"The Lines Between Justice and Injustice Are Crisscrossed"

"'The Star-Spangled Banner' nevertheless shares its conceptual DNA with the United States as a whole. It is a product of a time when the stain of slavery was clear on the nation and part of US law. To understand the anthem and its legacy, we need to know more than just Key's words. We need to understand their author's feelings and actions about slavery."

Mark Clague in a 2016 CNN article defends "The Star-Spangled Banner."

"Portrays Douglass Unequivocally as a Hero While Also Revealing His Weaknesses"

"Ironically, his popularity is also due to ignorance. Some who commend him would probably cease doing so if they knew more about him. Frederick Douglass was a whirlwind of eloquence, imagination, and desperate striving as he sought to expose injustice and remedy its harms. All who praise him should know that part of what made him so distinctive are the tensions—indeed the contradictions—that he embraced."

Randall Kennedy in The Atlantic reviews David W. Blight's Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

The Father of the Civil Rights Movement

Susan Parker at DelmarvaNow describes how Maryland is marking Frederick Douglass's bicentennial birthday.

We Was All on the Cover of Newsweek

"The catalyzing episode occurred on May 17, 1968, six weeks after the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the outbreak of new riots in dozens of cities. Nine Catholic activists, led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, entered a Knights of Columbus building in Catonsville and went up to the second floor, where the local draft board had offices. In front of astonished clerks, they seized hundreds of draft records, carried them down to the parking lot and set them on fire with homemade napalm.

"Some reporters had been told of the raid in advance. They were given a statement that said in part, 'We destroy these draft records not only because they exploit our young men but because they represent misplaced power concentrated in the ruling class of America.' It added, 'We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country's crimes.'"

Daniel Lewis in The New York Times writes an obituary for Daniel J. Berrigan.

"Universities Aren't Companies"

"The fundamental difference between academia and the private sector is that in the private sector, profits are the only truth. In the academic sector, the only truth—according to the Mount St. Mary's mission statement, for goodness' sake—is the truth. Or at least it should be. Now, it seems little more than a cynical view—or a nihilistic one."

Rebecca Schuman in Slate weighs in on the threat to academic freedom in Maryland.

"Hiss Is Your Life"

"The 'pumpkin papers' helped convict Hiss of perjury in 1950, which transformed public opinion, convincing Americans for the first time that communism posed a real danger to the country. The obscure congressman named Nixon who pushed the Hiss case won a Senate seat the year Hiss was convicted and got the vice-presidential nomination in 1952; a month after Hiss’s conviction, Sen. Joseph McCarthy gave the speech in Wheeling, W.Va., that launched his career and gave the new, virulent anticommunism its name. For the next 45 years, the Cold War served as the iron cage of American politics.
"Conservatives had hoped this site would provide a place where the public could be told that the Communist Party did not just defend a totalitarian regime but also recruited its members to spy on that regime’s behalf. Thus the hunt for communist spies was not 'McCarthyism'; it was a noble cause.
"But, like the other Cold War commemorative efforts, the pumpkin patch National Historic Landmark is remarkable primarily as a failure."

Salon publishes an excerpt from Jon Wiener's new book, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America.

And David Chambers responds.

"The Whole Landscape for an Instant Turned Slightly Red"

"The battle of Antietam, or Sharpsburg, the bloodiest day in American history, rebuffed the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia’s first invasion of Northern territory, convinced European nations to withhold recognition from the Confederacy, assured Republican control of the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterm elections, gave Abraham Lincoln political cover to announce the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and finally persuaded the president that the Union could no longer afford Gen. George B. McClellan."

In The New York Times, Rick Beard marks the sesquicentennial of "America's Bloodiest Day."

"It Now Has Two Faces"

"Leone said the stone was placed amid the bricks by the slave who built the furnace: 'We infer ... that the man ... was using and believed in the North American version of the hybrid religion whose origins come from West Africa.'
"'You would pick up the stone, and you would put it some place because it has the power of the deity,' he said."

Michael E. Ruane in The Washington Post reports on the recent discovery of slave artifacts at Maryland's Wye House plantation, where a young Frederick Douglass once lived.