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the Anglo settlers who flocked to California declared war on the Native Californians who had come before them. But Forty-Niners weren’t the first white people to oppress or even enslave Native Americans in California. The very land on which Marshall spotted the gold was part of a vast empire built on the slave labor of native peoples

In order to acquire the land, he converted to Catholicism and became a Mexican citizen, and within a few years he had more than doubled his land holdings.

it was home to Native Americans who “found their homelands now the property of outsiders who viewed them as potential laborers

The government’s repayment policy is an extension of its approach to British tourists or other citizens who get in trouble abroad and need help returning to the United Kingdom. People 18 years or older have to reimburse the government.That age limit came into effect after The Guardian newspaper reported two years ago on a 17-year-old British teenager who sought help at the British embassy in Islamabad to escape a forced marriage in 2014. She had to sign a loan agreement and hand in her British passport before being allowed to return to the United Kingdom, and ultimately was billed more than $1,000, with her passport being held until she paid.

Just as the government would not charge a crime victim for investigating a crime, it should not charge women for bringing them back home, said Alison Gardner, an assistant professor of sociology who studies modern slavery at the University of Nottingham. She said a $1,000 debt could be devastating for a young woman whose family has tried to force her to marry and could disown her if she escaped.“It’s an example of this general policy of pushing costs onto the people who have incurred the misfortune, which drives a cycle of increased vulnerability,” she said.

More than simply a leftist to be opposed, Ocasio-Cortez has joined Barack Obama as a focus of the very same fear and anger that elected Trump in the first place. She represents the prospect of a more progressive, diverse America where those who were once deprived of power and influence can shape the course of the nation and its politics. The story of her family’s working-class roots in the Bronx is both specific enough to be compelling and universal enough for anyone, including many voters in Trump’s base, to relate to. And that’s precisely why her story, like Obama’s, must be discredited.

The idea that undeserving people of color are stealing money or recognition from the deserving  predates Trump, of course. It has been a feature of American politics since the country’s founding. The poetry of the young enslaved woman Phillis Wheatley was assumed to be fraudulent because her intelligence undermined the basic assumption of chattel slavery, that black people were not truly human. After Frederick Douglass wrote his first autobiography, a critic who knew one of Douglass’s owners insisted that the famed orator was “not capable of writing the Narrative” and that “there are no such barbarities committed on their plantations.”

More recently, the election of Barack Obama provoked a fierce backlash on the right, one that manifested in one conspiracy theory after another meant to prove Obama was a fraud. Conservatives became fixated on proving that the first black president did not write his autobiography, that he was functionally illiterate absent a teleprompter, and that his admission to elite universities was the unearned result of affirmative action, despite his graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law.

While I’ve spent my life studying leaders and leadership, abandoning long-held beliefs, some based on comfortable myths, requires a journey that I suspect never ends

I still admire much about Lee, his integrity included. But to see him as I long had, through a single lens, was to fundamentally misunderstand the kaleidoscopic nature of leaders — and, more broadly, the nature of our past. No matter how much we study or how long we’ve lived, the hardest work we can do is to rotate the kaleidoscope, to see the world in a new light and to evolve our beliefs accordingly.

it takes even longer for organizations to follow suit. Institutions are conservative and slow to change, and the military is no exception. Steeped as they are in tradition and admired for consistency, it is difficult for the U.S. armed forces to develop new outlooks on warfare, social issues and, notably, their own view of history.

America needs help right now and Americans know it. It has been enduring for many years a continuing cultural catastrophe—illegitimacy, the decline of faith, low family formation, child abuse and neglect, drugs, inadequate public education, etc

All this exists alongside an entertainment culture on which the poor and neglected are dependent, and which is devoted to violence, sex and nihilism.

As a people we are constantly, bitterly pitted against each other

Recy Taylor died 10 days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up.

If we know that enslaved women were used for their productive and reproductive labor—if they were raped with impunity in the system of slavery—then what happened after Emancipation? Did those practices and the institutions that upheld those practices—the men and their sons and their cousins—end those practices just because of Emancipation?

So I started looking for cases, which were hard to find because marginalized people are hard to find in the archives. Their stories are not remembered, they’re not saved, and they’re not considered worthy of being archived so often. Those stories were hard to find, but the black press actually printed a lot of black women’s testimonies about sexual violence at the time.

Several different Western European powers established colonies in Asia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each of the imperial powers had its own style of administration, and colonial officers from the different nations also displayed various attitudes towards their imperial subjects.

Nonetheless, British colonials held themselves apart from local people more than other Europeans did, hiring locals as domestic help, but rarely intermarrying with them. In part, this may have been due to a transfer of British ideas about the separation of classes to their overseas colonies.

to Christianize and civilize the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the New World

Even skin color is not a reliable indicator of one’s origins.

As one study calculated, almost a third of white Americans possess up to 20 percent African genetic inheritance, yet look white, while 5.5 percent of black Americans have no detectable African genetic ancestry. Race has a political and social meaning, but not a biological one.

Her disappearance from the historical record is precisely the point. When we can so easily lose the daughter of a president and his slave, it forces us to acknowledge that our racial categories are utterly fallacious and built on a science that has been thoroughly discredited.

Two cities, Seville (Spain) and Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) claim that they have the remains of the great explorer.

Some revere him for boldly sailing west from Europe at a time when to do so was considered certain death, finding continents never dreamed of by Europe's most ancient civilizations. Others see him as a cruel, ruthless man who brought disease, slavery, and exploitation to the pristine New World. Love him or hate him, there is no doubt that Columbus changed his world.

He died in Valladolid in May of 1506, and he was at first buried there. But Columbus was, then as now, a powerful figure, and the question soon arose as to what to do with his remains. He had expressed a desire to be buried in the New World, but in 1506 there were no buildings there impressive enough to house such lofty remains. In 1509, his remains were moved to the convent at La Cartuja, an island in a river near Seville.

“normalizing” President Trump has become a mortal sin, and “that’s not who we are” a rallying cry for those who view today’s anti-democratic and nativist compulsions as aberrations along that long arc toward justice. Except this is normal. And it is who we are.

Jon Meacham’s “The Soul of America,” though it intends to uplift, nonetheless offers a necessary and sobering corrective. America’s past is “more often tragic” than otherwise, the historian writes, “full of broken hearts and broken promises, disappointed hopes and dreams delayed.” In times of fear, our leaders “can be as often disappointing as they are heroic.”

And if the soul of America is found in those attempts to expand the space for more people to live freely and pursue happiness, Meacham also points to a “universal American inconsistency” — even as we uphold life and liberty for some, we hold back others deemed unworthy.

The past few weeks have witnessed a nasty internecine fight among religious conservatives about whether liberal democracy’s time has passed

Sohrab Ahmari, writing at First Things, attacked National Review’s David French for adhering to a traditional commitment to liberal democracy while “the overall balance of forces has tilted inexorably away from us.”

French’s adherence to liberal democracy is a commitment to a set of rules under which these goals can be pursued in a pluralistic society: through public discourse, the courts, and the ballot box. For Ahmari and his ilk, this is insufficient. He seems to believe not only that the state should always settle such disputes in his favor, but that it should prevent cultural and political expressions he finds distasteful.

n Arezzo, Italy, where an engineer recalled his shock when his 16-year-old daughter gave the thumbs up after she heard on the news that a hundred migrants had drowned.“Good,” she had said, “that’s a hundred less coming to Italy.” Then, seeing her father’s face, she added: “Look, Dad, don’t be so shocked, everyone thinks this.”A French teacher from Normandy told me how his students started describing immigrants as “rats” during the 2015 migrant crisis.

more often, I found that the European Union had become a proxy for big abstract things that people feel threaten their way of life: Migration in Italy. Capitalism in France. Liberal secular values in Poland.

As Father Ragusa put it in Tuscany, Europe is a choice Europeans need to make over and over again.He spoke of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor who was killed by the Nazis and had written about the role a toxic combination of economic hardship and ethnic hatred played in the rise of fascism. What he had written about Germany during its ascent could have been written today, Father Ragusa said.The question Europe ultimately faces is the same, today as always, he said: “What values do you want to follow? You have a responsibility to decide.”

Serwer is stating with particular force something that most liberals seem to believe: That populism in all its forms, but maybe religious conservatism especially, is best understood as the illiberal rage of the formerly privileged, the longtime white-male-Christian winners of our history, at discovering that under conditions of equality they don’t get to be the rulers anymore.

I want to complicate the first argument, and challenge the second one

The complication has to do with the history of black emancipation and black politics

I had a very pleasant dinner with Michael Anton, the brilliant, bespoke Straussian who went to work for Trump’s National Security Council for a while

Anton is something of an intellectual pariah — a Washington Post columnist wrote last year that “there is little reason to ever listen” to him — but he’s a pariah in part because he’s a reactionary with a first-class mind

He reminds me why I’m a conservative, why the distinction between a reactionary and a conservative is an important one in this particular moment, and how the left unwittingly is becoming reactionism’s most potent enabler

Why are Europeans so much happier than Americans? Or, conversely, why are Europeans the happiest people in the world…in human history?

one answer to my question is obvious: social democracy. Europeans enjoy generous public goods — public healthcare, retirement, education, high speed rail, and so forth. And so they don’t live the lives of bruising, battering, endless — and pointless — competition that Americans do.

Americans work until their dying days now — the average American dies in debt.

In my mind, here’s the most relevant lesson from Rome for current US developments: The emperors didn’t make the empire. The empire made the emperors.

The US has had an emperor for decades, both through the taking of power and, more importantly (and in Roman fashion), through Congress delegating its powers to him. Trump’s willingness to use those powers has revealed what has been the case for some time.

One fact seldom mentioned about Romanity and Greco-Roman culture is how the people that lived under it seemed to deeply hate it. A reoccurring fact of the era is how local populations defected to the barbarian tribes massively. People joined the Goths, the Lombards, the Franks and even the Huns in their wars against their own country! Goths were very popular among the population, even when then besieged Rome, we hear about the Roman plebs joining forces with their attackers.

Many progressives who came of age during the Obama presidency — myself among them — became disillusioned with its caution.

Too many of us took for granted Mr. Obama’s uncanny ability to make sense of contrasting truths: the give and take of liberty and fairness in an economy; “the goodness of our nation” and its “original sin of slavery.”

nd as Republicans blocked him in bad faith while inequality soared, we grew weary of his earnest civics of solidarity — the way he wove competing policy ideas into a narrative in which all of us were imperfect protagonists.

A big story of the Democratic primaries is the rise of the so-called pragmatic black voters who revived former Vice President Joe Biden's flagging presidential campaign. But there's a flip side to this story that no one is paying attention to: What happened to all those radical black voters who should be rallying to Sen. Bernie Sanders' side?

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a socialist, according to many historians.  W.E.B. DuBois was a socialist,  and so were civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and  Bayard Rustin. The most prominent black philosopher today,  Cornel West,  is a socialist and Sanders' supporter. Hip-hop artists, such as rapper "Killer Mike" and Chuck D of Public Enemy, are also big Sanders supporters. Read More .pg.t-light .zn-body-text h3 { text-align: center; font-weight: 900; } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .zn-body-text h3:not(.el__headline):not(.cd__headline):before { margin: 60px auto 10px; } } There is  arguably no group in America that should be more suspicious of unfettered capitalism than blacks. Slavery, for example, was driven as much by greed as racism. And blacks lost half  of their wealth due to the 2008

"You can't have capitalism without racism," Malcolm X once  said.