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d5f963b
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Is not Life miserable enough, comes not Death soon enough, without resort to the hideous enginery of War?
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Howard Zinn |
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12d7428
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to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality.
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Howard Zinn |
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baa0e14
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Revenge! Workingmen, to Arms!!! . . . You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; . . . you have worked yourself to death . . . your Children you have sacrificed to the factory lord--in short: you have been miserable and obedient slaves all these years: Why? To satisfy the insatiable greed, to fill the coffers of your lazy thieving master? When you ask them now to lessen your burdens, he sends his bloodhounds out to shoot you, ..
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Howard Zinn |
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bf63071
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In April 1914, two National Guard companies were stationed in the hills overlooking the largest tent colony of strikers, the one at Ludlow, housing a thousand men, women, children. On the morning of April 20, a machine gun attack began on the tents. The miners fired back. Their leader, a Greek named Lou Tikas, was lured up into the hills to discuss a truce, then shot to death by a company of National Guardsmen. The women and children dug pi..
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Howard Zinn |
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2e06a62
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When the first contingents of U.S. troops were being sent to Saudi Arabia, in August of 1990, Corporal Jeff Patterson, a twenty-two-year-old Marine stationed in Hawaii, sat down on the runway of the airfield and refused to board a plane bound to Saudi Arabia. He asked to be discharged from the Marine Corps: I have come to believe that there are no justified wars. . . . I began to question exactly what I was doing in the Marine Corps about t..
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history
military
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Howard Zinn |
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4d10b5e
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Paine's pamphlet appealed to a wide range of colonial opinion angered by England. But it caused some tremors in aristocrats like John Adams, who were with the patriot cause but wanted to make sure it didn't go too far in the direction of democracy. Paine had denounced the so-called balanced government of Lords and Commons as a deception, and called for single-chamber representative bodies where the people could be represented. Adams denounc..
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Howard Zinn |
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28a91d5
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I said, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern blacks did, as antiwar protesters did.
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Howard Zinn |
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fe8ac7e
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What if these different despised groups--the Indians, the slaves, the poor whites--should combine? Even before there were so many blacks, in the seventeenth century, there was, as Abbot Smith puts it, "a lively fear that servants would join with Negroes or Indians to overcome the small number of masters." --
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Howard Zinn |
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ba1ae35
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It was in his economic interest to keep women servants from marrying or from having sexual relations, because childbearing would interfere with work. Benjamin Franklin, writing as "Poor Richard" in 1736, gave advice to his readers: "Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong and homely." Servants could not marry without permission, could be separated from their families, could be whipped for various offenses. Pennsylvania law in the seventeent..
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Howard Zinn |
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bf1343b
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We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America: the desperation of starving settlers, the special helplessness of the displaced African, the powerful incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites, the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration. The point is that the elements of..
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Howard Zinn |
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32118a5
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So, we destroyed the German forces (twelve hundred Flying Fortresses bombing several thousand German soldiers!)--and also the French population of Royan. After the war, I read a dispatch by the New York Times correspondent in the area: "About 350 civilians, dazed or bruised ... crawled from the ruins and said the air attacks had been 'such hell as we never believed possible.' " At our bombing altitudes--twenty-five or thirty thousand feet--..
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Howard Zinn |
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7f79489
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But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world--by a teacher, a writer, anyone--is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.
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Howard Zinn |
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9cd683b
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Every now and then I am impressed with the thinking of the non-Indian. I was in Cleveland last year and got to talking with a non-Indian about American history. He said that he was really sorry about what had happened to Indians, but that there was a good reason for it. The continent had to be developed and he felt that Indians had stood in the way, and thus had had to be removed. "After all," he remarked, "what did you do with the land whe..
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Howard Zinn |
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2c4cfc4
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As for the Cherokees, they faced a set of laws passed by Georgia: their lands were taken, their government abolished, all meetings prohibited. Cherokees advising others not to migrate were to be imprisoned. Cherokees could not testify in court against any white. Cherokees could not dig for the gold recently discovered on their land. A delegation of them, protesting to the federal government, received this reply from Jackson's new Secretary ..
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Howard Zinn |
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b0759b2
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In New York you could see the poor lying in the streets with the garbage. There were no sewers in the slums, and filthy water drained into yards and alleys, into the cellars where the poorest of the poor lived, bringing with it a typhoid epidemic in 1837, typhus in 1842. In the cholera epidemic of 1832, the rich fled the city; the poor stayed and died.
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Howard Zinn |
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55ebc6c
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The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart's heart in all men, from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business . . . a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country..
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Howard Zinn |
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fc079ca
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the Trident submarine, which was capable of firing hundreds of nuclear warheads, cost $1.5 billion. It was totally useless except in a nuclear war, in which case it would only add several hundred warheads to the tens of thousands already available. That $1.5 billion was enough to finance a five-year program of child immunization around the world against deadly diseases, and prevent five million deaths
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Howard Zinn |
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6c2b616
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Once, however, engaged in the inquiry, I was not very long in finding out the true solution of the matter. It was not color, but crime, not God, but man, that afforded the true explanation of the existence of slavery; nor was I long in finding out another important truth, viz: what man can make, man can unmake. . . .
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Howard Zinn |
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311b99e
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We have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes. This was not purely deception; it involved, in part, a genuine recognition of lower-class grievances, which helps to account for its effectiveness as a tactic over the centuries. As
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Howard Zinn |
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6ca4659
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Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races? The United States' armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave..
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Howard Zinn |
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c45e26f
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Washington guns killed American nuns!'" The last slogan was a reference to the execution in the fall of 1980 of four American nuns by Salvadoran soldiers. Thousands of people in El Salvador were being murdered each year by "death squads" sponsored by a government armed by the United States, and the American public was beginning to pay attention to events in this tiny Central American country."
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Howard Zinn |
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6ff2b4f
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Starting with Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, by 1760, there had been eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments. There had also been six black rebellions, from South Carolina to New York, and forty riots of various origins. By this time also, there emerged, according to Jack Greene, "stable, coherent, effective and acknowledged local political and social elites." And by the 1760s, this local leadership saw the possibility..
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Howard Zinn |
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fc6d4c3
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There was much talk in the American press in the early eighties about the political cautiousness of a new generation of college students concerned mostly with their own careers. But when, at the Harvard commencement of June 1983, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes criticized American intervention in Latin America, and said, "Because we are your true friends, we will not permit you to conduct yourselves in Latin American affairs as the Soviet Uni..
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Howard Zinn |
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bf904d9
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When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, "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."
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Howard Zinn |
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dd151ce
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will not hold ourselves bound to obey the laws in which we have no voice of representation.
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Howard Zinn |
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a89baaf
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The U.S. government did not seem to recognize that its punitive foreign policies, its military installations in countries all over the globe, might arouse anger in foreign countries, and that anger might turn to violence.
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Howard Zinn |
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9212892
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Ten thousand people wrote letters to the governor of Utah, protesting the verdict, but Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad. Before he died he wrote to Bill Haywood, another IWW leader, "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize." Socialism,"
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Howard Zinn |
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f994b7c
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Oil shaped U.S. decisions about the Middle East during both Democratic and Republican presidencies. The administration of President Jimmy Carter, a liberal Democrat, had produced the "Carter Doctrine." Under this doctrine, the United States claimed the right to defend its interest in Middle Eastern oil "by any means necessary, including military force." In"
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Howard Zinn |
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e8ecc4b
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A young woman: "As a white middle class person I've never felt discriminated against at all. But I'll say this: If anyone ever tried to make me sit in a different schoolroom, use a different bathroom, or anything like that, I would knock them right on their ass. . . . The people are the last ones that need their rights stated on paper, for if they're abused or injusticed by government or authority, they can act on the injustice directly. . ..
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Howard Zinn |
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67c274c
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Carl Bridenbaugh's study of colonial cities, Cities in the Wilderness, reveals a clear-cut class system. He finds: The leaders of early Boston were gentlemen of considerable wealth who, in association with the clergy, eagerly sought to preserve in America the social arrangements of the Mother Country. By means of their control of trade and commerce, by their political domination of the inhabitants through church and Town Meeting, and by car..
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Howard Zinn |
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23ee808
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Socialists like Helen Keller did not think suffrage was enough. Blind and deaf, Keller fought for change with her spirit and her pen. In 1911 she wrote, "Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? ... We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee." Black"
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Howard Zinn |
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29df750
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Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make 257 dollars on every (black slave) in a year, and spend only 12 or 13 dollars on his keep.
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slavery
founding-fathers
slavery-history
food-for-thought
slavery-in-the-united-states
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Howard Zinn |
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381547c
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We have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes.
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Howard Zinn |
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9efe3aa
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It appeared March 9, 1960, dramatically, on a full page of the Constitution under a huge headline, "AN APPEAL FOR HUMAN RIGHTS," and it created a sensation: We ... have joined our hearts, minds, and bodies in the cause of gaining those rights which are inherently ours as members of the human race and as citizens of the United States.... We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are already legally and morally ours to be meted..
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Howard Zinn |
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4ce0c17
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This money could have paid for health care for everyone and for programs to create jobs for all. Instead of giving out contracts for companies to build bombers and nuclear submarines, the government could have given contracts to nonprofit agencies to hire people to build homes, clean up rivers, and construct public transportation systems. Instead,
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Howard Zinn |
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e363f69
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Is there a "national interest" when a few people decide on war, and huge numbers of others--here and abroad--are killed or crippled as a result of such a decision? Should citizens not ask in whose interest are we doing what we are doing? Then why not, I came to think, tell the story of wars not through the eyes of the generals and diplomats but from the viewpoints of the GIs, of the parents who received the black-bordered telegrams, even of..
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Howard Zinn |
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abc9221
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By the end of the Clinton years, the United States had more than 2 million people in prison--a higher percentage of the population than any other country in the world, except maybe Communist China. Visions
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Howard Zinn |
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26375cf
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My viewpoint, 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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90c070a
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But opinion surveys in the 1980s and 1990s showed that Americans favored health care for everyone. They also were in favor of guaranteed jobs, government help for the poor and homeless, military budget cuts, and taxes on the rich. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats were willing to take these bold steps. What
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Howard Zinn |
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ea0fcc7
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You ask me why the I.W.W. is not patriotic to the United States. If you were a bum without a blanket; if you had left your wife and kids when you went west for a job, and had never located them since; if your job had never kept you long enough in a place to qualify you to vote; if you slept in a lousy, sour bunkhouse, and ate food just as rotten as they could give you and get by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your cooking cans full of hol..
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Howard Zinn |
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c08202e
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And one woman wrote, in 1850, in the book Greenwood Leaves: "True feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood." Another book, Recollections of a Southern Matron: "If any habit of his annoyed me, I spoke of it once or twice, calmly, then bore it quietly." Giving women "Rules for Conjugal and Domestic Happiness," one book ended with: "Do not expect too much."
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Howard Zinn |
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8467d2a
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What if citizens organized to demand what the Declaration of Independence promised: a government that protected the equal rights of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? This would call for an economic system that distributed wealth in a thoughtful and humane way. It would mean a culture where young people were not taught to seek success as a mask for greed. Throughout
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Howard Zinn |
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e62cd5d
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A Creek man more than a hundred years old, named Speckled Snake, reacted to Andrew Jackson's policy of removal: Brothers! I have listened to many talks from our great white father. When he first came over the wide waters, he was but a little man . . . very little. His legs were cramped by sitting long in his big boat, and he begged for a little land to light his fire on. . . . But when the white man had warmed himself before the Indians' fi..
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Howard Zinn |
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0b39538
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The issues of free trade are complicated, but protestors asked a simple question: Should the health and freedom of ordinary people all over the world be sacrificed so that corporations can make a profit? Tens
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Howard Zinn |