It’s Time to Make Juneteenth a National Holiday

Marking the end of slavery with a federal holiday would be more than a symbolic gesture. It would provide space for growth as a nation.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman

The Violence Didn’t Start With the Protests

Violence has been a constant throughout American history and is woven through countless American systems today.

Kali Holloway

The Making of the Radical Republicans

How did the struggle for emancipation become a mass politics?

Eric Foner

The Racial Politics of ‘Return’

Tourism initiatives in Ghana and beyond leave out black people without the economic means to travel.

Edna Bonhomme

Since Emancipation, the United States Has Refused to Make Reparations for Slavery

But in 1862, the federal government doled out the 2020 equivalent of $23 million—not to the formerly enslaved but to their white enslavers.

Kali Holloway

Slavery, and American Racism, Were Born in Genocide

Martin Luther King Jr. saw something essential about our nation: Imperial expansion west over stolen Indian land shaped and deepened the American Revolution’s relationship to slavery.

Greg Grandin

The Reasons Republicans Are Still Backing Trump

The party Trump has inherited is hell-bent on continuing America’s long tradition of racism and imperialism.

Rebecca Gordon

Eric Foner’s Story of American Freedom

Charting the ironies of freedom won and lost during and after the Civil War, the American historian has also helped us better understand the ambiguous consequences of what were almost always only partial victories.

Michael Kazin

A Lawsuit at Harvard Pries Open Debates About Science and Reparations

Since 2011, Tamara Lanier has been battling the university over the ownership of daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors. Her fight tells us a lot about the racist roots of American science and the need for reparations.

Eamon Whalen

Letters From the November 11/18, 2019, Issue

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