What was the Civil War about? In a word, slavery. The driving force in American politics in the decades after the American Revolution was the rise of an arrogant, ruthless, parasitic oligarchy in the South, built on God-ordained economic inequality.
You wouldn’t know it from the widespread glorification of America’s “founding fathers,” but the years around American independence were shot through with class conflict between elites and working people. And most of the founding fathers were on the wrong side.
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Jacob Lawrence was one of twentieth-century America’s most celebrated black artists. In Struggle, his series of paintings on the American Revolution, he opened up new territory in American history- beyond had become synonymous with black art.
A gripping biography of the leader of the slave revolt that led to Haiti’s independence, described as ‘the first black superhero of the modern age, the work under review promises to be the definitive study of the epocal revolutionary figure.
Medicare for All | John Oliver. No Rules for Donald | Randy Rainbow Song Parody. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | Black Heroes of the American Revolution. Elizabeth Warren Dissects Bloomberg Defense. 'You're Pardoned!': Trump Frees Convicted Swamp Creatures.
Basketball legend, best-selling author and history buff Kareem Abdul-Jabbar teamed up with the History Channel to create Black Patriots: Heroes of the Revolution, a one-hour documentary that shares the African-American experience during the Revolutionary War
Little is known about the veracity of the so-called Burr Conspiracy, the alleged effort by Aaron Burr to split off the western territories to form a separate nation in the early 1800s. People, the book's author writes, clung to familiar stories; they ‘embraced different certainties’ regardless of new information and revelations. Burr was judged on what was viscerally believed in a politically divided United States, whose easy acceptance of felt truths resembles our own.
The author argues that a key factor in unifying the fractious 13 colonies in opposition to British rule during the Revolution was the patriots' effort to link British oppression to extant colonial fears about insurrectionary slaves and homicidal Indians. America's founders were chief among those spreading tales of British agents inciting blacks and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion, making racial prejudice a foundation stone of the new republic.
A new book chronicles the travelers ignoring borders to spread ideas of liberty and equality, from the American revolution to the declaration of Haitian independence. "Without social media or even an international postal system," author Janet Polasky writes, "revolutionaries shared ideals of liberty and equality across entire continents." Decades before Marx, these internationalist radicals were soon betrayed by the very societies they helped build.
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