It is difficult to imagine, in these divided and troubling days, that our nation once had a conservative Republican president who believed that a socialist like Debs was just an American citizen with whom he disagreed, not an enemy who ought to be destroyed.
President Harry Truman's knowledge of the imminent success of the Manhattan Project led him to fear that the United Nations' charter was inadequate to the task of preventing war; the Cold War meant that a better form of internationalism was never achieved.
What William (Bill) Coors complained was “political persecution” was, for boycotters, a tool of political expression — of refusing to financially support policies that maligned and marginalized their communities and those of their allies.
When a fraternity chapter sued him for defamation for remarking that it actively preserved the "Lost Cause" mythology of the Confederacy, the author went to the archives to defend himself.
For centuries, we have been the ones demonizing foreigners as carriers of infectious disease. And we have been the ones banning immigrants in the name of protecting Americans’ public health.
No federal law governs wait times. Nearly two-thirds of voters in 2012 and three-quarters in 2018 waited less than 10 minutes. But long wait times are a chronic problem primarily for Latino and Black voters in “precincts with high minority populations, high population, and low incomes.”
McCarthy’s reckless accusations and trampling of witnesses’ rights were offensive to age-old Jewish values, with or without overt anti-Semitism. That’s easy to say in hindsight, but was also the verdict of Jewish Americans at the time.
Historical restrictions against "sectarian" use of tax dollars used the term broadly to encompass many religious doctrines. Claims that the laws were based in anti-Catholic bigotry are inaccurate.
American independence unleashed a hemispheric conquest by the United States and a renewed commitment to empire by Great Britain. Both projects relied on racism, violence, and the devaluing of black and indigenous lives.
Since memory is essential to functioning in our daily lives, we all think historically to survive, even if only to question ourselves: “Did I pay that bill yesterday?” In answering that question, we reconstruct yesterday’s actions in our minds and perhaps even search for physical (or in today’s case, digital) evidence of that task. There it is — historical thinking!
The Obama–Biden administration wanted to move forward rather than hold Wall Street bankers and CIA torturers accountable. If elected, Biden should follow FDR’s playbook and expose his predecessor’s corruption and mismanagement instead.
Now the time has come for the story of the Workingmen’s Reform Party, the building of Richmond’s City Hall, and the solidarity-based politics of the Black and white members of the Knights of Labor, to come out into the light.
The Fourth of July is not a day to celebrate the Founders themselves, nor white independence, but the bracing principles and “inalienable rights” they fought for: freedom, equality and justice.
But this idea of Mount Rushmore as a goosebump-inducing holy site to these liberal and patriotic ideals ignores that the land was stolen from the Sioux Nation — turning the site into a “landscape of denial” in the words of sociologist James Loewen.
