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Charlie Rosenberg
I come from a long line of serfs. Some of my ancestors arrived in the 17th or 18th century, some came in the 1850s, others around 1905. Some were coal miners, some were farmers. My parents both wen...view moreI come from a long line of serfs. Some of my ancestors arrived in the 17th or 18th century, some came in the 1850s, others around 1905. Some were coal miners, some were farmers. My parents both went to college, the first generation in their families to do that. My mother's sisters did too. My father's brothers took on their parents' grocery store, which at the time paid better than teaching chemistry. One great grandfather was a local organizer with the United Mine Workers of America. A great-great-grandfather in a different branch of the family tree was a southern unionist, serving in the 11th Tennessee Cavalry, United States Army. His wife's brothers tried to kill him after the Civil War, and the Ku Klux Klan tried three times to burn his house down. I was born in Connecticut, on the exact day that the Viet Minh opened their first artillery salvo against the French colonial occupation army at Dien Bien Phu. I didn't know that at the time, but it became important after growing up in the midst of America's unfortunate attempt to fight another Vietnam War. I grew up in Wisconsin, and I've lived on both the east and west coasts, and in West Virginia, before spending a few years in SE Washington DC, and then ending up back in Wisconsin. I've knocked on thousands of doors building small storefront associations of low-paid workers, I've worked in temp office jobs, I've written for several encyclopedias, I drove a paratransit bus and joined the Amalgamated Transit Union. My past published work includes articles on Thomas Jefferson, Mao Zedong, and Climate Change, for the Encyclopedia of Social Justice, on British and American public opinion for the Encyclopedia of the American Revolutionary War, several articles in the Oxford Encyclopedia of African American History 1896-2008 (including articles on Racism, Haiti, Benjamin J. Davis, Socialism, Populism, Science and Scientists), and articles in the Encyclopedia of the Great Depression and the New Deal. I coach a chess team at a school on the north side of Milwaukee, and I do a lot of reading. Publishers refer to people like me as "independent scholars" because I have no academic affiliation. I remember what I read, and try to share what I know. I've fought successful battles with copy editors to keep the words "black" and "white" in quotation marks when referring to artificial racial paradigms. I'm a shade of brown, as is every human being. A very pale shade, but its all melanin. There are no red, white, black or yellow pigments. That's fundamental to my writing, my life and my world view.view less