museum had the remains of two children murdered in the 1985 MOVE bombing, the University of Pennsylvania tried to quickly and quietly bury the remains of over a dozen other Black Philadelphians whose bones they had kept in the basement of…

Apparently I started this draft in June 2021. Or, rather, I created a new “story” here in Medium, partly at the prompting of my new therapist, and in the spirit of Pride Month. I wrote one word in it: Gendernope And then I abandoned the story/let it gestate for nine…

CONTEXTUAL NOTE: On March 30, during the Awards Breakfast at the Annual Meeting of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) in Hartford, I made public an open secret: the decades-long collusion of leaders in the public history field — including leadership of the NCPH, academic historians, museum directors, and more —…

As a scholar of the politics of the past, I dig anniversaries. Which is why I’m writing about Hamilton this month, two years after it…