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...
Socialism moved out of the small circles of city immigrants—Jewish and German socialists speaking their own languages—and became American. The strongest Socialist state organization was in Oklahoma, w...
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...
Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to justify their own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the slaves of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe—in...
Senator H. V. Johnson said: I believe we should be recreant to our noble mission, if we refused acquiescence in the high purposes of a wise Providence. War has its evils. In all ages it has been the m...
Ruling elites seem to have learned through the generations—consciously or not—that war makes them more secure against internal trouble.
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....
No doubt the odds are against dissenters in any nation’s judicial system. But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see...
Morgan then formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, combining Carnegie’s corporation with others. He sold stocks and bonds for $1,300,000,000 (about 400 million more than the combined worth of the companie...
Mark Twain commented on the Philippine war: We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-...
Just as African Americans had learned that they did not have enough strength to make good the promises of emancipation, working people learned that they were not united or strong enough to defeat the...
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 old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control.