Frederick Douglass
Lincoln in Hollywood, from Griffith to Spielberg
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Census Nonsense
When asked about his race on the census form, Barack Obama, the child of a white Kansan and black African, did not take the option of checking both “white” and “black” or “some other race.” Instead, he checked “black, African American or Negro.” By doing that, Obama probably did what was expected of him, but he also confirmed an enduring legacy of American racism. READ MORE >>
Obama, Niebuhr, and U.S. Politics
In the wake of Barack Obama’s speech in Oslo, there has been much talk--some of it based on intellectual hearsay--about the influence that theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had on Obama. READ MORE >>
Disputations: The Lost Lincoln
Click here to read responses by Michael Kazin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Fred Kaplan. Click here to read Sean Wilentz's response to his critics. READ MORE >>
That Night
The leaves were not all that was changing in Lafayette Park. I had never before seen a patriotic mosh-pit, but I was gladly trapped in one outside the White House in the hours after Barack Obama's inexorable but still unimaginable victory. I had also never seen young people march on the White House in the cause of joy. READ MORE >>
Fox History Channel
The Universalist
Recollected Works of Abraham Lincoln Compiled and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher (Stanford University Press, 648 pp., $60) When the Republican Party nominated him in May 1860 to run for president, Abraham Lincoln started to see double: READ MORE >>
Douglass to Thomas
Black and Right
Frederick Douglass remarked that “the Republican Party is the deck, all else is the sea.” It was the Republican Party, after all, that had been organized in 1854 to prevent the extension of slavery. It was Abraham Lincoln, a Republican president, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation. And it was the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction who issued the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, outlawing slavery and granting citizenship and voting rights to blacks. READ MORE >>
