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April 18 - May 6, 2025
Would the union hold? Would the experiment in a new democracy ultimately prove successful?
Hamilton was a fatherless immigrant,
Morris contributed to the early republic as much or more than people like Ben Franklin or John Adams.
It was his hands that etched “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union…” onto animal skin with a goose feather.
He argued for things like aristocratic rule and against enslaving other human beings.
Like Hamilton and Morris, like you, I too hope for better things.
I suddenly felt very small, a child on a bridge on a round rock that orbited a medium-size star in one of nearly an infinite number of galaxies.
The colors were still there, it’s just that daylight made them hard to see. So too is much of history: the overshadowing suns—the men with the best military strategy, the people with the most ships, those with vast fortunes and political power—they eclipse the beauty that is there, waiting for us in the quiet predawn hours. The people outside the dominant caste, those whose impact has been missed by people who either don’t know where to look or who have intentionally decided not to, the auroras of history:
The best Americans are not the critics, they are the doers. They are the people who went for broke when everyone else yelled to turn back. They are those who know that one becomes great because of who they lift up, not who they put down.
The text of the Preamble imagined America at its finest: Just. Peaceful. Good. And free.
It has been the land of the free while simultaneously sanctioning oppression.
so little has been recorded about the lives of enslaved people, and what was recorded was often from the perspective of the people who owned them,
But delivering her dead baby girl into the arms of the Lord—Clara was a woman of great faith—was far different than delivering her sobbing, living daughter into the arms of an unknown enslaver.
Dred Scott didn’t have any standing to bring a lawsuit.
all African Americans, no matter if they were enslaved or free, were not citizens
she likely didn’t need the likes of Roger Taney to tell her what she had already experienced: that many people considered her less than based solely on the color of her skin.
If anyone tries to tell you the Civil War was a war for “state’s rights,” calmly look them in the eye, and ask, politely and inquisitively, what exactly the states wanted the “right” to do? You can follow up with, “Make their own rules about what?” The answer is, of course, that they wanted to make their own rules about whether they had the right to enslave people. All the “way of life” and “self-determination” and “economic conditions” roads lead right back to slavery. You can also spare me the arguments of “other places in the world enslaved people,” “the United States was one of the first
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While only a small percentage of the country as a whole actively enslaved people, the entire country’s economy, not just the economy of the South, rested on the backs of enslaved Africans.
Denim was first created from the indigo dyeing and cultivating knowledge that came from enslaved Africans in South Carolina.
he made sure to advertise that he did not hire Chinese or Black workers—that his denim blue jeans were made only by white people, even though the cotton and indigo were grown by enslaved labor.[4]
Some people were actively working for abolition. Some people refused to buy goods that had been made by enslaved labor. But most did not. Most looked the other way, reaping the benefits of an economy built on the backs of the enslaved.
When I say fierce debate, what I actually mean is violent debate.
extreme violence within the U.S. Congress during the decades leading up to the Civil War.
“Let states decide for themselves? I think not,”
Soon, she would be forced to move to Washington, D.C., pretending to support her husband’s vanity project: the presidency.
Multiple historians believe Buchanan and William Rufus King, Pierce’s dead vice president, were lovers.
Andrew Jackson referred to them as “Miss Fancy and Aunt Nancy,” which were nicknames that probably suggested exactly what you think they suggested.[11]
“Just do the next needed thing,” she reminded herself when her feet throbbed and her back refused to straighten. Make sure your children have better than you did.
Liberty was apparently only for me, but not for thee.
They wanted their young ones to receive exactly the same education as the white children.
Early twentieth-century thinkers like Du Bois saw people like Virginia as double agents: scraping and bowing to whites to get things they wanted, like books for schools, while simultaneously saying to Black communities that they stood in solidarity with them.
They would never have expected a white teacher to buy land to further the educational opportunities of their communities.
Virginia didn’t just teach them to multiply and write their names, she mothered them.
The audacity of Henrico County to take the money of an elderly woman and then act like they were doing her some kind of giant favor by helping her pay off one quarter of the mortgage on the land that was soon to be theirs.
She viewed schools not merely as a place to gain literacy but as tools to fight systemic poverty.
Revere wasn’t even the only one who rode a horse to warn troops in the distance that the British were coming. A teenage girl did it, too, and she rode twice as far, in the rain. She got a personal thanks from George Washington. But Sybil Ludington didn’t have a famous poem written about her, so hers is not the name we remember.[5]
Women’s health was poorly understood at the time, and it was a common belief among men that pursuing too much education made a woman unfit for childbearing, as it diverted too great a blood supply to the brain and away from reproductive organs.
One reason why so many people, particularly southern Democrats, opposed suffrage for women is because they knew it would give Black women the right to vote, and that, they just couldn’t abide. Giving them the right to vote would upset the entire power dynamic that the United States was founded upon, and the rock upon which it still rested: the supremacy of white men.
What right did Columbus have to discover a place that was already occupied?
She goes on to lay out her case that men and women are equal, because they are both human beings. We can’t have a democracy without men, and we can’t have a democracy without half of the democracy’s citizens—women, she says.
how they ran not from the danger, as many men assumed they would, but toward it.
When her husband died in the 1850s, nearly everything they owned, right down to the clothes on her own back, became property of the state. If she wanted to keep her trunk of wedding gifts, the dishes on which she fed her children, the chairs upon which they sat, she would have to buy them back from the government of Illinois.
Women had few rights of their own—not to own property, not even legal rights to parent the children she birthed.
Some men told them, “Women have too many rights as it is.”[20]
“Why not do the unheard-of thing?” Rebecca asked.[25] And what a question that is. Why not do the unheard-of thing? Why not do what no one else is doing? Why not leave behind the old ways that are no longer serving? Why not be the first?
What they needed was to inspire women in solidarity to know that their highest loyalty was owed not to the Republican Party or Woodrow Wilson, but to women, and convince them that voting against the interests of women was morally wrong. Inez
“President Wilson, how long must women wait for liberty?”[16]
They wanted a spectacle of suffrage. They wanted Congress and President Wilson to see what they had done to Inez,
You were then connected using a series of signals, interchanges, and a bit of magic to someone half a continent away, or even down the street.
Over time, Wilson began to realize that we couldn’t ask women to serve their country and not give them a say in how it was run.
