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ced4279
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Here was the traditional device by which those in charge of any social order mobilize and discipline a recalcitrant population--offering the adventure and rewards of military service to get poor people to fight for a cause they may not see clearly as their own.
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Howard Zinn |
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5b400e9
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In the White House now was James Polk, a Democrat, an expansionist, who, on the night of his inauguration, confided to his Secretary of the Navy that one of his main objectives was the acquisition of California. His order to General Taylor to move troops to the Rio Grande was a challenge to the Mexicans. It was not at all clear that the Rio Grande was the southern boundary of Texas, although Texas had forced the defeated Mexican general San..
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Howard Zinn |
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e079348
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I think of Charles Sherrod. He was a SNCC "field secretary" and one of those young people who went into the toughest towns in the deep South to set up Freedom Houses and help local folk organize to change their lives."
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Howard Zinn |
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2f7a2cf
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And even the privileged minority--must it not reconsider, with that practicality which even privilege cannot abolish, the value of its privileges, when they become threatened by the anger of the sacrificed, whether in organized rebellion, unorganized riot, or simply those brutal individual acts of desperation labeled crimes by law and the state?
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Howard Zinn |
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d46513d
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A Hopi Indian named Sun Chief said: I had learned many English words and could recite part of the Ten Commandments. I knew how to sleep on a bad, pray to Jesus, comb my hair, eat with a knife and fork, and use a toilet. . . . I had also learned that a person thinks with his head instead of his heart.
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heart
head
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Howard Zinn |
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a09d9d7
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Jackson himself described how the treaties were obtained: ". . . we addressed ourselves feelingly to the predominant and governing passion of all Indian tribes, i.e., their avarice or fear." He encouraged white squatters to move into Indian lands, then told the Indians the government could not remove the whites and so they had better cede the lands or be wiped out. He also, Rogin says, "practiced extensive bribery." These treaties, these la..
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Howard Zinn |
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f14d45c
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In Wisconsin in 1856, the LaCrosse and Milwaukee Railroad got a million acres free by distributing about $900,000 in stocks and bonds to fifty-nine assemblymen, thirteen senators, the governor. Two years later the railroad was bankrupt and the bonds were worthless.
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Howard Zinn |
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0d97cce
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Dan Berrigan wrote a "Meditation" at the time of the Catonsville incident: Our apologies good friends for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. . . . We say: killing is disorder, life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize. for the sake of that order, we ri..
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poor
peace
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Howard Zinn |
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794df65
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Some historians think those first blacks in Virginia were considered as servants, like the white indentured servants brought from Europe. But the strong probability is that, even if they were listed as "servants" (a more familiar category to the English), they were viewed as being different from white servants, were treated differently, and in fact were slaves. In any case, slavery developed quickly into a regular institution, into the norm..
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Howard Zinn |
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40bbb22
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They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among savior, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.
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Howard Zinn |
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d8a36d6
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Mexico surrendered. There were calls among Americans to take all of Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed February 1848, just took half. The Texas boundary was set at the Rio Grande; New Mexico and California were ceded. The United States paid Mexico $15 million, which led the Whig Intelligencer to conclude that "we take nothing by conquest. . . . Thank God."
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Howard Zinn |
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c06421c
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Even allowing for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.
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Howard Zinn |
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1c0bc27
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New York blacks could not vote unless they owned $250 in property (a qualification not applied to whites).
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Howard Zinn |
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fb21c1b
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It was an example of a common phenomenon in American journalism (perhaps in social criticism in general), the shallow focusing on agents or on individuals, thus concealing what a deeper analysis would reveal--the failure of the government itself, indeed, of the political system.
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Howard Zinn |
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118cf21
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The Constitution became even more acceptable to the public at large after the first Congress, responding to criticism, passed a series of amendments known as the Bill of Rights. These amendments seemed to make the new government a guardian of people's liberties: to speak, to publish, to worship, to petition, to assemble, to be tried fairly, to be secure at home against official intrusion. It was, therefore, perfectly designed to build popul..
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Howard Zinn |
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879c28b
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wealthy conservatives at the ballot box. The Constitution, then, illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to ..
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Howard Zinn |
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a370a5d
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A writer in early 1930, boosting the beauty business, started off a magazine article with the sentence: "The average American woman has sixteen square feet of skin."
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skin
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Howard Zinn |
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19f532d
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Certain black women faced the triple hurdle--of being abolitionists in a slave society, of being black among white reformers, and of being women in a reform movement dominated by men. When Sojourner Truth rose to speak in 1853 in New York City at the Fourth National Woman's Rights Convention, it all came together. There was a hostile mob in the hall shouting, jeering, threatening. She said: I know that it feels a kind o' hissin' and ticklin..
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Howard Zinn |
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9fbb372
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Money (before he became a Supreme Court justice), wrote: "They control the people through the people's own money."
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Howard Zinn |
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12a9b46
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The FBI is supposed to investigate criminal activities, but, like the old Soviet secret police, it seems also to take note of gatherings and public statements where the government is criticized.
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Howard Zinn |
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982e06b
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The hands of Hitler were filthy, but those of the United States were not clean. Our government had accepted, was still accepting, the subordination of black people in what we claimed was a democratic society. Our government threw Japanese families into concentration camps on the racist supposition that anyone Japanese--even if born in this country--could not be allowed to remain free.
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Howard Zinn |
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376ab8f
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It was the job of education, he said, to smash through this make-believe and give black people a realistic picture of themselves and of the world.
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Howard Zinn |
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bdc8c97
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And so it went, in industry after industry--shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the "welfare state."
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Howard Zinn |
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0dee66c
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The Church finally seeks to make complete idiots out of the mass and to make them forego the paradise on earth by promising a fictitious heaven.
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Howard Zinn |
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8e68b23
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Thus it could moderate labor rebellion by channeling energy into elections--just as the constitutional system channeled possibly troublesome energy into voting.
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Howard Zinn |
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d5a8d78
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What the movement accomplished was historic, but soon it came up against obstacles far more formidable than the signs and badges of racial segregation. First, an economic system that, while lavishly rewarding some people and giving enough to others to gain their loyalty, consigns a substantial part of the population to misery, generation after generation. And along with this, a national ideology so historically soaked in racism that nonwhit..
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Howard Zinn |
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1cee15d
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That day, throughout the nation, in towns and cities that had never seen an antiwar rally, several million people were protesting the war. It was the largest public demonstration in the nation's history. On Moratorium Day I was racing from one antiwar rally to another, as so many others were, our voices hoarse by the end of the day.
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Howard Zinn |
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5ce0dfe
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a young black man who had notified his draft board he could not in conscience cooperate with the draft because he was repelled by the violence of the Vietnam war. He received a five-year sentence. Gaylin writes: "Hank's was the first five-year sentence I had encountered. He was also the first black man." There were additional factors: "How was your hair then?" I asked. "Afro." "And what were you wearing?" "A dashiki." "Don't you think that ..
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Howard Zinn |
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aca89b2
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Until Americans can overcome this idealization of law, until they begin to see that law is, like other institutions and actions, to be measured against moral principles, against human needs, we will remain a static society in a world of change, a society deaf to the rising cries for justice- and therefore,a society in serious trouble." "The realities of american politics, it turns out, are different than as described in old civic textbooks..
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Howard Zinn |
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f988c29
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The "mystique" that Friedan spoke of was the image of the woman as mother, wife, living through her husband, through her children, giving up her own dreams for that. She concluded: "The only way for a woman as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own."
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man
woman
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Howard Zinn |
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ec838d1
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The day after Congress declared war, the Socialist party met in emergency convention in St. Louis and called the declaration "a crime against the people of the United States." In the summer of 1917, Socialist antiwar meetings in Minnesota drew large crowds--five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand farmers--protesting the war, the draft, profiteering. A local newspaper in Wisconsin, the Plymouth Review, said that probably no party ever g..
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Howard Zinn |
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fd2ef47
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The system was psychological and physical at the same time. The slaves were taught discipline, were impressed again and again with the idea of their own inferiority to "know their place," to see blackness as a sign of subordination, to be awed by the power of the master, to merge their interest with the master's, destroying their own individual needs. To accomplish this there was the discipline of hard labor, the breakup of the slave family..
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Howard Zinn |
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a2e536b
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The literature that followed World War II, James Jones's From Here to Eternity, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, captured this GI anger against the army "brass." In The Naked and the Dead, the soldiers talk in battle, and one of them says: "The only thing wrong with this Army is it never lost a war." Toglio was shocked. "You think we ought to lose this one?" Red found himself carried away. "What have I ..
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war
winning
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Howard Zinn |
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6582dfb
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Frederick Douglass, former slave, extraordinary speaker and writer, wrote in his Rochester newspaper the North Star, January 21, 1848, of "the present disgraceful, cruel, and iniquitous war with our sister republic. Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion." Douglass was scornful of the unwillingness of opponents of the war to take real action (even the abolitionists kept paying their taxes): The determinati..
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Howard Zinn |
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a21cda5
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The New Yorker Cadwallader Colden, in his Address to the Freeholders in 1747, attacked the wealthy as tax dodgers unconcerned with the welfare of others (although he himself was wealthy) and spoke for the honesty and dependability of "the midling rank of mankind" in whom citizens could best trust "our liberty & Property." This was to become a critically important rhetorical device for the rule of the few, who would speak to the many of "our..
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Howard Zinn |
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3483f67
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It is pretended that, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, it is "we the people" who wrote that document, rather than fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central government. That use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us--rich and poor and ..
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Howard Zinn |
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c65560b
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It was Thomas Jefferson, in France as ambassador at the time of Shays' Rebellion, who spoke of such uprisings as healthy for society. In a letter to a friend he wrote: "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.... God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.... The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the b..
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Howard Zinn |
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b6cc9c2
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It was a complex chain of oppression in Virginia. The Indians were plundered by white frontiersmen, who were taxed and controlled by the Jamestown elite. And the whole colony was being exploited by England, which bought the colonists' tobacco at prices it dictated and made 100,000 pounds a year for the King. Berkeley himself, returning to England years earlier to protest the English Navigation Acts, which gave English merchants a monopoly o..
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Howard Zinn |
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c6f25e3
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Black civil rights activists in the South were among the first to resist the draft. SNCC's Bob Moses joined historian Staughton Lynd and veteran pacifist Dave Dellinger to march in Washington against the war, and Life Magazine had a dramatic photo of the three of them walking abreast, being splattered with red paint by angry super-patriots.
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Howard Zinn |
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2576b10
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Posters appealed for volunteers in Massachusetts: "Men of old Essex! Men of Newburyport! Rally around the bold, gallant and lionhearted Cushing. He will lead you to victory and to glory!" They promised pay of $7 to $10 a month, and spoke of a federal bounty of $24 and 160 acres of land. But one young man wrote anonymously to the Cambridge Chronicle: Neither have I the least idea of "joining" you, or in any way assisting the unjust war wagin..
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Howard Zinn |
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1c6e5d0
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On the other hand, a white shoemaker wrote in 1848 in the Awl, the newspaper of Lynn shoe factory workers: . . . we are nothing but a standing army that keeps three million of our brethren in bondage. . . . Living under the shade of Bunker Hill monument, demanding in the name of humanity, our right, and withholding those rights from others because their skin is black! Is
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Howard Zinn |
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2fc7105
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In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law and in the Congo in the early 16th century with law in Portugal and England. In those European countries, where the idea of private property was becoming powerful, theft was punishable brutally. In England, even as late as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a rag of cotton. But in the Congo, communal life persisted. The idea of private property was a strange one, and ..
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slavery
slavery-history
slavery-in-the-united-states
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Howard Zinn |
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bfbf2fa
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King's stress on love and nonviolence was powerfully effective in building a sympathetic following throughout the nation, among whites as well as blacks.
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nonviolence
race
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Howard Zinn |
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eea8915
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A black man, Benjamin Banneker, who taught himself mathematics and astronomy, predicted accurately a solar eclipse, and was appointed to plan the new city of Washington, wrote to Thomas Jefferson: I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of beings, who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world; that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt; and that we have long..
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Howard Zinn |