MLK’s I Have a Dream Speech begins: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.” […]
Is this Republican blackmail constitutional? Most scholars and the Justice Department do not think so, although there are some conservative scholars who disagree. And there is no Supreme Court precedent for this question. President Biden has publicly stated that the Fourteenth Amendment question is on the table. […]
The Confederate VP Stephens proclaimed:
“Our new government’s foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Stephens continues, “Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws” establishing slavery. “This stone which was rejected by the first builders ‘is become the chief of the corner,’ the real ‘corner-stone,’ in our new edifice.” This is religious imagery, as Christ was proclaimed as the corner-stone of Christianity.
Furthermore, the Confederate VP Stephens proclaimed that the new Confederate “Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution, African slavery as it exists among us, and the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” […]
Who do we consider to be the leaders of the first three generations of black leaders? Frederick Douglass, first generation black leader, abolitionist writer and orator, who was born a slave and escaped to freedom; Booker T Washington, educator, second generation black leader, who was born a slave, was freed when the Civil War ended; and WEB Du Bois, third generation black leader, civil rights activist, author and scholar, who was born free in Massachusetts after the Civil War, chose to attend college in the Deep South, and was co-founder of the NAACP. […]
Professor Gallagher opens his book on the Union War, “The loyal American citizenry fought a war that also killed slavery. In a conflict that stretched across four years and claimed more than 800,000 US casualties, the nation experienced huge swings of civilian and military morale before crushing Confederate resistance. Union always remained the paramount goal, a fact clearly expressed by Abraham Lincoln in speeches and other statements designed to garner the widest popular support for the war effort.” […]
Why study the Peloponnesian wars? One main reason is: You cannot understand the Platonic dialogues without first understanding the history of the Peloponnesian Wars, because so many of the leading figures of this period are referenced in the Platonic dialogues, and we can learn many moral lessons from the war, which changed the Greek city-states forever.
The history of the war includes many interesting personalities, including Pericles, the founder of the radical democracy of Athens who died in the first years of the war, and Alcibiades, the ladies’ man and charismatic personality who was a leader of all three sides of the antagonists of the war, and we have the Spartan general Lysander who spared Athens from destruction when she lost the war. […]
There are some really heart-breaking situations involving abortion. Should abortion be allowed if the mother’s and/or the baby’s life is in danger? Should abortion be allowed in case of rape or incest? Should abortion be permitted if it is likely the mother would otherwise commit suicide? Should abortion be permitted to reduce the number of deaths caused by botched abortions by coat hangers or Lysol? […]
We will compare and contrast Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Funeral Oration of Pericles, and Winston Churchill’s speech honoring those pilots who saved democracy after the Battle of Britain. […]
General Winfield Scott, brilliant strategic general and hero of the Mexican War, served under seven Presidents, but in the 1860’s he was in his seventies, and was so obese that he had to be hoisted on and off his horse with a crane. But he was still a sharp general, and his “Anaconda Plan” was the strategy that would win the war, and this Great Snake picture was printed in the newspapers across the country. 1861. This plan called for a naval blockade that strangled the commerce of the Confederacy, the Union forces seizing control of the Mississippi River, then Union forces marching through the heart of the Confederacy. General Scott predicted that 300,000 soldiers would be needed to defeat the Confederacy, which was less than half the size of the eventual Union Army, but it was shocking numbers at the beginning of the war, when the Union Army had fewer than twenty thousand soldiers. […]
Frederick Douglass remembers, “In the South I was a slave, thought of and spoken of as property,” as chattel, like talking livestock. “In the Northern states, a fugitive slave was hunted like a felon, to be hurled into the terrible jaws of slavery, doomed by an inveterate prejudice against color,” “shut out from cabins on steamboats, refused admission to respectable hotels, caricatured, scorned, scoffed, mocked and maltreated by anyone with a white skin.” […]
Copyright 2017
