In subsequent issues Platypus will serialize a “History of the Left”. The phrase has a strange ring to it! A human being has a history, a nation, a people have a history. One is not the “same person” one was twenty years ago perhaps, yet one can not make sense of who one is now without a sense of who one “was” even if that person has come to seem as alien as a stranger. A people too may “remember” its past, its becoming, its suffering, its ancient glories and yet no living member of that people may have experienced any of these. Such remembering and rethinking what has been whether personal and collective is obvious to us. But “the Left”?

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Held on July 28th, 2007, at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago.

Presenting organizations include: Mess Hall, Platypus, Free Geek, Chicagoland/Calumet Underground Railroad Efforts, Bronzeville Historical Society, Chicago Women’s Health Center, The Odyssey Project, and more.

This event is part of the Stockyard Institute’s Pedagogical Factory exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center, AREA Chicago‘s lecture series for the upcoming “How We Learn” issue of their magazine, and Neighborhood Writing Alliance’s programs for the education issue of Journal of Ordinary Thought. This public forum was made possible in part by the Illinois Humanities Council.

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