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One Brief Shining Moment

Adam Hochschild The New York Review of Books
Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.

Friday Nite Videos | March 14, 2025

Portside
Why the US Has Birthright Citizenship. Who Is the Leader of the People | Edwin Starr. Oligarchs Are Our Modern Day Kings. Sen. Jeff Merkley Asks if Trump Is a Russian Asset. Blood Moon, Trump Trade War, MAGA Stock Market.

Why the US Has Birthright Citizenship

The short answer is that birthright citizenship in the US came about as a way of granting citizenship after the American Civil War to the large population of formerly enslaved Black people

Marx Goes to Texas

Ryan Moore Protean Magazine
In October of 1845, having been silenced by government censors—and on the run from possible extradition—Karl Marx once thought about moving to Texas.

books

How German Atheists Made America Great Again

S. C. Gwynne The New York Times
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.

It Was Never a Civil War

Michael Podhorzer Washington Monthly
The threat posed by Trump and the MAGA movement, like the Confederate States, is not “conservative” or even “extremist” but criminally anti-democratic.

Incapable of Sustaining Weeds

Tom Stevenson London Review of Books
What are​ the major wars of our time? Ukraine and Gaza, of course. But what about Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Sudan? Most of these are civil wars with very large numbers of fatalities. This is a review of "Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War"

A Brief History of the Ku Klux Klan Acts

Joseph Patrick Kelly The Conversation
The 1870s laws passed by the Reconstruction Congress to enforce 14th Amendment rights and to protect Black voters, ignored for decades, are now being used against Trump.
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