Something radical happened in the 18th century. A motley band of Europeans that had begun to develop a bustling civilization along a stretch of the North American Atlantic coast decided that their way of thinking and doing business no longer needed to reflect European habits and modes of...
The 1619 Project, launched last year by The New York Times Magazine, injected the question of slavery into the core of the traditional narrative of US history. It raised the question not only of what counts in history but how history is taught. Implicitly, it calls into question the great dogma...
This week, 216 years ago, one founding father killed another in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. On that early July morning, the vice president of the United States squared off against the former secretary of the treasury. As virtually everyone in America now knows, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda,...
In its report on US President Donald Trump’s Fourth of July weekend in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, the Associated Press characterized his speech as “a direct appeal to disaffected white voters four months before Election Day.” While Trump himself “zeroed in on the desecration by some...
Thomas Jefferson was an antiracist who defended racist practices. The latest famous personality to be censored by Facebook for spreading hate speech is a man who can no longer defend himself: Thomas Jefferson. Business Insider describes how Facebook flagged parts of Jefferson’s Declaration of...
In American culture, the display and use of massive firepower has become a feature of the true hero. As this week’s and, in fact, any other week’s news reveals, the United States is literally shot on a regular basis. This week is exceptional: 59 in one go is the new record for a mass...
