Ramteen Arablui
speaker
199 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Aug
Ramteen Arablui’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
a nine-hole golf course. As for Oba Obamamwen, the king, he fled the city and hid out in the rainforest for six months.
With the Oba out of the way, the British incorporated the Benin Kingdom's lands into its own holdings in West Africa.
Jesus College declined to comment further on this issue.
Cambridge University's Jesus College would be the first institution to return a Benin bronze. Shortly after, other institutions and even museums started following suit. Countries like Germany pledged to return looted Benin artworks. And so did the Smithsonian Institution here in the United States, which had a total collection of 39 Benin bronzes.
This is Deidre Farmer-Palman again, who's the executive director of the Restitution Study Group.
D'Adria argues that the Benin bronzes should also belong to the descendants of the people the Benin Kingdom sold to European slave traders.
The Isan people were part of the kingdoms neighboring the Benin Kingdom. So when D'Adria found out about the Smithsonian's decision to return its collection of Benin bronzes to Nigeria, she was shocked.
But Deidre was like, well, the colonizers, the British, took these bronzes from the kingdom that enslaved my ancestors. So why should Nigeria have full control over them?
D'Adria and her organization filed a petition to stop the Smithsonian from returning the bronzes to Nigeria. The goal? To allow the descendants of people sold into slavery by the Benin Kingdom to have a say in their fate.
In an email exchange at the time, the Smithsonian told D'Adria more research was needed to concretely link the objects in their collection to the slave trade.
After they were denied, DeAdria and the restitution study group appealed to have their case brought up to the Supreme Court. The court would ultimately decline to hear D'Adria and her organization's petition against the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian had already begun transferring much of its collection to Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments.
I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.
And me. And. Lawrence Wu.
Thank you to Johannes Dergi, Tony Cavan, Nadia Lansi, Jay Venasco, Chloe Veltman, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.
Thank you.
Utah, 1877. A man named Wallace Wilkerson stops by a saloon. He starts by playing a game of cards with another man named William Baxter. An argument starts. Wilkerson takes out a gun, shoots Baxter in the head, killing him, and then he flees. Wilkerson is captured. A few months later, he's convicted of murder and sentenced to be executed the next month.
Wilkerson was sentenced to be executed by a firing squad, a sentence that was challenged all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had to decide whether a firing squad violated Wallace Wilkerson's Eighth Amendment rights.
So what is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide its boundaries? And what do we know about how the people who wrote the Eighth Amendment imagined its meaning might change? I'm Ramteen Arablui.
Coming up, the Eighth Amendment and what cruel and unusual actually means.
Around the same time, a movement was brewing, one led by intellectuals around Europe who celebrated reason and knowledge and freedom and pushed the world toward more humanitarian ideals. It was the beginning of the Enlightenment, and one Italian philosopher would be especially influential to the American founders, Cesare Beccaria.
Showing 81–100 of 199 · page 5 of 10
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