Exclusive: Conservative columnist David Brooks can’t understand why right-wing Republicans are so determined to kill immigration reform, especially since the Senate-approved bill would boost the economy and cut the deficit. But Brooks ignores what might be called the white elephant…
Tag: Civil War
Rethinking Thomas Jefferson
Exclusive: Americans are proud that their Declaration of Independence was also a declaration of universal rights. But the hard truth is that, in 1776, the words were mere propaganda cloaking the fact that a third of the signers were slaveholders,…
Anti-War Message of Mother’s Day
From the Archive: Mother’s Day has become a time to thank mothers for the hard work they do raising children and keeping families together, surely a worthy message. But the original Mother’s Day in 1870 had a more political intent,…
A Civil Rights Battle over a Streetcar
Even after the Emancipation Proclamation freed African-American slaves in the Confederacy on Jan. 1, 1863, racial bias was common even far from the rebellious South. Later that year, blacks fought to get access to horse-drawn streetcars in San Francisco, writes…
The 1%’s Doctrine for the 99%
Exclusive: Many on the American Right insist federal actions from the Civil War to recent banking regulations were encroachments on states’ rights and personal liberties, but underlying these claims in the 1860s and today is the greed of the richest…
Is Unity Still a Value?
As the United States commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Civil War fought over the South’s secession in defense of slavery today’s irony is that the U.S. government is experiencing a resurgence of the divisions that empowered secession in 1861,…