New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, shortly after the war:The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surren...
In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law and in the Congo in the early 16th century with law in Portugal and England. In those European countries, where the idea of private pr...
Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love?
By the end of the Clinton years, the United States had more than 2 million people in prison—a higher percentage of the population than any other country in the world, except maybe Communist China. Vis...
The literature that followed World War II, James Jones's From Here to Eternity, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, captured this GI anger against the army brass. In...
Some historians think those first blacks in Virginia were considered as servants, like the white indentured servants brought from Europe. But the strong probability is that, even if they were listed a...
History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolu...
A Hopi Indian named Sun Chief said:I had learned many English words and could recite part of the Ten Commandments. I knew how to sleep on a bad, pray to Jesus, comb my hair, eat with a knife and fork,...
The essential ingredients of these struggles for justice are human beings who, if only for a moment, if only while beset with fears, step out of line and do "something", however small. And even the sm...
The Constitution. . . illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics an...
King's stress on love and nonviolence was powerfully effective in building a sympathetic following throughout the nation, among whites as well as blacks.
Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?
Scientists who had worked on the atom bomb added their voices to the growing movement. George Kistiakowsky, a Harvard University chemistry professor who had worked on the first atomic bomb, and later...
Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.
If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as lo...
I didn't want to spent a lot of close time with someone who believed that fun is a bourgeois indulgence.
The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties....
I have a little boy at home,A pretty little son;I think sometimes the world is mineIn him, my only one. . . 'Ere dawn my labor drives me forth;Tis night when I am free;A stranger am I to my child;And...
I ain't gonna kill; it's against my will. . . .
Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new at...