Until we address unequal history, we cannot overcome unequal opportunity. Until blacks stand on level and equal ground, we cannot rest. It must be our goal to assure that all Americans play by the sam...
There it was again: the entrance up the darkened ramp disclosing an expanse of amazing green, the fervent crowd contained in a stadium scaled to human dimensions, the players so close it almost seemed...
The people placed me in an office of the highest dignity and charged me with the duty of maintaining that dignity and proper respect for the office on the part of my subordinates. . . . By your own co...
The media and pundits of the day instructed women that their only true fulfillment could be found as wives and mothers, that sexist discrimination was actually good for them, that the denial of opport...
Sometimes, sitting in the park with my boys, I imagine myself back at Ebbets Field, a young girl once more in the presence of my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below—Jac...
Roosevelt’s revulsion at Tolstoy’s infantile, pathetic, endearing bon vivant—his categorical interpretation of healthy relationships versus unhealthy relationships—reveals a deep-seated disgust with p...
Roosevelt and Root deputized Taft to inform the Holy See that the United States would purchase the lands for a fair price so long as the hated friars never returned to the archipelago. The land would...
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes....
On the return trip, they passed a brigade of black soldiers, who rushed forward to greet the president, screaming, yelling, shouting: ‘Hurrah for the Liberator; Hurrah for the President.’ Their spont...
On a hot summer night in July 1836, an organized mob broke into the shop where the abolitionist weekly was printed, dismantled the press, and tore up the edition that was about to be circulated.
Now I believe in rich people who act squarely, and in labor unions which are managed with wisdom and justice; but when either employee or employer, laboring man or capitalist, goes wrong, I have to cl...
Nothing so extraordinary has ever happened in American politics, a dazed Harold Ickes wrote. Here was a man—a Democrat until a couple of years ago—who, without any organization went into a Republican...
Nor did Johnson restrict his insistence on his concept of the proper relations between President and Congress to infringements proposed by liberal Democrats. In 1955 the conservative Republicans spons...
More accustomed to relying upon himself to shape events, he took the greatest control of the process leading up to the nomination, displaying a fierce ambition, an exceptional political acumen, and a...
Meanwhile, he continued to speak out on behalf of black citizens. In March 1846, a terrifying massacre took place in Seward’s hometown. A twenty-three-year-old black man named William Freeman, recentl...
Lincoln was the most truly progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in pre...
Lincoln warned, the lawyer must not rely on rhetorical glibness or persuasiveness alone. What is well-spoken must be yoked to what is well-thought. And such thought is the product of great labor, the...
Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating all the elements of the Republican party—including the impracticable, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long...
Lincoln replied that he was more than willing to die, but that he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived, and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his d...
Lincoln never forgot that in a democracy the leader’s strength ultimately depends on the strength of his bond with the people. In the mornings he set aside several hours to hear the needs of the ordin...