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Reader Comments: Slavery and Modern Capitalism; Stopping Gun Violence, Stopping the NRA; PA18; West Virginia Teachers; Puerto Rico - Crisis Deepens; Viola Desmond; Venezuela; Soviet Union, Fight Against Hitler...and Stalin; My Lai: Never Again; Global Call for Peace; and more...

How does our epoch of political polarization compare to the decade that was rent over the issue of slavery before the Civil War? Historical analogies can be misleading, but the controversies that bedeviled that age still haunt us. In certain ways, they foreshadow our own divided house.

Slavery did not die because it was unproductive or unprofitable, as some earlier historians have argued. Slavery was not some feudal remnant on the way to extinction.

We’ve identified people in our history who look and behave strikingly like the Koch brothers and their associates—specifically a small group that is mega-wealthy, super- privileged, highly self aware, morally self-confident, ideologically driven and deeply engaged in long-term efforts to seize the levers of government and upend American democracy. By this historian’s reckoning, it is, in general, the Old South’s slave owning aristocracy.

Graves form part of a collective memory of socialism. They force an acknowledgement of the ideas those revolutionaries died to defend. Fascism's armies sought to bury those ideas forever, along with the people who held them, in the Nazis' "thousand-year Reich." Learning lessons from Germany for our struggle against those that fought against racism, slavery, the Confederacy and white supremacy.

Reader Comments: Nunes Memo - Big Dud; Puerto Rico - many still without power; Union Membership Growth...Amidst Decline; Medicare for All - Canadian Readers Tell Their Story; Teaching Slavery; Antonio Gramsci; Trump's Military Parade - in song; Olympic Truce Actions; Cuba's Historic Literacy Campaign; The Puerto Rican Socialist Party; Scholarships for Young Activists; 50th Anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre; and more....

Even though ex-felons do not have a “right” to vote the arbitrariness and potential bias of the restoration process offend “two First Amendment rights; namely, free association and free expression.”

A new report finds both educators and pupils are woefully misinformed.