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People have talked about Trump breaking norms, especially when it comes to talking about race, going as far as to say that he's the "most racist president in modern history."

After all, racism was baked into the founding of the United States, a country built on the genocide of Native American people and slavery; 12 of the first 18 presidents actually owned slaves.

different from what people are talking about with President Trump. In his case, it's his use of all that language in 2020 rather than 1964, right out in the public on his Twitter feed, in a presidential debate or at his rallies. I

clear advances in attitudes about race in recent years:

A 2020 Monmouth University poll found that 76 percent — including 71 percent of white respondents — considered racial and ethnic discrimination in this country a “big problem,” compared with just 51 percent who said the same in 2015.

Gallup found that from 1958 to 2021, approval of marriage between white and Black people has gone from 4 percent to 94 percent

When I try to explain the aspirational genius of the American founding, I always refer to two documents

They’re by the famous “frenemies” of the American founding, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The second is Adams’s very short Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, dated October 11, 1798.

the Lost Cause was far more than a military narrative. It provided a comprehensive account of the war’s origins, conduct, and consequences. The conflict, in this telling, had little to do with slavery, but instead was caused, depending on which book you read, by the protective tariff, arguments over states’ rights, or white southerners’ desire for individual liberty. Confederate soldiers were defeated not by superior generalship or greater fighting spirit but by the Union’s advantages in manpower, resources, and industrial technology.

And the nation’s victory was marred by what followed: the era of Reconstruction, portrayed as a time of corruption and misgovernment, when the southern white population was subjected to the humiliation of “Negro domination.” This account of history was easily understandable and, like all ideologies, most convincing to those who benefited from it—proponents of white supremacy.

After the war, Longstreet had emerged as a singular figure: the most prominent white southerner to join the Republican Party and proclaim his support for Black male suffrage and officeholding. Leading the biracial Louisiana militia and the New Orleans Metropolitan Police, he also battled violent believers in white supremacy.

One idea that I often encounter in the world of economic discussion, and which annoys me greatly, is that nations get rich by looting other nations.

This idea is a pillar of “third world” socialism and “decolonial” thinking, but it also exists on the political Right. This is, in a sense, a very natural thing to believe — imperialism is a very real feature of world history, and natural resources sometimes do get looted. So this isn’t a straw man; it’s a common misconception that needs debunkin

it’s important to debunk it, because only when we understand how nations actually do get rich can we Americans make sure we take the necessary steps to make sure our nation stays rich.

Here are just a few of the longstanding problems plaguing American education: a generalized decline in literacy; the faltering international performance of American students; an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession; a lack of trained and able substitutes to fill teacher shortages; unequal access to educational resources; inadequate funding for schools; stagnant compensation for teachers; heavier workloads; declining prestige; and deteriorating faculty morale.

Nine-year-old students earlier this year revealed “the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics,”

In the latest comparison of fourth grade reading ability, the United States ranked below 15 countries, including Russia, Ireland, Poland and Bulgaria.

the problem of public ignorance and fake crises transcends politics. Profound pessimism about the state of the nation is empowering the radical, revolutionary politics that fuels extremists on the right and left.

now, for parts of MAGA, the Constitution itself is part of the crisis. If it doesn’t permit Trump to take control, then it must be swept aside.

Elements of this argument are now bubbling up across the reactionary, populist right

While the political Lincoln may be difficult for us to acknowledge at a time when politics and partisan commitments are widely denigrated, Lincoln’s presidency demonstrates that partisanship and political ruthlessness can be used to advance the highest ideals. And there were no clearer cases than during his 1864 battle for reelection (without which the slave-owning South would almost certainly have triumphed) and subsequent effort to pass the 13th Amendment, which at long last purged slavery from the Constitution. In the end, Lincoln became the master of events because he was the master of politics.

the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite. Contrary to Mr. Wiencek’s depiction, Jefferson was always deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks, slave or free. His proslavery views were shaped not only by money and status but also by his deeply racist views, which he tried to justify through pseudoscience.

Unlike other biographies that have focused on the most sensational episodes in the dictator’s life, it sets Stalin firmly in the historical context: the rise (and eventual fall) of what the author calls the “Red Empire”.

Where Stalin excelled, again and again, was in ruthlessness and attention to detail. He paid minute attention to extending Soviet rule in places conquered at the war’s end. He took great interest in details of science and cultural policy, fearing even the faintest breach in communist omniscience.

It is also a worthy successor to his “Lenin, Stalin, Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (2008), which compared and contrasted the three monsters.

What was it in white Southern mores, folkways or history that made this such an indelible — though not unique — characteristic of theirs, that allowed so many of them to do such things or simply to stand in complicit silence, without a peep from conscience, as such things were done all around them?

“The Making of a Racist” is at its best in its early chapters as it recounts the author’s childhood indoctrination into the casual racism of the Jim Crow South. Racism was in the books he read. It was in the history he was taught. It was in the social conventions he observed. It was in the jokes he learned. It was like air or water, something that you didn’t question or think about, something that was just . . . there.

both were racists in an explicitly racist region, and both passed that to their son. One comes away from those coming-of-age chapters with renewed appreciation for the subtle yet ruthless efficiency with which systemic bigotry reinforces itself. And Dew’s recounting of his slow break from that system is compelling.

White: Early on in The Great Divide you ask who is to blame for the crisis and the inequality that grew after it. One of the answers you say are economists. To what extent do you feel economist and economic theory is culpable for the crisis?

tiglitz: The prevalent ideology—when I say prevalent  it’s not all economists— held that markets were basically efficient, that they were stable. You had people like Greenspan and Bernanke saying things like “markets don't generate bubbles.” They had precise models that were precisely wrong and gave them confidence in theories that led to the policies that were responsible for the crisis, and responsible for the growth in inequality. Alternative theories would have led to very different policies

For instance, the tax cut in 2001 and 2003 under President Bush. Economists that are very widely respected were cutting taxes at the top, increasing inequality in our society when what we needed was just the opposite. Most of the models used by economists ignored inequality. They pretended that macroeconomy was unaffected by inequality. I think that was totally wrong.

the challenge for Jared Kushner, and everyone in our extraordinarily privileged generation, is to remember our ancestors’ suffering and honor their memories by defending the weak, vulnerable and oppressed today.

Slavery, in other words, was meant to ensure that Jews would remember powerlessness once they gained power. Jared Kushner is what happens when that memory fails.

How could Kushner — a Modern Orthodox golden boy — fail to internalize that? How could he invite Donald Trump’s Cabinet to his house for Shabbat dinner only hours after his father-in-law’s executive order banning refugees from entering the United States? How could he pose in a tuxedo alongside his wife, Ivanka Trump, on Saturday night as that executive order wreaked havoc on innocent people’s lives simply because they hailed from the wrong countries?

“They should be hauled out of Congress and taken to Guantánamo!” a military veteran said of the few dozen elected officials — including Hillary Clinton and the only two Muslim members of Congress — identified in the film as having connections to terrorists. “Can’t we get a law passed so we can go in and get these people the hell out of our government?”

White and the filmmaker, Trevor Loudon, assured the group that there is “a new sheriff in town.”

Trump’s election has presented a “God-given opportunity,” Loudon said. “The fate of the Western world” now depends on how they use it.

geneticists applying new statistical approaches have taken a first shot at both identifying and dating the major population mixture events of the last 4,000 years, with the goal of providing a new source of information for historians.

Some of the hundred or so major mixing events they describe have plausible historical explanations, while many others remain to be accounted for.

many populations of the southern Mediterranean and Middle East have segments of African origin in their genomes that were inserted at times between A.D. 650 and 1900, according to the geneticists’ calculations. This could reflect the activity of the Arab slave trade,

after years of research, he has discovered the novelist’s name: Hannah Bond, a slave on a North Carolina plantation owned by John Hill Wheeler, is the actual writer of “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” the book signed by Hannah Crafts.

“Words cannot express how meaningful this is to African-American literary studies,” he said in an interview. “It revolutionizes our understanding of the canon of black women’s literature.”

After the novel was written, its manuscript was stored in an attic in New Jersey and was little noticed until Dorothy Porter Wesley, an African-American librarian, bought it from a New York City bookseller in 1948 for $85.

I first began seriously considering the immortality of white supremacy after listening to Nell Irvin Painter.

 Here are a couple interviews on that point--one with Phoebe Judge at WUNC in the Research Triangle in North Carolina, the other with Jonathan Judaken before a lecture at Rhodes College in Memphis.

The two that really pushed me over were were Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom and Barbara and Karen Fields' Racecraft. Morgan is indispensable. There is no single book I've found myself reviewing more over the past five years. 

does Napoleon deserve to be called Great? As Roberts concedes, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars cost a total of around three million military and one million civilian deaths. Of these, 1.4 million were French. For this Napoleon must share much of the responsibility. Roberts also accepts that naval warfare was an almost total blind spot for Napoleon. Even after Trafalgar, he remained convinced that he could build a fleet capable of invading Britain, wasting men, money and material on a doomed enterprise. To this we might add Napoleon's abandonment of his army in Egypt, the abduction and execution of the Duc d'Enghien, the reintroduction of slavery in French colonies in 1802, catastrophic defeat in Russia, and other similar blemishes to his reputation. And, of course, Napoleon ultimately brought France to her knees.

Roberts however is in no doubt that the epithet is deserved. A general at 24, Napoleon lost only seven of 60 battles fought. In 1814 he won four separate battles in five days. His capacity for decision-making and daring on the battlefield was extraordinary. If he did not invent new military strategies, he perfected them, using new formations and artillery to maximum effect. Like Napoleon himself, his superbly trained and disciplined armies moved fast, in one case covering 400 miles in 20 marching days. None of this would have been possible without the creation of a new military culture based on honour, patriotism and devotion to Napoleon's person.  Napoleon's military achievements, Roberts further contends, were matched and have been outlasted by his civil achievements. Having put an end to the violence of the Terror and the disorder of the Directory, Napoleon built upon and protected the best achievements of the 1789 Revolution: meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, secular education, sound finances, and efficient administration. Napoleon, Roberts writes, was no totalitarian dictator but rather "the Enlightenment on horseback". Despite this rather disconcerting image, there is little here with which even the most stern of Napoleon's critics would disagree. For good or ill, he can justifiably lay claim to being the founder of modern France. Finally, there is the fascination aroused by the man himself. "For sheer intellectual capacity and its persistent application in government," Roberts concludes, "there has probably never been another ruler in history to match him."

four distinct models: Confucian (yukyo), Colonial(singmin), nationalist(minjok), and minjung, or "populist," historiography

Confucian historiography, is concerned on the idea that a nation's "culture" constitutes the overriding determinant of its history

By the Koryo period, then, Chinese Confucian culture had supplanted Buddhism as the leading influence on Korean society, and it is this influence that is the source of Korea's historical legac