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A recent decision by the Cherokee Nation’s Supreme Court struck down a law that freedmen – descendants of people enslaved by Cherokees in the 18th and 19th centuries – cannot hold elective tribal office.

This decision means that the 8,500 tribal descendants of Cherokee freedmen can run for tribal office. Freedmen currently have access to voting and other benefits of citizenship that were not a part of this particular decision.

The Cherokee Nation has wrestled with the tribal citizenship status of freedmen since U.S. officials forced Cherokees to adopt freedmen into the tribe in 1866.

As a historian, I was influenced by E. H. Carr’s thinking about the past and present as part of a continuum that stretches into the future. In What is History? (1961), Carr argued that concern with the future is what really motivates the study of the past. As a teacher and political activist, I also strongly believe that schools should promote active citizenship as essential for maintaining a democratic society.

in an effort to survive, the NCSS has largely abandoned its commitment to these ideas, twisting itself into a pretzel to adapt to national Common Core standards and to satisfy influential conservative organizations that they are not radical, or even liberal. I suspect, but cannot document, that the organization’s membership has precipitously declined during the past two decades and it has increasingly depended financial support for its conferences and publications from deep-pocketed traditional and rightwing groups who advertise and have display booths.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Since the introduction of NCLB, there has been a steady reduction in the amount of time spent in the teaching of social studies, with the most profound decline noticed in the elementary grades.”

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) and Sen.-designate Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) are pushing for undocumented essential workers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic to be fast-tracked for U.S. citizenship. 

Padilla’s own parents came to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1960s and worked in restaurants and house cleaning.  

“These are people who feed us, clean our homes and hospitals and offices… and they do all this while living in fear of deportation, exploitation and now of this pandemic,”

You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.

Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are

Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.

I’m pursuing French citizenship. The whole procedure can take years. Amid repeated requests for new documents, some would-be French people just give up.

This may be by design. “The difficulty of the ordeal seems a means of testing the authenticity of his/her commitment to the project of becoming French,” the sociologists Didier Fassin and Sarah Mazouz concluded in their 2009 paper “What Is It to Become French?” Officials can reject an applicant because he hasn’t adopted French values, or merely because his request isn’t “opportune.”

There’s a long tradition of Frenchification here. Napoleon Bonaparte was born Napoleone di Buonaparte and spoke French with a thick Corsican accent. He and others spent the 19th century transforming France from a nation with a patchwork of regional languages and dialects to one where practically everyone spoke proper French.

When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this way. The most obvious example is human beings. Slavery was appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought and sold at auction. Such treatment fails to value human beings as persons, worthy of dignity and respect; it sees them as instruments of gain and objects of use. Something similar can be said of other cherished goods and practices. We don’t allow children to be bought and sold, no matter how difficult the process of adoption can be or how willing impatient prospective parents might be. Even if the prospective buyers would treat the child responsibly, we worry that a market in children would express and promote the wrong way of valuing them. Children are properly regarded not as consumer goods but as beings worthy of love and care. Or consider the rights and obligations of citizenship. If you are called to jury duty, you can’t hire a substitute to take your place. Nor do we allow citizens to sell their votes, even though others might be eager to buy them. Why not? Because we believe that civic duties are not private property but public responsibilities. To outsource them is to demean them, to value them in the wrong way. These examples illustrate a broader point: some of the good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question—health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them.

After narrating the history of Latin, Persian, Phoenician and other once-dominant languages, all now either dead or consigned to their native communities, Mr. Ostler argues that English too will sputter out relatively soon. Among the factors dooming it is the lack of any institution to demand its survival—no priestly use, as Latin or Sanskrit had, or government that requires its subjects to keep their linguistic skills up to enjoy full citizenship. As English loses cachet, it will become optional, and ultimately its reign will be one of the shortest in the history of lingua francas.

But regional languages are gaining enough traction in trade to allow their speakers to discard English, particularly if people can transact their cultural and commercial business with the crutch of computer software and machine translation.

The one issue that Mr. Ostler treats insufficiently is what the world might lose after what his subtitle calls "the return of Babel." One needn't be sentimental about English to wonder whether it isn't useful to have one language, rich in literature, that everyone shares in addition to a mother tongue.

BACK in 1993, the misanthropic art critic Robert Hughes published a grumpy, entertaining book called “Culture of Complaint,” in which he predicted that America was doomed to become increasingly an “infantilized culture” of victimhood. It was a rant against what he saw as a grievance industry appearing all across the political spectrum.

Members of one group were prompted to write a short essay about a time when they felt bored; the other to write about “a time when your life seemed unfair. Perhaps you felt wronged or slighted by someone.” After writing the essay, the participants were interviewed and asked if they wanted to help the scholars in a simple, easy task. The results were stark. Those who wrote the essays about being wronged were 26 percent less likely to help the researchers, and were rated by the researchers as feeling 13 percent more entitled.

“Victimhood culture” has now been identified as a widening phenomenon by mainstream sociologists. And it is impossible to miss the obvious examples all around us.

newish is the rhetoric of unreality, the insistence, chiefly by Democrats, that some politicians are incapable of perceiving the truth because they have an epistemological deficit: they no longer believe in evidence, or even in objective reality.

the past of proof is strange and, on its uncertain future, much in public life turns. In the end, it comes down to this: the history of truth is cockamamie, and lately it’s been getting cockamamier.

. Michael P. Lynch is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a thought experiment: “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain.” As thought experiments go, this one isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.”) Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes. It would be, Lynch says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know. I Google, therefore I am not.

a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. “Good rig”: the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. “Ed level 1”: parents have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. “MUSD”: a musician in the highest category of promise. Kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the “brag”—were already in trouble, because that wasn’t nearly enough.

With so many accomplished applicants to choose from, we were looking for kids with something special, “PQs”—personal qualities—that were often revealed by the letters or essays. Kids who only had the numbers and the résumé were usually rejected: “no spark,” “not a team-builder,” “this is pretty much in the middle of the fairway for us.” One young person, who had piled up a truly insane quantity of extracurriculars and who submitted nine letters of recommendation, was felt to be “too intense.”

On the other hand, the numbers and the résumé were clearly indispensable. I’d been told that successful applicants could either be “well-rounded” or “pointy”—outstanding in one particular way—but if they were pointy, they had to be really pointy: a musician whose audition tape had impressed the music department, a scientist who had won a national award.

less than 5% of the population has received a COVID-19 vaccine dose, the rich and well-connected have found a faster way to get their hands on one: travel north.

Some Mexicans with family ties or dual citizenship in the United States, or who just can afford the airfare, are heading to the U.S. to get vaccinated faster than the many months of waiting for one back home.

The phenomenon has sparked intense debate: between officials who believe U.S. residents should have priority and those who feel that, in a general sense, the more people vaccinated the better

‘This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes’

Senator Raphael Warnock’s first speech on the Senate floor brought the past into the present.

“We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,”

But an image? One never says a picture is true or false. It either captures your attention or it doesn’t. The more TV we watched, the more we expected – and with our finger on the remote, the more we demanded – that not just our sitcoms and cop procedurals and other “junk TV” be entertaining but also our news and other issues of import.

This was, in spirit, the vision that Huxley predicted way back in 1931, the dystopia my father believed we should have been watching out for. He wrote:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

The NYU professor was surely prophetic. “Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics,” he cautioned.

“We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organised around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic message.”

What Postman perceived in television has been dramatically intensified by smartphones and social media

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Xavier Becerra, nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, have conveyed similar messages about their immigrant roots.

Polls suggest 60% of Americans support some of its policies, such as a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.

Yet this history of migration has coexisted with xenophobia: a form of prejudice against people from other countries.

Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today? Why add to the burden by looking at the past

Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory. As such it can both make us wiser in our public choices and more richly human in our private lives.

Without individual memory, a person literally loses his or her identity, and would not know how to act in encounters with others. Imagine waking up one morning unable to tell total strangers from family and friends!

Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, the first woman to lead the country's smallest state, has been named President-elect Joe Biden's intended nominee for commerce secretary.

would oversee the U.S. Commerce Department's eclectic portfolio of federal agencies, including some that have been thrown into political hot waters during the Trump administration — most notably the Census Bureau.

been scrambling to prepare the release of the first set of 2020 census results, which was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic and last-minute schedule changes by Trump administration officials.

ince the Great Recession that began in late 2007, there is a growing feeling that economics is not serving us well. There is truth to this hunch, but the reasons are more complex than most people realize.

Academic disciplines are built on assumptions; the most tried and tested of these are often enshrined as axioms. When economic policies go wrong, the standard practice is to rush to examine those axioms. Are some of them incorrect? Economists collate statistics, create new data using randomized trials, collect impressionistic information, and often come out with the conclusion that some of the established axioms are not quite right. Correct them, and one will get better predictions and better policy. Such an approach can work under normal circumstances, but when economic outcomes go deeply wrong, the problem may be more foundational: not in the axioms of the discipline but in the unstated assumptions—the “assumptions in the woodwork,” which all disciplines have and which we are usually unaware of.

Economists usually point to a few assumptions, such as self-interest (in particular, the urge to accumulate and consume more), the axiom of diminishing marginal utility (the fact that consuming more of the same good causes utility from each additional unit to decline), and so on. But these assumptions are in fact inadequate. Laboratory tests show that rats satisfy these axioms, too, but there is no evidence of trade among rats. For society to conduct trade, these economic assumptions need to be supplemented with other social and normative preconditions: We need language, the ability to communicate, and some minimal respect for others’ rights. These are the assumptions in the woodwork that economists are often unmindful of but play a vital role.

What's the best country in the world to raise a child? If a well developed public education system tops your list, you'd likely consider the United States -- it took the top spot in education in this year's Best Countries Report, done annually since 2016 by U.S. News & World Report and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

"One area where the US falls behind quite a bit is in the safety metric," she said. "In that attribute, the US actually ranks 32, pretty far down the list. So that really impacts its ratings for raising kids, of course." Read MoreCanada came in fourth for raising kids, followed by the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia and Austria. The UK came in at number 11.

The Best Countries report evaluated 73 nations across 65 different metrics. To do so it surveyed more than 20,000 people in the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Respondents are rather evenly split between leaders in business; college-educated citizens who consider themselves middle class or higher and who read or watch the news at least four days a week; and the general public, defined as over age 18 who's age and gender were nationally representative of their countries' demographic.