Sublime

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but by blood”—his last words before execution were recorded, and, as has often been noted, they were prophetic. But they were also only partly true. Certain crimes were ceased by the Civil War, but they have not been purged. Not yet. Harpers Ferry is

It’s not even an American—it’s Nigel Farage, former head of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). Before Farage came along, British anti-EU sentiment was strongly tinged with racism and even white supremacism.

Captain Richard Henry Pratt’s guiding principle for Indian education, as summed up at the nineteenth annual National Conference of Charities and Correction held in Denver, Colorado, in 1892: “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” This principle resulted in a policy now widely recognized as the embodiment of cultural genocide.

At the war’s outset in April 1917, Fox Conner had been an undistinguished major, in one of the least glamorous bureaus of the War Department, whose primary battles had been against health problems. Nineteen months later, he wore a general’s star and sat in the inner circle that surrounded America’s most powerful soldier since Ulysses S. Grant. At a

The master of the academy, William Weatherald, had a major impact on the boy, implanting in him a love of literature and the essentials of mathematics and other practical sciences and fostering more than a little of the gentle religiosity of Quakerism.

By late February, Washington was persuaded that the contemplated operation would lure the British into an engagement on terms favorable to the Americans. One lesson he had learned from the French and Indian War was that fear was contagious in battle, especially among inexperienced troops. Without disclosing the exact nature of the impending operati