Robert E. Lee was not a hero, white supremacists are not Americans
There is no need to be careful about this. Anyone who served in the armies of the Confederate States of America was a traitor to the United States; anyone who led those armies all the more so. They...
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How the cotton gin advanced slavery
We’re going to get from Eli Whitney to your smart phone in one post here, so look sharp. We all learn about Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in high school. It was a cotton-cleaning machine that could pull the...
View ArticleConfederate monuments and the cult of the Lost Cause
Here’s a great article from Smithsonian, by New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, on the real reason so many Confederate monuments were put up in this country, both just after the Civil War and in the...
View ArticleWere there black Confederate soldiers?
It’s a new claim made by those who seek to diminish the evil of slavery: that “many” enslaved black men fought for the Confederacy in battle during the Civil War. The truth, as ably presented by...
View ArticleConfederate monuments fall, America rises
It’s amazing that the sudden removal of so many Confederate war monuments is just a footnote in this Spring’s news. The long and awful battles to remove these monuments to slavery and hatred are...
View ArticleRemoving Confederate monuments erases history–or not
We were reading a great interview with Harvard Law School history professor Annette Gordon-Reed on the recent attacks made on statues of slaveholders, conquistadors, and Confederate soldiers. You can...
View ArticleTruth v. Myth: Trump’s Executive Order on Diversity Education
Welcome to the beginning of our series on the Trump Administration’s September 22, 2020 Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping. You can find the official White House version of this...
View ArticleFreedom of double-speak
We’re back once again to flag just one of the many open, unembarrassed attacks on our democracy going on right now, and it’s clear that this is not going to stop until that work is accomplished, or an...
View ArticleNovember 2021 round-up: attacks on academic freedom in Florida and Texas
There’s a lot to include in any wrap-up of the battle going on in the U.S. right now to make colleges and universities nothing more than weapons in the hands of Americans who want to dismantle our...
View ArticlePushback on book banning and gay silencing in Texas
Two stories involving academic freedom in Texas came out recently within a few days of each other. The first involves librarians who created the Twitter hashtag #FReadom (freedom and reading = freedom...
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