American history

By Danny McDonald Globe Staff, Updated July 15, 2022, 6:03 p.m. But white supremacist movements have deep roots in Massachusetts and New England, historians said. While the displays of propaganda are shockingly hateful and vile, they are far from new. The Colonists, of course, codified slavery in Massachusetts in 1641, more than a century before the United States…

Read More In progressive Massachusetts, a long history of white supremacy

This day in history: ‘Disco Demolition Night’ On this day in 1979, nearly 50,000 people packed Comiskey Park on the southwest side of Chicago to watch local DJ and notorious disco hater Steve Dahl blow up a bunch of disco records in between a White Sox doubleheader. “Disco Demolition Night” remains one of the seminal…

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By Harry Bruinius  Staff writer, Christian Science Monitor June 24, 2022 In a 6-3 majority ruling on Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision giving women the right to abortion. In anticipation of the ruling last week, the Monitor interviewed Geoffrey R. Stone, author of the legal history “Sex and the Constitution.”…

Read More A history of American thought on abortion: It’s not what you think

BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN  JULY 1, 2022 4:19 PM EDT  While Founding Fathers behind that document like John Adams, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson are household names, there were many men and women who played an important role in shaping America in its infancy who are not as well known, This is especially the case for women and minorities. Native Americans, furthermore, had their own…

Read More Beyond the Founding Fathers: 12 Unsung Figures Who Helped Build America

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer – a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.“   Frederick Douglass Every year on this day I make an assessment, from my own perspective, of how much…

Read More 4th of July thoughts

By Michael Duffy Washington Post Opinions editor-at-large We are witnessing something of a watershed moment in the reckoning America is having with itself and its history. Harvard University released a 134-page report Tuesday that begins to explain how, as Post columnist Eugene Robinson put it, “the nation’s oldest, richest and most prestigious institution of higher learning” benefited from slavery.  Two Harvard…

Read More A hard historical truth about Harvard

HARRIET TUBMAN KEPT PUSHING FOR CHANGE AFTER THE ‘RAILROAD’

By Starlight Williams, Associate Editor Thursday, March 10, 2022 In her nine decades (she died on this day in 1913), Tubman (pictured in 1878) became the first U.S. woman to lead an armed military raid and was a spy and nurse for the Union during the Civil War. She joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in their…

HARRIET TUBMAN KEPT PUSHING FOR CHANGE AFTER THE ‘RAILROAD’" class="entry-more-link">Read More HARRIET TUBMAN KEPT PUSHING FOR CHANGE AFTER THE ‘RAILROAD’

By Julie Zauzmer Weil, Adrian Blanco and Leo Dominguez 1/10/22 From the founding of the United States until long after the Civil War, hundreds of the elected leaders writing the nation’s laws were current or former slaveowners. More than 1,700 people who served in the U.S. Congress in the 18th, 19th, and even 20th centuries owned human beings at some…

Read More More than 1,700 congressmen once enslaved Black people. This is who they were, and how they shaped the nation.