18 quotes
History, however, is not a linear narrative of progress. Rights may be won and taken away; gains are never complete or uncontested, and popular movements generate their own countervailing pressures.
The Century: A Nation's-Eye View (2002)
The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became.
The South's Inner Civil War (1989)
Essentially what Lincoln said is slavery is a form of theft, the theft of labor, one person stealing another person's labor without that person’s permission.
The vast majority of white southerners, supported vociferously by the Democratic Party of the north, were deeply opposed to any equality for the former slaves.
If Lincoln Hadn't Died (2009)
The Confederate government increasingly molded its policies in the interest of the planter class.
America's historic sense of mission has been redefined to mean the creation of a single global free market.
The Century: A Nation's-Eye View (2002)
Even as the United States has risen to become the predominant international power, however, conflict has persisted over the nature of American society itself and what its role in the world should be.
The Century: A Nation's-Eye View (2002)
America at the turn of this century is a far freer, more egalitarian society than in 1900.
The Century: A Nation's-Eye View (2002)
South Carolina led the southern walk-out from the 1948 Democratic National Convention.
Many things claimed as uniquely American, a devotion to individual freedom, for example, or social opportunity, exist in other countries. But birthright citizenship does make the United States unique in the developed world. No European nation recognizes the principle.
If Robert E. Lee, who rebelled against the American government, deserves one, then why doesn't Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion?
Alone among the societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century, the United States, for a moment, offered the freedmen a measure of political control over their own destinies.
The New View of Reconstruction (1983)
American ideas about freedom certainly resonate abroad. Eastern Europeans embraced them after the collapse of Communist rule. Indeed, the years since 1989 have witnessed an unprecedented internationalization of current American concepts of freedom.
I admire Lincoln very much.
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010)
Lincoln asked the nation to confront unblinkingly the legacy of slavery. What were the requirements of justice in the face of this reality? What would be necessary to enable former slaves and their descendants to enjoy fully the pursuit of happiness? Lincoln did not live to provide an answer. A century and a half later, we have yet to do so.
In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy. It aimed to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.
A Short History of Reconstruction (1990)
The United States was not the only nation to experience emancipation in the nineteenth century. Neither plantation slavery nor abolition were unique to the United States. But Reconstruction was.
The New View of Reconstruction (1983)
Now, as then, commerce unrestrained by social control ends up stripping economic relations of all moral content, while the drive toward fulfilling market demands at the lowest possible price creates widespread indifference to the conditions under which marketable goods are produced. Today’s Chinatown sweatshops and Third World child labor factories are the functional equivalents of colonial slavery in that the demands of the consumer and the profit drive of the entrepreneur overwhelm the rights of those whose labor actually produces the salable commodity.
Plantation Profiteering (1997)