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b5896b8
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Just as African Americans had learned that they did not have enough strength to make good the promises of emancipation, working people learned that they were not united or strong enough to defeat the combination of private wealth and government power. But their fight would continue.
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Howard Zinn |
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a043613
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The well-paid leaders of the AFL were protected from criticism by tightly controlled meetings and by "goon" squads--hired toughs originally used against strikebreakers but after a while used to intimidate and beat up opponents inside the union."
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Howard Zinn |
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216f040
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George Washington had turned down the requests of blacks, seeking freedom, to fight in the Revolutionary army. So when the British military commander in Virginia, Lord Dunmore, promised freedom to Virginia slaves who joined his forces, this created consternation. A report from one Maryland county worried about poor whites encouraging slave runaways: The insolence of the Negroes in this county is come to such a height, that we are under a ne..
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Howard Zinn |
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41e03b5
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Some newspapers, at the very start of the war, protested. Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune, May 12, 1846: We can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by thousands, and pursue them perhaps to their capital; we can conquer and "annex" their territory; but what then? Have the histories of the ruin of Greek and Roman liberty consequent on such extensions of empire by the sword no lesson for us? Who believes that a scor..
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united-states-of-america
war
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Howard Zinn |
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60f7bc4
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Sexual purity was to be the special virtue of a woman. It was assumed that men, as a matter of biological nature, would sin, but woman must not surrender. As one male author said: "If you do, you will be left in silent sadness to bewail your credulity, imbecility, duplicity, and premature prostitution." A woman wrote that females would get into trouble if they were "high spirited not prudent."
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Howard Zinn |
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08f3509
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No doubt the odds are against dissenters in any nation's judicial system. But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.
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Howard Zinn |
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8098c19
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Slaves hung on determinedly to their selves, to their love of family, their wholeness. A shoemaker on the South Carolina Sea Islands expressed in his own way: "I'se lost an arm, but it hasn't gone out of my brains."
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hope
slavery
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Howard Zinn |
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df3d980
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Unemployment, hard times, were growing in 1914. Could guns divert attention and create some national consensus against an external enemy? It surely was a coincidence--the bombardment of Vera Cruz, the attack on the Ludlow colony. Or perhaps it was, as someone once described human history, "the natural selection of accidents." Perhaps the affair in Mexico was an instinctual response of the system for its own survival, to create a unity of fi..
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Howard Zinn |
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a4632df
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Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy. Certainly this was the experience of African-Americans in this country for two hundred years. With the government failing to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, black men, women, and children decided to do that on their own.
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Howard Zinn |
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0b703f3
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In 1868, the Georgia legislature voted to expel all its Negro members-two senators, twenty-five representatives-and Turner spoke to the Georgia House of Representatives (a black woman graduate student at Atlanta University later brought his speech to light): Mr. Speaker. . . I wish the members of this House to understand the position that I take. I hold that I am a member of this body. Therefore, sir, I shall neither fawn or cringe before a..
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politics
united-states-of-america
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Howard Zinn |
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cc76914
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cult of domesticity for the woman was a way of pacifying her with a doctrine of "separate but equal"--giving her work equally as important as the man's, but separate and different. Inside that "equality" there was the fact that the woman did not choose her mate, and once her marriage took place, her life was determined. One girl wrote in 1791: "The die is about to be cast which will probably determine the future happiness or misery of my li..
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Howard Zinn |
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82c3fb8
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In the thirty years leading up to the Civil War, the law was increasingly interpreted in the courts to suit the capitalist development of the country. Studying this, Morton Horwitz (The Transformation of American Law) points out that the English commonlaw was no longer holy when it stood in the way of business growth. Mill owners were given the legal right to destroy other people's property by flood to carry on their business. The law of "e..
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Howard Zinn |
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3d9c3b4
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cult of true womanhood" could not completely erase what was visible as evidence of woman's subordinate status: she could not vote, could not own property; when she did work, her wages were one-fourth to one-half what men earned in the same job. Women were excluded from the professions of law and medicine, from colleges, from the ministry."
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Howard Zinn |
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d69e31e
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We need to dig under the rubble of war and point out that the Bush administration is using the war as a cover for worsening the income gap in this country, while paying no attention to the problems of most of the American people, while enriching corporations.
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Howard Zinn |
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559f844
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In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, came the first known strike of women factory workers; 202 women joined men in protesting a wage cut and longer hours, but they met separately. Four years later, women in Dover, New Hampshire, struck alone. And in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, when a young woman was fired from her job, other girls left their looms, one of them then climbing the town pump and making, according to a newspaper report, "a f..
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Howard Zinn |
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6b9b1dd
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pounds...." Thomas Jefferson had written a paragraph of the Declaration accusing the King of transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies and "suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce." This seemed to express moral indignation against slavery and the slave trade (Jefferson's personal distaste for slavery must be put alongside the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves to the day he died). Be..
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Howard Zinn |
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f79f437
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He opposed slavery, but could not see blacks as equals, so a constant theme in his approach was to free the slaves and to send them back to Africa. In his 1858 campaign in Illinois for the Senate against Stephen Douglas, Lincoln spoke differently depending on the views of his listeners (and also perhaps depending on how close it was to the election). Speaking in northern Illinois in July (in Chicago), he said: Let us discard all this quibbl..
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Howard Zinn |
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5f68319
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Home labor in cultured lands, appeased and misled by a ballot whose power the dictatorship of vast capital strictly curtailed, was bribed by high wage and political office to unite in an exploitation of white, yellow, brown and black labor, in lesser lands. . . .
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Howard Zinn |
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491723c
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came to be known as the Federalist Papers (opponents of the Constitution became known as anti-Federalists). In Federalist Paper # 10, James Madison argued that representative government was needed to maintain peace in a society ridden by factional disputes. These disputes came from "the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society." The problem..
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Howard Zinn |
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4bf91b1
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Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1753, "When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again..
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Howard Zinn |
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cfdcacc
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Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the India..
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Howard Zinn |
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e2c0c8f
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They drew three lessons from the Pequot War: (1) that the Englishmen's most solemn pledge would be broken whenever obligation conflicted with advantage; (2) that the English way of war had no limit of scruple or mercy; and (3) that weapons of Indian making were almost useless against weapons of European manufacture. These lessons the Indians took to heart.
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Howard Zinn |
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93133ac
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The police force was dominantly Irish, and the official investigation of the riot indicated the police helped the rioters: "... it appears that charges of unprovoked and most brutal clubbing have been made against policemen, with the result that they were reprimanded or fined a day's pay and were yet retained upon the force." --
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Howard Zinn |
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4cd59ff
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I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
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future
hope
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Howard Zinn |
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2b28e5b
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All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government. . . ...
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Howard Zinn |
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9dee178
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The poet Archibald MacLeish, then an Assistant Secretary of State, spoke critically of what he saw in the postwar world: "As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief . . . without moral purpose or human interest. . . ."
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poet
wealth
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Howard Zinn |
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e891f16
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We have known for some time that the poor and ignored were the nonvoters, alienated from a political system they felt didn't care about them, and about which they could do little. Now alienation has spread upward into families above the poverty line. These are white workers, neither rich nor poor, but angry over economic insecurity, unhappy with their work, worried about their neighborhoods, hostile to government--combining elements of raci..
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Howard Zinn |
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d5bfe99
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God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor.
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Howard Zinn |
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d1f131e
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I never cared much for machinery. I could not see into their complications or feel interested in them. . . In sweet June weather I would lean far out of the window, and try not to hear the unceasing clash of sound inside.
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summer
window
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Howard Zinn |
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52de0a6
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And Bernice Johnson, who organized the Albany Freedom Singers and was expelled from Albany State College for her determined involvement in the movement.
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Howard Zinn |
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f663a6c
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An Ashinabe "spring poem" translated by Gerald Vizenor: as my eyes look across the prairie i feel the summer in the spring"
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spring
summer
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Howard Zinn |
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30795cd
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Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed into the murder of whole peoples. Roger
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Howard Zinn |
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9d577a0
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The police force was dominantly Irish, and the official investigation of the riot indicated the police helped the rioters: "... it appears that charges of unprovoked and most brutal clubbing have been made against policemen, with the result that they were reprimanded or fined a day's pay and were yet retained upon the force."
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Howard Zinn |
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8b9a6b3
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But how can the judgment be made if the benefits and losses cannot be balanced because the losses are either unmentioned or mentioned quickly?
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Howard Zinn |
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2945219
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That quick disposal might be acceptable ("Unfortunate, yes, but it had to be done") to the middle and upper classes of the conquering and "advanced" countries. But is it acceptable to the poor of Asia, Africa, Latin America, or to the prisoners in Soviet labor camps, or the blacks in urban ghettos, or the Indians on reservations--to the victims of that progress which benefits a privileged minority in the world? Was it acceptable (or just in..
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Howard Zinn |
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f69f904
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in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been.
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Howard Zinn |
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c369ff1
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It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world.
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Howard Zinn |
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2e90133
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Aldous Huxley: "Liberties are not given, they are taken."
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Howard Zinn |
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f4ee180
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there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it. . . .
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Howard Zinn |
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346194a
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after the Civil War both parties now were controlled by capitalists. They were divided along North-South lines, still hung over with the animosities of the Civil War. This made it very hard to create a party of reform cutting across both parties to unite working people South and North--to say nothing of black and white, foreign-born and native-born.
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Howard Zinn |
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770be7f
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It would take either a full-scale slave rebellion or a full-scale war to end such a deeply entrenched system. If a rebellion, it might get out of hand, and turn its ferocity beyond slavery to the most successful system of capitalist enrichment in the world. If a war, those who made the war would organize its consequences. Hence, it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, not John Brown. In 1859, John Brown was hanged, with federal complic..
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Howard Zinn |
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8f13528
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Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy. Certainly this was the experience of African-Americans in this country for two hundred years.
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Howard Zinn |
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3eb0d95
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Also in 1865, a South Carolina planter wrote to the New York Tribune that the conduct of the Negro in the late crisis of our affairs has convinced me that we were all laboring under a delusion. . . . I believed that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters. But events and reflection have caused me to change these positions. . . . If they were content, happy and attached to their masters, why did they desert him in the..
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Howard Zinn |
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04b3f42
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History is the memory of states,' wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, , in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen's policies. From his standpoint, the 'peace' that Europe had before the French Revolution was 'restored' by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in Engla..
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Howard Zinn |