Slavery
December 17, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Admiral Horatio Nelson is one of the greatest heroes of British history. With the possible exception of Wellington, no one contributed more to winning the Napoleonic Wars. Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, his greatest victory, holds a place in British history analogous to that of Lincoln at the end of the Civil War. But in recent years, Nelson has come under attack, and activists have urged that statues of him be
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April 12, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
The New York Post reviewed the police report of an incident that occurred at a Blue Ash, Ohio, Target store in October. Upon hearing that her bill totaled over $1,000, customer Karen Ivery became irate and demanded that it be paid by reparations. Ivery became so aggressive during her encounter with the manager, the store’s loss prevention officer, Zach Cotter, was forced to intervene. The confrontation ended when Cotter punched Ivery
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March 10, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Reparations for slavery is an idea that, at best, is idiotic. More often it is malicious. Why people who never owned slaves should write checks to people who never were slaves is inexplicable. But insanity has its degrees, and this one takes the cake: Democratic Party legislators have introduced a bill in the Minnesota House of Representatives to create a $100 million fund to pay slavery reparations to descendants of
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February 19, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I wrote briefly here last week about William Faulkner’s Flags In the Dust. My appreciation of Flags In the Dust derives entirely from the St. John’s Summer Classics course I took on it from “tutors” (professors) Frank Pagano and James Carey. Mr. Pagano is the author, most recently, of “The was that is not: Some comments on Faulkner’s ‘Was,'” which he has given us permission to post on Power Line.
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December 15, 2022 — Scott Johnson
President Biden welcomed African leaders for dinner at the White House last night. The White House has posted the transcript of his remarks here. Biden’s remarks would not have been complete without this iteration of the 1619 creed: “We the People” reminds us that our countries’ greatest strength lies in just that: our people. Our people lie at the heart of the deep and profound connection that forever binds Africa
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November 25, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Douglas Murray has kicked off a podcast series entitled Uncancelled History with author Jonathan Horn. (I prefer to spell uncanceled with one “l,” American style.) Horn is a former White House speechwriter whose first book — The Man Who Would Not Be Washington (2015) — was a biography of Robert E. Lee. He is also the author, most recently, of Washington’s End (2020), about the man who was Washington. Murray’s
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September 21, 2022 — Scott Johnson
CNN’s Don Lemon played the fool — okay, he did his thing as usual — in conversation with Strelmark president and “Royal Watcher” Hilary Fordwich. Lemon packs slavery, reparations, the empire, and the monarchy into his boffo question. Fordwich dispatches it in a baloney meets the grinder moment. Lemon was unprepared to engage beyond the shibboleths. That must be why this highly satisfying video has gone viral. Quotable quote: “It’s
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June 17, 2022 — John Hinderaker
In this bracing essay, David Horowitz calls out the Left for what it is–criminal, racist, and sometimes fascist. David argues that conservatives need to understand the utter bad faith with which the Left conducts itself, and stand up bravely to defend our country from the ravages of the Left. The crisis currently facing our nation is a crisis of faith – faith in the Constitution that has shaped our destiny,
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March 22, 2022 — Steven Hayward
The confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are off to a predictable start, with Sen. Ted Cruz mentioning the forgotten late 18th-century Justice Bushrod Washington, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 24 hours, provoking a spasm from the left, which may have been Cruz’s intent. Gillian Brockwell, a staff writer for the Washington Post‘s “history blog,” found this all too much to take: Ted Cruz told Ketanji
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June 26, 2020 — Scott Johnson
In the adjacent post I prefaced the dedicatory speech by Frederick Douglass at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Memorial with a quote from David Blight’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Douglass. I was prompted to post Douglass’s speech by Professor Blight’s current Washington Post column that I passed over in silence in my post. Our friend Ken Masugi is not so inclined. He comments: “Unfortunately, Blight threw away his scholarship to
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June 26, 2020 — Scott Johnson
David Blight opens his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Frederick Douglass with the unveiling of The Freedmen’s Memorial in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1876. At the heart of Blight’s opening is his account and analysis of Douglass’s Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln at the unveiling. In the speech, Blight writes, Douglass “had named the pain and betrayal of ages. Now he entered the celebration….He recognized how
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December 1, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute was inspired by our post Slavery? We Were a Footnote to create an animated chart on his site, Carpe Diem. Mark’s animated chart is taken from the same database at SlaveVoyages.org that we discussed in our post. The animation traces the trans-Atlantic slave trade over time, and reflects the fact that statistically, the American colonies and, later, the U.S. played only a minor
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November 29, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Liberals are trying to rewrite American history, teaching our children that the only thing that ever happened here–until they came along a year or two ago!–was slavery. The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which is being enthusiastically adopted by the nation’s public schools, is the culmination of years of left-wing propaganda. The liberals’ task is made easier by the fact that world history is mostly terra incognita to America’s young
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