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In Empire We Trust – Who Gains and Who Loses in Trump’s America

Steve Fraser TomDispatch
Imperialism does massive and fatal damage abroad. The wars in Gaza and Iran are the latest bloodbaths for all to see. Less visible are the wages of imperialism at home -Plans to plunder the planet of its land, labor, and vital resources are afoot.

April 12, 1861, Confederate Forces Fired on Fort Sumter

Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American
Their move had come because the elite enslavers who controlled those southern states believed that Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 itself marked the end of their way of life.

Deadlier Than Gettysburg

Drew Gilpin Faust The Atlantic
How the cruelty of the Confederacy’s prison camps gave rise to the rules of war

The Most Rancorous Line

Nicholas Guyatt The New York Review of Books
How did the Mason–Dixon Line—meant to resolve a long-standing colonial border dispute—come to represent the US’s foundational divide between slavery and freedom?

Trump’s Takeover of Education Is Taking a Page From the Confederacy

Layla A. Jones Talking Points Memo
By partnering with right-wing groups, Trump and his allies are exercising control over the retelling of history in hopes of shaping the political opinions of the youngest Americans, threatens to propagandize public education for generations to come.

Sven Beckert’s Chronicle of Capitalism’s Long Rise

Nelson Lichtenstein Jacobin
Capitalism is a global economic system, so a proper chronicle of its rise to dominance has to examine the entire world, as historian Sven Beckert does in his massive new book, Capitalism: A Global History.

The Underground Railroad’s Stealth Sailors

Eric Foner The New York Review of Books
The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers, many of them Black, meant fugitive slaves’ chances of reaching freedom were better below deck than over land.

Friday Nite Videos | September 26, 2025

Portside Portside
Leslie Jones on Memory-Holing Slavery. Bombshell Development in the Epstein Scandal. Pregnancy Is Insane. What Mark Zuckerberg Is Hiding About His AI Chatbots. Trump And Vance Cannot Be Happy With the New South Park.
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