Starting with Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, by 1760, there had been eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments. There had also been six black rebellions, from South Carolina to New...
Speaking of California, the Illinois State Register asked: Shall this garden of beauty be suffered to lie dormant in its wild and useless luxuriance? . . . myriads of enterprising Americans would floc...
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy. . . . Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth, like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you— Ye are many, they are few!
My image of a Communist was not a Soviet bureaucrat but my friend Leon’s father, a cabdriver who came home from work bruised and bloody one day, beaten up by his employer’s goons (yes, that word was s...
I’ll never forget that day. It confirmed what I learned from my Spelman years, that education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must fi...
In January 1943, there appeared in a Negro newspaper this Draftee's Prayer:Dear Lord, todayI go to war:To fight, to die, Tell me what for?Dear Lord, I'll fight, I do not fear, Germans or Japs;My fears...
I remember my first reading of The Communist Manifesto, which Marx and Engels wrote when they too were young radicals; Marx was thirty, Engels twenty-eight. The history of all hitherto existing societ...
Grant Foreman, the leading authority on Indian removal, estimates that during confinement in the stockade or on the march westward four thousand Cherokees died. In December 1838, President Van Buren s...
Dan Berrigan wrote a Meditation at the time of the Catonsville incident:Our apologies good friends for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderli...
A Yale professor of military history, Micheal Howard, writing in the New York Times )January 28, 1991) quoted the military strategist Clausewitz approvingly: The fact that a bloody slaughter is a horr...
The atmosphere of war brutalizes everyone involved, begets a fanaticism in which the original moral factor is buried at the bottom of a heap of atrocities committed by all sides.
Was allowed to merge with Hartford. It was all settled out of court,
The prayers of those who hold religion in one hand, and
Would the behavior of the United States during the war—in military action abroad, in treatment of minorities at home—be in keeping with a people’s war? Would the country’s wartime policies respect the...
When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war...
What the movement accomplished was historic, but soon it came up against obstacles far more formidable than the signs and badges of racial segregation. First, an economic system that, while lavishly r...
What made Bacon’s Rebellion especially fearsome for the rulers of Virginia was that black slaves and white servants joined forces. The final surrender was by four hundred English and Negroes in Armes...
What did the Revolution mean to the Native Americans, the Indians? They had been ignored by the fine words of the Declaration, had not been considered equal, certainly not in choosing those who would...
Very soon after the Fourteenth Amendment became law, the Supreme Court began to demolish it as a protection for blacks, and to develop it as a protection for corporations.