Attica 1971: What Lessons Have We Learned?

Certainly with respect to history, it too often seems like everything old is new again. Think about it: Racial conflict, mass incarceration, over aggressive policing, and the police getting off scot free. This is not yesterday’s news. This is the story of an event that took place on September 9, 1971. The uprising at Attica Prison.

In many ways the events of that week set the unfortunate predicate for so much that would happen after. It’s an event from which we’ve learned all the wrong lessons, often, until now, with many of the wrong facts.

Now, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Heather Ann Thompson puts it all in historical context in Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

My conversation with Heather Ann Thompson:

War Correspondent to the World's Women

The world today is a dangerous, unstable and violent place. And while Stephen Pinker tells us that today is less violent than at any other time in human history, images from Africa and the Middle East would seem to belie that.

But when we look at places that have improved, in Africa, in Latin America and even in the West, we see that woman and the empowerment of women have played a key role in the transformation to a more civil world.

What does this mean, why has it happened, and what does it portent for solutions to those places that still seemed mired in hatred and violence. Sally Armstrong has spent her career covering wars and global struggles and now examines this nexus between global progress and the empowerment of woman in Uprising: A New Age Is Dawning for Every Mother's Daughter.

My conversation with Sally Armstrong: