Sublime

His famed Cross of Gold speech in 1896 resonated, and he ran for president several times but couldn’t win. Bryan was an advocate for the previous cycle, the one that had disappeared and was no longer relevant, even if he was still its powerful voice.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who lost forty-nine relatives in the next decade’s Holocaust and went on to coin the term “genocide,” later cited the Holodomor in a 1953 speech in New York as a quintessential example of his neologism. “This is not simply a case of mass murder,” Lemkin said. “It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of

In eighteenth-century America, Colonial society and Native American society sat, unhappily, side by side. As time went by, settlers from Europe began defecting to live with the natives. No natives defected to live with the colonials. This bothered the Europeans. They had, they assumed, the superior civilization, and yet people were voting with thei

The great Jeffersonian system that had prevailed in the first decades, with western subjects semi-colonized, simply could not hold. There were too many Daniel Boones. The government gave up prosecuting squatters by the 1830s and instead let them buy their land. In the 1860s it began giving away parcels of public land as “homesteads” to nearly any c

Excluding Natives from the census was symbolically significant, sustaining the fantasy that settlers were taming an uninhabited wilderness. But statistically, it was less important. In 1890 those page-963 Indians and Alaskans made up only 0.57 percent of the population, the consequence of the dwindling of Native populations and the explosion of Ang

1882 and ending in 1903, was not very different in many respects from the first large-scale immigration of Eastern European Jews to America at about the same time. This was a time of massive emigration and immigration throughout the world, especially from the crowded cities and towns of Europe. Enormous population shifts took place, with people set

Anaxagoras comprehended the God-Intelligence which reigns over all men and all beings. In rejecting ancient religious notions, he also rejected ancient polity. As he did not believe in the gods of the prytaneum, he no longer fulfilled all the duties of a citizen; he avoided the assemblies, and would not be a magistrate. His doctrine was an attack u

That which was experimental in our plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of repressing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely to the solitude of his own heart.