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This Week in People’s History, Jul 29-Aug 4, 2026

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Union soldiers holding their noses to stop smelling the rotten egg of secession Rebels Aren’t the Noble Warriors They Would Like to Think They Are (1861), The Civil War Was Over, but Not the Bloodthirsty Racism (1866), Take Your Fugitive Slave Law and Shove It! (1836), Killing Anti-Eviction Protesters Isn’t a Good Look (1931)

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?

This Week in People’s History, Nov 12–18, 2025

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Three American Revolutionary soldiers, two white, one of color Scorned Black Soldiers Rescue Yankee Doodle (1775), CIA Won’t Give Guatemala a Break (1960), Jim Crow on Parade (1865), ‘Give Peace a Chance’ (1969), Racist Terror at Its Worst (1900), Honoring Frederick Douglass (2015)

How Bad Slavery Was

Robert Kuttner The American Prospect
Donald Trump joins a long line of apologists for America’s peculiar institution, falsifying history in the interest of whitewashing slavery.

How Sherman’s March Opened the Door for Self-Emancipation

Adria R Walker The Guardian
Historian Bennett Parten's new book, Somewhere Toward Freedom, focuses on the experience of those who seized a chance at emancipation. “Through the collective weight and power of their movement, [they] found a way to essentially be in the room.”
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