reconstruction
The work of reconstruction, 50 years after Martin Luther King Jr.
Of the many absurdities around race and hatred that still exist in our culture, Trump may be the least of them.
Ulysses S. Grant’s fight against voter suppression
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University stated earlier this month that “14 states will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election.” Enacted by Republican legislatures, “the new laws range from strict photo ID requirements to early voting cutbacks to registration restrictions.” (The states are Alabama, Arizona, Indians, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.) As for what the Brennan Center calls the “myth of voter fraud,” their ongoing examination found that such fraud is “very rare.”
One of the central stories in the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant involved his fight against voter suppression.
Emancipation and economics
Lincoln understood that the dream of well-being, if not radically democratized, would for some people only be a nightmare.
Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880, by Luke E. Harlow and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, by David Brion Davis
Why did northern whites support a limited set of rights for blacks during Reconstruction, but then abandon them in the 1870s, and do little to stop the racial violence of the 1880s and beyond? Two new books shed important new light on such questions.
reviewed by Edward J. Blum