Friday 10/16, 7:30 pm, Screening of Verita$! 9A Hamilton Place, Boston
Geoff Carens
Join the Boston IWW on Friday, October 16th at 7:30 PM for a screening and discussion of Shin Eun-jung’s Verita$, a film that exposes Harvard University’s 300+ year history of wide-ranging political influence beyond its Cambridge gates. The Salem Witch Trials, the execution of Sacco & Vanzetti, pseudo-scientific eugenics, CIA Black Ops, attacks on labor organizing, and local institutional expansion/gentrification, are only a few examples of topics covered by the film.
The late Shin Eun-jung’s husband, George Katsiaficas, the author of the two-volume Asia’s Unknown Uprisings (PM Press), plans to join us at this event!
Light Refreshments will be served.
Encuentro 5 is located at 9A Hamilton Place, steps from Park Street Station on the Red Line. The space is accessible by a short flight of stairs but is unfortunately not wheelchair accessible. E5 is a safer space, please respect the people and the place. Thank you, see you there!
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More about Verita$, which is now a book published by PM Press: http://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=683
Announcing Shin Eun-jung’s Verita$: Harvard’s Hidden History:
We hope you might be interested in knowing that Shin Eun-jung’s long-awaited book that critically examines Harvard’s monumental but disconcerting global influence and power is being launched August 15th.
The “hidden history” announced in the book’s title begins with analysis of Harvard’s involvement in the Salem witch trials and the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. Similarly disquieting, Harvard provided students as strikebreakers in both the 1912 Bread and Roses textile workers strike and the 1919 Boston police strike. Harvard administrators and scientists promoted eugenics in the early twentieth century and had a deep impact on Nazi Germany’s race theories. Its contemporary ties to U.S. foreign policy and neoliberalism are also profound. Harvard’s management of Russian economic reform left nightmarish memories, and the university was compelled to pay more than $26 million after the U.S. government sued it. The book also examines Harvard’s investment policy for its massive endowment, its restrictive labor polices, and its devastation of the adjoining Allston-Brighton neighborhood into which it is expanding.
About the Author: Shin Eun-jung:
Shin Eun-jung was born in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1972. Her hometown’s historic uprising in 1980 had a profound effect on her life. A student activist, she later worked as a television news writer for nine years. From 2000 to 2004, she directed the Gwangju Human Rights Film Festival, which screened documentaries from around the world. This book is based upon the award-winning film of the same title. Verita$ won Best Director of a Documentary award at the 2011 New York International Film Festival; it was screened at the Society for Cinema Studies, the International Labor and Video Festival in Turkey, the San Francisco Labor Fest, and in its Korean version at the Seoul Marginal Film Festival. The Korean version of the book was a bestseller among nonfiction titles. Until she suddenly passed away in November 2012, she was hard at work translating the book into English.
Introduction by John Trumpbour:
Born in North Carolina, John Trumpbour earned a BA in history at Stanford University and later received a PhD in history at Harvard. He edited How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire (South End Press) and is the author of Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920-1950 (Cambridge University Press), which won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. He is currently Research Director for the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.