Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be tau...
But slave importation became illegal in 1808.
A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in early 1992 showed that public opinion on welfare changed depending on how the question was worded. If the word welfare was used, 44 percent of those questio...
[T]hat combination of inferior status and derogatory thought [is what] we call racism.
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,
More militant. Frederick Douglass spoke in 1857: Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her augu...
In the industrial towns children went to work with their fathers and mothers, schools and doctors were only promises, a bed of one’s own was a rare luxury.
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...
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.
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves—unwittingly—...
Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Con...
There is the past and its continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, outrageous monopolization of the good earth’s wealth by a few, political power in the hands of...
There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged.
The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.
The pretense continued over the generations, helped by all-embracing symbols, physical or verbal: the flag, patriotism, democracy, national interest, national defense, national security. The slogans w...
The military conflict itself, by dominating everything in its time, diminished other issues, made people choose sides in the one contest that was publicly important, forced people onto the side of the...