Grassroots History
By This is an incredible story of inmates at an Indiana prison doing grassroots research on the history of their own prison with assistance from a historian-volunteer. Not surprising, the findings suggest terrible violence against prisoners and rank hypocrisy by the “reformers” who founded the prison. There’s really no way to excerpt this article effectively. But it is truly incredible and inspiring research.
This research is also very difficult to accomplish because the prisoners have almost no resources thanks to the state of Indiana defunding all non-vocational education. If you are a historian and have time to help these people, you can contact the lead historian on the project here.
Finally, I will at least note the most fun, if one of many disturbing, parts of the history, which tells of one of the prison doctor’s experiments on the inmates, this time on one masturbating too often. The solution:
“We applied muriate of cocaine to the clitoris, and I can assure you the effect was wonderful, the vagina at once behaved as well as the most virtuous vagina in the United States.”
So there’s that.