In the summer of 2011, under siege from both the left and the right for his efforts to broker a budget deal to avoid a debt default, Barack Obama defended his leadership with a telling historical analogy. He noted that the Emancipation Proclamation, a copy of which hangs on his Oval Office wall, outlawed slavery […]
January/February 2013
Posted inPolitics
Thenceforward and Forever Free, Mostly
Deserving of neither blanket condemnation nor blind exaltation, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a brave compromise.
Posted inMagazine
Dixie’s Enemy Within
How the ideology of white supremacy undermined the South’s own war effort.
Posted inMagazine
Deconstructing Reconstruction
The tumultuous decade that followed the Civil War failed to enshrine black voting and civil rights, and instead paved the way for more than a century of entrenched racial injustice.
Posted inMagazine
America’s Twentieth-Century Slavery
The horrifying, little-known story of how hundreds of thousands of blacks worked in brutal bondage right up until World War II.
Posted inPolitics
A Second Emancipation
One hundred years after Lincoln signed the Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. tried unsuccessfully to get President John F. Kennedy to issue a second one. That failure changed the course of history.
Posted inMagazine
Emmett and Trayvon
How racial prejudice in America has changed in the last sixty years.
Posted inMagazine
Is Inequality Shortening Your Life Span?
White, black, or brown, we’d all live longer in a more equal, less status-driven society.
Posted inPolitics
Lincoln Died for Our Sins
The opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s cinemythic portrait of the sixteenth president features President Abraham Lincoln seated on a stage, half cloaked in darkness, and observing the Union forces he is sending into battle. It’s an apt metaphor for the man himself—both visible and obscure, inside the tempest yet somehow above the fray. Lincoln was […]
