History and World Cultures AUM

Dr. K representing!

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Rain or shine, we hope to see you tomorrow!

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Join us for Dr. Kathryn Braund's Lecture
Thursday, June 25th from 5:00 until 7:00
Lucas Tavern at 310 North Hull Street
Dr. Kathryn Holland Braund is a leading expert on Creek Indian history and the author of several acclaimed books, including Deerskins and Duffels and The Old Federal Road in Alabama. She will be sharing her deep insights into Bartram’s legacy and the 18th-century Southeast.
Whether you're a history buff, a nature lover, or just curious about Alabama’s roots, we’d love to see you at Lucas Tavern.
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Dr. Lee Farrow has published another book, appearing this month! Jessie Kenney was a colleague and secretary to the great British suffragettes, Emmeline Pankhurst. In the middle of Russia's revolutionary year of 1917, the two women traveled to Russia to try and keep Russia in the war. Kenney kept a detailed diary of their experiences, which she never published. Farrow discovered this diary, annotated it (after research trips to archives in London and Norwich), and introduces it, allowing readers for the first time to follow Kenney and Pankhurst as they witnessed one of history's greatest upheavals.

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In 1944, a Finnish-Swedish artist working for a wartime satirical magazine drew Adolf Hi**er as a sobbing baby in a diaper.
She was 29 years old. The editors ran it anyway.
Her name was Tove Jansson. And that drawing — defiant, absurd, quietly fearless — tells you everything you need to know about how she faced a world that kept threatening to fall apart.
During the years when Helsinki was being bombed, Tove worked in her studio at night. She drew political cartoons by day and listened to explosions in the dark. When the weight of it became too heavy to carry in ink alone, she started writing something else.
Stories. About a family of round, white creatures living peacefully in a valley.
The world called them children's books.
They were not only that.
Moominmamma was her mother — warm, steady, the kind of presence that makes chaos feel survivable. Moominpappa was her father. Moomintroll — curious, gentle, perpetually bewildered by a world that never quite made sense — was Tove herself. She built her entire family into that valley and gave them the life she was trying to hold onto while the bombs fell outside.
But two characters carried something heavier than personality.
Thingumy and Bob arrived in Moominvalley small and secretive, speaking only to each other in a language no one else could understand. They carried a suitcase they refused to let anyone open. When the lid was finally lifted — when the moment came and they stopped hiding — the light that poured out was so brilliant it filled the entire room.
Tove named them after herself and Vivica, the woman she was in love with.
In Finland in the 1940s, their relationship was not just hidden. It was illegal.
The suitcase was their love. The gem inside was what that love felt like from the inside — overwhelming, luminous, impossible to look at directly. Millions of children read that scene and saw a fairy tale. It was. It was also a confession written in the only language available to a woman who could not yet speak her truth in public.
She hid it in plain sight. And the world read it to their children at bedtime.
Snufkin — the wandering philosopher who lived by no one's rules but his own, who came and went as he pleased and was loved completely for it — was Atos Wirtanen, her intellectual companion and one-time fiancé. Too-Ticky, the quiet and practical figure who understood things others couldn't see, who stood solid while everything else shifted, was Tuulikki Pietilä — the woman who would stand beside Tove for nearly fifty years.
Every page of the Moomin books was a portrait of the people she loved most.
Every story was a world she built because the real one kept trying to take everything from her.
Tove Jansson never wrote a manifesto. She never gave a speech. She never stood up and declared herself. She just kept writing — about floods and comets and lonely creatures finding their way home — and trusted that somewhere, in the right moment, the right person would open the suitcase and understand what was inside.
The world caught up to her, slowly. Finland decriminalized same-sex relationships in 1971. Tove lived to 86. She and Tuulikki spent their summers on a small remote island with no electricity and no other people — just the two of them, and the sea, and enough quiet to finally stop hiding.
She died in 2001, one of the most beloved authors in the world.
The suitcase open. The gem still shining.
Here is the thought that stays with you after you learn all of this: somewhere right now, there is an artist hiding the most important truth of their life inside something the world calls entertainment. A novel. A painting. A song. A story that looks like one thing and is entirely another.
We read it. We love it. We don't yet know what it means.
Tove Jansson trusted we eventually would.
She was right.