Clarissa W. Atkinson's Blog

Just before the 75th anniversary of D-Day in June 2019, I posted an idiosyncratic childhood memory of that event along with a horrified denunciation of the ignorance and stupidity of Trump 1.0, its State Department, and the Department spokesperson, Heather Nauert. In what seemed at the time like an inconceivably idiotic remark, Nauert had cited D-Day as an example of the long friendship of Germany and the United States. It seemed appalling, just a few years ago, that a such a person spoke fo...

My great-grandfather, Joseph Hubley Ashton, was a 19th-century lawyer and a powerful voice for birthright citizenship as a pillar of United States immigration policy. He was also an admirer of Abraham Lincoln and a friend of Walt Whitman, but I knew nothing about him until I learned about a family treasure inherited by my mother — his account of a highly informal meeting with President Linco...

On a bright blue October afternoon 60 years ago I put my twins in the stroller, tied the (pre-Velcro) shoes of my three-year old, and walked a few blocks down Broadway to a birthday party. The invited guests were the Riverside Park sandbox regulars, and I was surprised when several didn’t show up. “Where are the McCrays?” I asked, “and what about that new family with the redheaded kids?” Our hostess, looking grim, said they had left town. “Gone? In the middle of the week? How come?” Then I under...

I was the mother of three in 1965, when it became legal for married couples in Connecticut to buy and use contraceptives. I didn’t live in Connecticut, luckily, but I welcomed news of the decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, the case in which SCOTUS established the right to privacy—another long stride, or so it seemed, in the march toward justice and freedom.

Those of us who came of age in the United States in the 1950s tended to believe, if only hal...

I was the mother of three in 1965, when it became legal for married couples in Connecticut to buy and use contraceptives. I didn’t live in Connecticut, luckily, but I welcomed news of the decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, the case in which SCOTUS established the right to privacy—another long stride, or so it seemed, in the march toward justice and freedom.

Those of us who came of age in the United States in the 1950s tended to believe, if only ha...

Almost 100 years ago, Virginia Woolf remarked on the food served to men and to women in the elite colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. In the richly endowed men’s college where she was not invited to lunch (but told to keep off the grass), the meal began with sole, “over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream.” It continued through “partridges, many and variable, with all their retinue of sauces and salads,” and on and on until at last the gentlemen scholars were s...

Wildfire smoke from California charges across the country, meeting Gulf hurricanes along the way. (Image credit: Joshua Stevens/ NASA)

In 2017—just three years ago, but it feels like a century—I posted here a lament for the beautiful, vanishing birds of Sanibel Island. I visited Sanibel again last winter, before we knew what 2020 would become. Before “we” knew, that is: in the middle of February, when I flew home, the public was not alerted to the danger of air travel during a pandemic. The p...

When one of my granddaughters asked if the Covid-19 experience was like anything I could remember, I said no. But when I thought more about it, I realized that the answer should have beenwell, yes, sort of. I recall from my childhood the polio outbreaks of the 1940s, along with bits and pieces of civilian life during World War II. From the early 60s, when I was the mother of young children, I remember very clearly the feeling of helpless panic that followed the discovery that Strontium-90,...

Frightened and enraged by the crimes and abuses of the Trump administration and its enablers, I look back for hope and courage to earlier bad times and voices of resistance. I re-post here a letter written at such a time by the brave and brilliant Claudia Jones; I recommend that you read it, reprinted below.

Claudia Jones

(For an introduction to the life and legacy of Claudia Jones, see my earlier post, “

[image error]On a Tuesday in early June 1944, near the end of 5th grade, I woke to find my mother extremely excited—almost speechless. She had been up for hours: my father was away, and my sisters and I were asleep. The phone had rung long before dawn, and in the days before caller ID and robocalls, you answered the phone when it rang—especially at an ungodly early hour, when it was likely to be an emergency.

[image error]It was an emergency. It was the New York Times, trying to reach one of their people—someone who l...