Marshanah T. (she/her)

There are some very strange things going on at the Library of Congress. I’m doing searches for news articles from the Civil Rights Era. Political cartoons. That sort of thing. They used to be easily found.

That stuff is VERY hard to find now. Things are missing, people.

Map of the U.S. showing women's earnings as a percentage of men's, with most states paying between 80 and 89.9 cents per dollar earned by men

The gender wage gap exists worldwide.

It is estimated to be about 20% globally, while in the U.S., the gap was about 17% in 2024, meaning women overall earned 83 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Those numbers vary when you account for race/ethnicity. 🧵⬇️

The earliest concrete evidence of engagement rings dates back to the ancient Romans.

While the ring was a symbol of a couple’s legal agreement to marry, it was certainly not a romantic gesture, but more of a legal contract.

Map showing gender pay gap for Black women across US states, with most earning between 50 and 79.9 cents per dollar men earn, and some states lacking data

The data is taken from full-time, year-round workers, showing what a woman makes for every dollar a white non-Hispanic man makes.

Gender wage gap | Definition & Facts | Britannica Money gender wage gap, in many industrialized countries, systemic differences between the average wages or...

www.britannica.com/money/gender...

Illustration explaining a government shutdown occurs when Congress and the president fail to approve a budget, causing nonessential services to stop.

A government shutdown is the forced cessation of most nonessential operations and services due to lack of funding.

These are operations that are not deemed necessary to protect national security, public health, public safety, or property.

Infographic showing government services that stop, continue, and get paid during a shutdown, including passport processing stopping and law enforcement continuing.

Infographic showing government shutdown impacts: workers furloughed, businesses losing revenue, public facing delays, and $11B GDP loss in 2018-19.

Network graph of Blacksky infrastructure showing personal data servers, global relays, algorithms, apps, and governance tools

Blacksky Algorithms is communal infrastructure.

The trump regime…

pushing Black women out of the workforce

Image of a book on fire. There is white text on top of the image that reads "The average age of the most banned books in America? 22 years old."

What is the average age of the most banned books in America?

It's 22.

The most banned books in America are not new books.

Why are they suddenly a problem now? We know. We all know.

That, plus an *extensive* roundup of book censorship news this week.

bookriot.com/the-average-...

Hot take: libraries are more than books.

Welcome to the world of “inclusions,” an ecosystem known to archivists the world over in which they come across all sorts of things readers have purposefully or inadvertently left between a book’s pages. Recently at the Library, the objet du jour was... a snakeskin. 🐍 blogs.loc.gov/loc/2025/09/...

We also need more HBCUs founded and funded FUBU. #blacksky

Rewriting Shakespeare Later printings reveal an alternate ending for ‘Romeo and Juliet.’

Magazine Monday: An alternate ending for "Romeo and Juliet"? The Library's Rare Book Division holds at least seven printings by an 18th century director who dared to rewrite the Bard.
https://lcm.loc.gov/issue/september-october-2025/rewriting-shakespeare/?loclr=blsky

I went looking to see if this list included some of the artists I learned on years ago (Mecano, Maná, Selena, Juanes, Shakira, etc.) Yep, all there.

(Seriously, I do this with other languages too.)

We ended segregation in this country because Black business owners sued on the basis that segregation violated interstate commerce laws

Why We Celebrate The Revolutionary Freedom of Assata Shakur The struggle for Black liberation continues

Fresh words ✨

allyfromnola.medium.com/657b04d66311...

for those interested, this is where you pay us (Blacksky)

How the 2025 Government Shutdown Will Impact Libraries | American Libraries Magazine The federal government shutdown, which begins today, will have cascading effects across the nation and our economy.

The federal government shutdown may have major repercussions for libraries. @librarypolicy.bsky.social explains the likely impacts. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/how-the-2025-government-shutdown-will-impact-libraries/

How James Baldwin Helps Us Understand Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter We built this house … do we also have to rebuild it?

EPIC REVIEW 🚨 “the Cowboy Carter tour – Beyoncé’s boldest show and one of the year’s defining works of American art.”

Allstora The bookstore for all stories.

Allstora is another good one -- an online bookstore that sells all types of books but puts an emphasis on promoting marginalized voices, and also gives a better share of $ from sales to the authors allstora.com

How the Nazis Were Inspired by Jim Crow | HISTORY To craft legal discrimination, the Third Reich studied the United States.

While we are having this discussion of Nazis, an important bit of nuance that is often missing from these conversations is that they were inspired in a few ways by the Jim Crow South here in the US.
www.history.com/news/how-the...

Black writers/scholars should keep an eye on this. We need more places to leave out papers/works, other than Yale, etc. I love the Schomburg, but it is still a part of New York Public Library. We need our own research institutions or they will continue to erase us.

Saint Heron Saint Heron Community Library; a growing media center dedicated to students, practicing artists and designers, musicians and general literature enthusiasts.

Solange on IG: “We would like to play a small part in creating free access to the expansive range of critical thought and expression by these great minds.”

library.saintheron.com

Master of Science in Information Studies
• Specialization(s): Archival Science, Library and Information Science
Bachelor of Science in Informatics
• Concentration(s): Cultural Heritage, Human-Centered Data Science

Picture of a young bell hooks. She is smiling slightly with her hand on her cheek. This post is honoring her on her birthday, September 25th.

Remembering bell hooks on her birthday. hooks was one of the most talented writers, theorists, activists, and educators of this century. She was born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

bell hooks’s Radical Pedagogy Throughout hooks' powerful life she envisioned, described, and enacted a radical, engaged pedagogy and praxis rooted in love, rather than power, while simultane…

Today is publication day for BELL HOOKS'S RADICAL PEDAGOGY: NEW VISIONS OF FEMINISM, JUSTICE, LOVE, & RESISTANCE IN THE CLASSROOM! Following in hooks' path, Jo Davis-McElligatt, Maia Butler, & Megan Feifer intend for it to be a guide for instructors at all levels: www.bloomsbury.com/us/bell-hook...

Through her creative platform, Saint Heron, Solange has launched The Saint Heron Library, a digital archive dedicated to making rare and out-of-print works by Black authors, poets, and artists accessible to all.

🔗 library.saintheron.com

Democracy, more than anything is a practice. I always think that the Civil Rights Movement succeeded because from the Civil War black Americans built institutions: universities, fraternities and sororities, churches, that engaged them in democratic practice.