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Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War? - Magazine
Members of Company E, Fourth U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, pictured at Fort Lincoln, in Maryland. The regiment, which was organized in Baltimore after the war broke out, lost nearly 300 men.
Barney Frank and Ed Rendell are right. In seeking to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, the public-sector unions and their allies on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party made a big mistake. “My side picked a fight they shouldn’t have picked,” Frank told The Hill .
America's Class War: Billionaires Against the Unions
South L.A., Twenty Years Later
Photograph Courtesy of Dark Servier In 1992, when I was eleven years old, I saw a Korean man on TV for the first time. He resembled the immigrants my family knew from church, the local swap meet, and the Asian grocery store. Stocky, with a buzz cut and large glasses, he wore the many-pocketed utility vest of the working-class entrepreneur. But something was wrong. He was tense, surrounded by smoke, his hand at a trigger.Steve Hahn: If X, Then Why?
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention By Manning Marable (Viking Press, 594 pp., $30) When Malcolm X died in a hail of assassin’s gunfire at the Audubon Ballroom in February 1965, the mainstream media in the United States was quick to suggest that he reaped the harvest of bloodshed he had brazenly sown. Calling him an “extremist,” “a demagogue,” a “racist,” and a “spiritual desperado,” commentators often insisted that Malcolm advocated the use of violence, regarded whites as “devils,” and was an embodiment—as a television series on the Nation of Islam had put it in 1959—of the “hate that hate produced.” At best, the press acknowledged Malcolm’s oratorical skills and razor-sharp intelligence, and found him to be personally impressive but politically misguided; at worst, they regarded him as an opportunist and religious zealot intent on stirring the cauldron of racial conflict, the polar opposite of the increasingly admired Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Census: Whites account for less than half of U.S. births for the first time in history.
White births are no longer the majority in the U.S., the Census Bureau announed Thursday Photo by Waltraud Grubitzsch/AFP/Getty Images. The minority is the new majority. The Census Bureau announced Thursday that most of the newborn babies in the United States belong to minority groups, the first time in history that whites of European ancestry have accounted for less than half of that total. Minorities—including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race—accounted for 50.4 percent of all U.S. births during the 12-month period that ended last July, edging past non-Hispanic whites who made up 49.6 percent. "This is an important tipping point," William H.MEETING Ronnie Lupe, the chairman of the White Mountain Apache tribe, is rather like an audience with the chieftain he would once have been. At 82 he has a sage's bearing, takes his time speaking and does not allow himself to be interrupted. He has ears as long as those on statues of the Buddha.
American Indians: Gambling on nation-building
Comment: The Attack on “All-American Muslim”
Dearborn, Michigan, is the city in America with the highest proportion of Muslims. That is not a new development. Immigrants from the Middle East began arriving in the area generations ago, when jobs building cars were still a lure—which should give a sense of the community’s vintage.In 2003, the United States Supreme Court decided the case of Lawrence v. Texas, ruling, by a six-to-three margin, that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional. Even those of us who followed the case had a rather gauzy notion of what had triggered the litigation.
Lawrence v Texas: How Laws Against Sodomy Became Unconstitutional
Against Law, For Order
art by Rebecca Rojer It’s taken decades and millions of lives, but elite opinion is starting to move against mass incarceration. The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books ran detailed exposés on the scale and violence of the penal state. Conservative leaders like Grover Norquist have said that mass incarceration violates the principles of “fiscal responsibility, accountability, and limited government,” while GOP darlings like Mitch Daniels have tried to take the lead in state reform. Soon the common wisdom will shift from “we need to get tough on crime” to “we jail too many people for too long for the wrong reasons.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's War
For a couple of centuries now, we have had to make due with Samuel Johnson’s famous phrase: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Thanks to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, we can now revise this phrase for the twenty-first century. Tthe last last refuge of a scoundrel, it appears, lies in taking up the battle against something called “Christophobia.” Hirsi Ali coins this term as part of her alarmist and deeply hateful cover story for Newsweek . “The War on Christians” is splashed across the cover, but the actual target of Hirsi Ali’s piece becomes more clear in the title provided for the online version of the piece: “The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World.” The terms of Hirsi Ali’s argument, such as it is, are all set out in her opening paragraph:
"Our Kind of Truth" by Ian Buruma
Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space Comments View/Create comment on this paragraph NEW YORK – Rick Santorum, a former United States senator seeking the Republican Party’s nomination to challenge President Barack Obama this year, has been saying some very strange things about the Netherlands."American Chimp" by Nathaniel Gold Americans take their rights seriously. But there is a lot of misunderstanding about what actually constitutes a ‘right.’ Religious believers are correct that they have a right to freely express their beliefs.
Nonhuman Personhood Rights (and Wrongs) | The Primate Diaries
The True Costs of Humanitarian Intervention
Essay Despite the fall of the Qaddafi regime in Libya, humanitarian intervention still has plenty of critics. But their targets are usually the early, ugly missions of the 1990s.Secretary Clinton will testify tomorrow before the House Foreign Relations Committee, "Assessing U.S. Foreign Policy Priorities Amidst Economic Challenges: The Foreign Relations Budget for Fiscal Year 2013." Each year there are myriad advocacy groups lobbying for a robust foreign assistance budget and just as many saying enough with tax-payers' money going to corrupt governments, congressional earmarks, dubious special interest programs and long-standing civil servant pet projects that do nothing to address the challenges of the developing world or compliment U.S. foreign policy priorities. This year, we can add to this annual procession of Republican candidates vying for the 2012 presidential nomination who still repeatedly call for a foreign assistance budget that starts at "zero." A position that still baffles me.
Why foreign assistance is still important
The Military