What to the Slave Is the Fourth July? by Frederick Douglass speaks to the frustrations spurred by the gap between the ideals of the United States and the reality we witness every day, and the threat of fascism. Read/listen to his brilliant speech.
One of the recurring themes of the collection: the ways in which the scars caused by slavery and other forms of racial violence in America linger, influencing and echoing future events within a chronology of traumas.
Prohibition Gets Started (in 1919), Slave Owners Get Nervous (1834), Swing Comes to the Opera House (1944), Repression Takes Practice (1934), Nazis Make a Reality of Wage Slavery (1934), Wilmington Occupation Ends (1969), Voting Rights Victory (1964)
Fighting the Good Fight (in 1909), Teach Literacy, Go to Jail (1854), Deadly But Very Popular (1964), Pretending to Drain the Swamp (1984), Orgy of Police Brutality (1874), McCarthyism's Downfall (1964), Hitler's Friends in the House of Lords (1934)
The former South Carolina governor instead said it was a dispute over how ‘government was going to run.’
At the close of the Civil War, people recently freed from slavery in Charleston honored fallen Union soldiers. A battered U.S. was faced with the task of burying and honoring the 600,000 to 800,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who had died.
How a Texan holiday became a national tradition.
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