This week's sporkful: Fighting erasure: daily articles and Women's History Month

It's probably pretty fresh in everyone's memory, but in January an absolute horror of a president was sworn in. His legions of evil having learned from the last time around, they hit the ground running in starting to erase any traces of history that were not centered around white men.

Determined to fight that in my own small way, I decided to post articles for every day of Black History Month (plus an extra three days in January to get to 31 days), but then also to do that for all of the history months.

I am currently in my third month of doing this, but there have been snags and things that I am trying to still figure out.

The first thing is that I couldn't always find great articles. I had a lot of people and events to choose from, but often -- even if you remember reading a great article once -- it doesn't mean you could find it. For the first month I was linking to a lot of biographies. When they were on sites affiliated with the government, there was no knowing if they would end up being taken down without warning.

I have started keeping a list of good articles when I see them. Since this is definitely going to go on throughout this year, I can keep a pretty big file.

One nice thing about posting is that the algorithm suggests articles, some of which were pretty good. I shared some, though never at the expense of posting my own article.

There was also the question of whether to collect these into blogs. I did not keep a good record of February's articles. I did note whom I had posted about, but not the links for the articles. Initially, I did not think I would save them, but it can be helpful to have a record.

For February (Black History Month), May (Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month), September 15th through October 15th (Hispanic Heritage Month) and November (Native American Heritage Month), I generally have reading lists that I will blog about. It doesn't happen during that month, but it happens. The articles could go in one of those posts.

I haven't generally had specific Women's History Month (March) reading or posting, which is why I am including them here.

I have more of a history of commemorating both Black Music Month and Pride Month (June) in different ways, but do I post two articles daily this June? I haven't decided yet, and I only have about two weeks left to figure it out.

For Facebook, I worry about posting too much. I generally do the song of the day with the blog post, if there is one and if it's ready, but if I am posting three things, or four, does it get lost in the shuffle? Spacing them out may help, but again, I am not seeing many likes. Is it enough to post the article? Do I need to add some text of my own thoughts?

That leads to the question of whether it matters at all; there haven't been many likes.

I am committed to doing good, but figuring out what to do and how to do it can be a challenge.

Articles for Women’s History Month

3/1 Las Soldaderas: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-real-history-of-las-soldaderas-the-women-who-made-the-mexican-revolution-possible?

3/2 WASPs: https://www.npr.org/2010/03/09/123773525/female-wwii-pilots-the-original-fly-girls

3/3 Mesannie Wilkins: https://minotmainehistoricalsociety.wordpress.com/minot-history/mesannie-wilkins/

3/4 ENIAC 6: https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/eniac-six-women-programmed-computer/

3/5 Night Witches: https://allthatsinteresting.com/night-witches

3/6 Bletchley Park: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/the-women-who-decoded-german-enigma-at-bletchley-park.html

3/7 Henrietta Swan Leavitt: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210310-the-star-fiend-who-unlocked-the-universe

3/8 Caroline Hershel: https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/in-caroline-herschels-footsteps/

3/9 Hedy Lamarr: https://www.history.com/news/hedy-lamarr-inventor-frequency-hopping-wifi

3/10 Hildegard of Bingen: https://www.culturefrontier.com/hildegard-of-bingen/