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Kaepernick refused to stand as a form of political expression—to protest, he said, the oppression of African-Americans by the police and others. The Supreme Court case arose out of a related First Amendment right—to exercise the freedom of religion. In 1943, at the height of the Second World War, the court heard a challenge by a Jehovah’s Witness family to the expulsion of their daughters, Marie and Gathie Barnette, from a school in West Virginia. The sisters had been punished for refusing to salute the flag and repeat the Pledge of Allegiance, something state law required of students.

Kaepernick refused to stand as a form of political expression—to protest, he said, the oppression of African-Americans by the police and others. The Supreme Court case arose out of a related First Amendment right—to exercise the freedom of religion. In 1943, at the height of the Second World War, the court heard a challenge by a Jehovah’s Witness family to the expulsion of their daughters, Marie and Gathie Barnette, from a school in West Virginia.

Economics is a subject that polarises like few others. To some, it's an immoral calculating machine. To others, it's an amoral - not immoral, but amoral - science, descriptive pure and simple. To still more, it has a positively moral commitment to freedom by trying to increase people's choices.

What's puzzling is that morality so often comes thumping into it - when the subject has been taught for generations as if morality was someone else's job.

A chimpanzee is not entitled to the same rights as people and does not have be freed from captivity by its owner, a US court has ruled. The appeals court in New York state said caged chimpanzee Tommy could not be recognised as a "legal person" as it "cannot bear any legal duties". The Nonhuman Rights Project had argued that chimps who had such similar characteristics to the humans deserved basic rights, including freedom. The rights group said it would appeal. Owner pleased In its ruling, the judges wrote: "So far as legal theory is concerned, a person is any being whom the law regards as capable of rights and duties. "Needless to say, unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions.'' The court added that there was no precedent for treating animals as persons and no legal basis.

That the Islamic State has made violent use of history shouldn’t come as a surprise. Perhaps more surprising is that in all those places where a modern nation has been grafted onto an ancient culture, history has returned with a vengeance. From Confucian China to Buddhist Myanmar to Hindu India, history has become the source of a fierce new conservatism that is being used to curb freedoms of women and stoke hatred of minorities. As the ultimate source of legitimacy, history has become a way for modernizing societies to procure the trappings of modernity while guarding themselves from its values.

Too often in our debates about freedom of speech, we assume that it already exists and that it is campus activists, particularly over questions of race, who threaten it. But what Princeton’s students have shown is that, before they came along, there was in fact precious little speech about figures like Wilson, and what speech there was, was mostly bland PR for tourists and prospective students. Even more important, Princeton’s students have shown us that it is precisely the kinds of actions they have taken — which are uncivil, frequently illegal and always unruly — that produce speech.

While my general approach to history is one of modulation — past imperfect, always — I’m leery of those who would say, against the students, don’t erase the past. I’m leery of these critics’ timing: if there’s any erasing going on here, it’s in the daily practices of Princeton. In those campus tours, those campus addresses, the general celebration of the man. Why haven’t we heard criticism of how the past is being erased by Princeton’s celebration of Wilson?I’m also leery of these critics’ assumptions that removing a name from a building is about erasing the past. As if once the name is gone, all conversation stops, all memory disappears.