The colonies, it seems, were societies of contending classes—a fact obscured by the emphasis, in traditional histories, on the external struggle against England, the unity of colonists in the Revoluti...
The Mexicans had fired the first shot. But they had done what the American government wanted, according to Colonel Hitchcock, who wrote in his diary, even before those first incidents: I have said fro...
That quick disposal might be acceptable (Unfortunate, yes, but it had to be done) to the middle and upper classes of the conquering and advanced countries. But is it acceptable to the poor of Asia, Af...
Ten thousand people wrote letters to the governor of Utah, protesting the verdict, but Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad. Before he died he wrote to Bill Haywood, another IWW leader, Don’t waste...
TEACHER:: Now children, you don’t think white people are any better than you because they have straight hair and white faces? STUDENTS:: No, sir. TEACHER:: No, they are no better, but they are differe...
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!
Now, with the British out of the way, the Americans could begin the inexorable process of pushing the Indians off their lands, killing them if they resisted. In short, as Francis Jennings puts it, the...
No harm shall come to any business interest as the result of administrative policy so long as I am President
It seemed a fitting way to end my teaching career. I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other.
In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the black would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and...
I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect...
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...
During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, a Privates Committee urged voters to oppose great and overgrown rich men . . . they will be too apt to be framing dis...
Columbus was one of the great heroes of world history, to be admired for his daring feat of imagination and courage. In my account, I acknowledged that he was an intrepid sailor, but also pointed out...
At Lowell, a Female Labor Reform Association put out a series of Factory Tracts. The first was entitled Factory Life as It Is By an Operative and spoke of the textile mill women as nothing more nor le...
Any humane and reasonable person must conclude that if the ends, however desireable, are uncertain and the means are horrible and certain, these means must not be employed.
And one woman wrote, in 1850, in the book Greenwood Leaves: True feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood. Another book, Recollections of a Southern Mat...
African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel form of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the...
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...
Jefferson’s personal distaste for slavery must be put alongside the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves to the day he died).