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 from...
Some of the New York Radical Women shortly afterward formed WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and its members, dressed as witches, appeared suddenly on the floor of the New...
It appeared March 9, 1960, dramatically, on a full page of the Constitution under a huge headline, AN APPEAL FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, and it created a sensation: We … have joined our hearts, minds, and bodie...
He opposed slavery, but could not see blacks as equals, so a constant theme in his approach was to free the slaves and to send them back to Africa. In his 1858 campaign in Illinois for the Senate agai...
Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relati...
All you have to do, gentlemen, for you have the numbers, is to unite on one idea - that the workingmen shall rule the country. What man makes, belongs to him, and the workingman made this country.
When guns boom, the arts die.
Unemployment, hard times, were growing in 1914. Could guns divert attention and create some national consensus against an external enemy? It surely was a coincidence—the bombardment of Vera Cruz, the...
The true task of education, Alfred North Whitehead cautioned, is to abjure stale knowledge. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish, he said. We need to keep it alive, vital, potent.
The New Yorker Cadwallader Colden, in his Address to the Freeholders in 1747, attacked the wealthy as tax dodgers unconcerned with the welfare of others (although he himself was wealthy) and spoke for...
The Fourteenth Amendment repudiated the prewar Dred Scott decision by declaring that all persons born or naturalized in the United States were citizens. It also seemed to make a powerful statement for...
Paine’s pamphlet appealed to a wide range of colonial opinion angered by England. But it caused some tremors in aristocrats like John Adams, who were with the patriot cause but wanted to make sure it...
It would take either a full-scale slave rebellion or a full-scale war to end such a deeply entrenched system. If a rebellion, it might get out of hand, and turn its ferocity beyond slavery to the most...
It is pretended that, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, it is we the people who wrote that document, rather than fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central...
In April 1914, two National Guard companies were stationed in the hills overlooking the largest tent colony of strikers, the one at Ludlow, housing a thousand men, women, children. On the morning of A...
By 1850, fifteen Boston families called the Associates controlled 20 percent of the cotton spindleage in the United States, 39 percent of insurance capital in Massachusetts, 40 percent of banking reso...
Before the Bessemer process, iron was hardened into steel at the rate of 3 to 5 tons a day; now the same amount could be processed in 15 minutes). Machines
We used military force to establish American power in Cuba and Puerto Rico, in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in Central America, in Hawaii and the Philippines.
We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are co...
The prisons in the United States had long been an extreme reflection of the American system itself: the stark life differences between rich and poor, the racism, the use of victims against one another...