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The Anti-Constitutional Attack on Birthright Citizenship

Evan D. Bernick Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project
Looking back at our constitutional history to capture Trump's order’s viciousness. Doing so reveals that the order is not merely unconstitutional, but anti-constitutional.

Heather Cox Richardson on March 15th, the Day Maine Joined the Union

Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American
Maine's petition for statehood was stopped dead by southerners who refused to permit a free state—one that did not permit human enslavement—to enter the Union without a corresponding “slave state” resulting in the infamous "Missouri Compromise."

books

The Missing Persons of Reconstruction

Joshua D. Rothman The New Republic
Enslaved families were regularly separated​. A new history chronicles the tenacious efforts of the emancipated to be reunited​ with their loved ones.

Anvil, the Forgotten Magazine of Heartland Marxism

Marc Blanc Jacobin
Printed out of a cattle barn in Missouri, Anvil published some of the biggest leftist writers of the 1930s, including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. Its popular vision for multiracial socialism in the heart of the US could hardly be more urgent.

The Reckless Creation of Whiteness

Erin L. Thompson The Nation
In The Unseen Truth, Sarah Lewis examines how an erroneous 18th-century story about the “Caucasian race” led to a centuries of prejudice and misapprehension.

History’s Lessons on Anti-Immigrant Extremism

Michael Luo The New Yorker
The scale of what Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and without recent precedent. A century and a half ago, however, a movement to cast out a different group of people began to accelerate in the United States.

books

Grave New World

David Klion Bookforum
This book starts by saying that the 9/11 attacks "occurred at a moment when “the United States found itself at the head of a global economic order that had been founded on a growth surge that was slowly but surely running out of steam."
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