Sublime

Mr Hawley’s disgust at the notion of the Pioneer being edited by an emissary, and of Brooke becoming actively political – as if a tortoise of desultory pursuits should protrude its small head ambitiously and become rampant – was hardly equal to the annoyance felt by some members of Mr Brooke’s own family. The result had oozed forth gradually, like

“Better that you enslave us, but feed us.”

According to the company’s records there were at least 6,000 whites employed during the years of construction, and the company put the death toll among these men at 835. But Tracy Robinson, who was no enemy of the railroad, said perhaps 40 percent died, or about 2,500. And no one then even reckoned the number of deaths among the blacks. Perhaps 6,0

That Uncle Tom would one day be used as a term of derision (“A Negro who is held to be humiliatingly subservient or deferential to whites,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary) she would have found impossible to fathom, and heartbreaking. For her he was something very close to a black Christ. He is the one character in all her book who li

On the one hand, there stood slavery, a stern reality, glaring frightfully upon us,—its robes already crimsoned with the blood of millions, and even now feasting itself greedily upon our own flesh. On the other hand, away back in the dim distance, under the flickering light of the north star, behind some craggy hill or snow-covered mountain, stood

The old woman’s principal heir, however, turned out to be an honest man, the provincial marshal of nobility of that province,1 Yefim Petrovich Polenov.

As I began, the words of the abolitionist William Wilberforce ran through my mind: “You may choose to look the other way but you can never again say you did not know.”[1] In 1789, filled with passion over the evil of slavery and an unflinching commitment to see it end, he had risen in the British Parliament and described in unwavering graphic detai