Today, on Presidents’ Day, we rightly celebrate Abraham Lincoln for helping end slavery. But we shouldn’t forget the unstoppable force that also brought down the Slave Power: the several million slaves who left the plantation, many of whom joined the Union Army.
The American media needs to call this movement what it is, fascism, and demand accountability and answers from the thousands of Republican politicians nationwide who refuse to repudiate it.
The discovery of a plaque showing a member of the Ku Klux Klan at the US military academy made headlines. One member of the commission which recommended its removal is a historian of the US army and the lost cause myth.
The Republican transformation of the federal judiciary in the 1860s and 1870s served the party well in the Civil War. But in the end, Lincoln and Grant’s high court appointments ended up being disastrous for civil rights.
At the close of the Civil War, people recently freed from slavery in Charleston honored fallen Union soldiers. A battered U.S. was faced with the task of burying and honoring the 600,000 to 800,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who had died.
The Civil War was a revolutionary upheaval that crushed slavery and stoked hopes of a broader emancipation against the rule of property. We should draw on that memory today for struggles against racism and capitalism.
I would be failing future generations if I did not to write about who owns the narrative of our country’s evolution. It is difficult to have productive discourse about liberty and justice in this country if we don’t first have command of basic truths
This book shows how the country's anti-slavery sentiment based its views an abolitionist reading of the Constitution, and how that understanding influenced Lincoln's thinking.
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