Lyndon wrote in the school paper: “What you accomplish in life depends almost completely upon what you make yourself do.” “Perfect concentration and a great desire will bring a person success in any field of work he chooses. The very first thing one should do is to train the mind to concentrate upon the essentials and discard the frivolous and unimportant.” […]
When studying the rabbinical commentaries on Deuteronomy, I was struck by the number of times the commandment to Love God was repeated in various forms, including the commandment to Fear God, which is roughly equivalent, so I decided to count them, there are about twenty repetitions. This was surprising to me as a Christian, for as St Paul exhorts, “the letter” of the law “kills, but the Spirit gives life.” […]
David Frum writes, “Zelensky came to Washington to speak for his nation. He came to Washington to ask for assistance. But above all, he came to Washington to recall Americans to themselves. He came to say, My embattled people believe in you. Embedded in his words of trust was a challenge: If we believe in you, perhaps you can again believe in yourselves?” […]
Theodore Roosevelt was not a man bound by class, which can be seen in the composition of the Rough Rider volunteer regiment unit he organized to fight in the Spanish American War. The newspaper publicity hyping his heroic charge leading his Rough Rider regiment up San Juan Hill made him a household name, eventually propelling him to the Presidency.
Roosevelt, like his distant cousin Franklin, was a member of the patrician class, which meant that, of course, he attended Harvard University. After serving in the New York State Legislature, Roosevelt was devastated when both his beautiful young wife Alice and his mother passed away on the same day, just two days after the birth of his daughter, also named Alice. For solace, he purchased a cattle ranch in North Dakota, developing many friendships among the rough riding cowboys in this western state. His rough rider recruits were an unlikely mix of wealthy blue-blooded aristocrats and rough and ready cowboys from the Badlands.
Roosevelt’s Rough Riders were not the only regiment charging up San Juan Hill, history books often do not mention the role of the colored regiment Buffalo soldiers in the Spanish-American War. During the war Roosevelt was chided for fraternizing with the enlisted men, this criticism makes more sense if he fraternized with both his Rough Riders and the Buffalo soldiers, which have an interesting history of their own. […]
In our continuing series of blogs and videos on WEB Du Bois, we will now reflect on these questions, among others:
What role did he play in making the NAACP the leading black activist organization?
How did he increase awareness of civil rights issues among Americans?
What were the tensions between him and the NAACP?
When studying the life and career of WEB Du Bois, we can ask ourselves another key question:
Why was he such a contrarian? […]
In this blog we will reflect on the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, with the subtitle, The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. This book documents both on an individual level and historically how the convict labor system worked in the Deep South. These convict labor camps were often every bit as brutal as the Siberian gulag labor camps in Russia under Stalin, in both systems many of the prisoners died from overwork, neglect, abuse, and starvation. […]
Many white protestors at School Board meetings have only a vague notion of what Critical Race Theory means, other than somehow it is a communist plot by blacks, or that it intends to make white children feel guilty about themselves or their country, in essence they want teachers to teach their white children some variation of the Lost Cause myth, that the Civil War was not caused by slavery, that the Civil War was fought for states’ rights, and that the North should not have invaded the South by arms. […]
The Church Fathers of Vatican II believed that the Catholic guarantee of Religious Liberty was crucial for regaining the respect of many believers and the modern world. History had evolved so that the Catholic Church was not on the side of truth regarding religious liberty. From ancient times the Catholic Church was supported first by the Roman emperors starting with Constantine, and then the royalty of medieval Europe, but the absolute monarchies had all disappeared, giving way to dictators and republics, some of which were constitutional monarchies. The Jacobism of the French Revolution and its grandchild communism were the enemies of the church, and the church supported fascism to combat communism. World War II totally discredited fascism, now the Catholic Church saw democracy as the bulwark opposing communism, and religious liberty was a cornerstone for democracy. […]
Copyright 2017
