That day, throughout the nation, in towns and cities that had never seen an antiwar rally, several million people were protesting the war. It was the largest public demonstration in the nation’s histo...
That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, howeve...
Surely, if it is the right of the people to alter or abolish, it is their right to criticize, even severely, policies they believe destructive of the ends for which government has been established. Th...
So the real problem, according to Madison, was a majority faction, and here the solution was offered by the Constitution, to have an extensive republic, that is, a large nation ranging over thirteen s...
Roosevelt was as much concerned to end the oppression of Jews as Lincoln was to end slavery during the Civil War; their priority in policy (whatever their personal compassion for victims of persecutio...
Revolutionary America may have been a middle-class society, happier and more prosperous than any other in its time, but it contained a large and growing number of fairly poor people, and many of them...
Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of othe...
Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. . . .
On the other hand, a white shoemaker wrote in 1848 in the Awl, the newspaper of Lynn shoe factory workers: . . . we are nothing but a standing army that keeps three million of our brethren in bondage....
Oil shaped U.S. decisions about the Middle East during both Democratic and Republican presidencies. The administration of President Jimmy Carter, a liberal Democrat, had produced the Carter Doctrine....
Jennings, putting the Indian into the center of the American Revolution—after all, it was Indian land that everyone was fighting over—sees the Revolution as a multiplicity of variously oppressed and e...
Jackson was a land speculator, merchant, slave trader, and the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history. He became a hero of the War of 1812, which was not (as usually depicted i...
It was an example of a common phenomenon in American journalism (perhaps in social criticism in general), the shallow focusing on agents or on individuals, thus concealing what a deeper analysis would...
It seems quite clear that much of this intense activity for Progressive reform was intended to head off socialism. Easley talked of the menace of Socialism as evidenced by its growth in the colleges,...
Imagine the American people united for the first time in a movement for fundamental change. Imagine society’s power taken away from the giant corporations, the military, and the politicians who answer...
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.
An anonymous pamphleteer in Massachusetts, writing angrily after King George’s War, described the situation: Poverty and Discontent appear in every Face (except the Countenances of the Rich) and dwell...
All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to act. They suggest that in times of crisis we must...
A New York banker toasted the Supreme Court in 1895: I give you, gentlemen, the Supreme Court of the United States—guardian of the dollar, defender of private property, enemy of spoliation, sheet anch...
A Creek man more than a hundred years old, named Speckled Snake, reacted to Andrew Jackson’s policy of removal: Brothers! I have listened to many talks from our great white father. When he first came...