Sublime

Long before Vesey, there was the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, in 1739. Those insurrectionists, led by an enslaved Angolan named Jemmy, planned to go to Florida, another nation then, where freedom had been promised. But they were intercepted and killed, or deported as slaves to the Caribbean. Prohibitions on gatherings, education, and group mo

When the police captured McVeigh, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” The same words John Wilkes Booth shouted after he assassinated Lincoln, they mean “Thus always to tyrants” and are the words attributed to Brutus after he and his supporters murdered Caesar.

Europe’s expansion amounted in part to a deliberate assault on the modernizing ventures of other peoples and states. Perhaps it was not Europe’s modernity that triumphed, but its superior capacity for organized violence.

story I am about to tell concerns

October 30, 1950, when the revolution started and five Nationalists tried to murder him.

It was at Harpers Ferry that the abolitionist John Brown decided to liberate America’s slaves and set up a new nation of his own in northwestern Virginia, which was a pretty ambitious undertaking considering that he had an army of just twenty-one people. To that end, on October 16, 1859, he and his little group stole into town under cover of darkne

In both English and Spanish America the price of imperial expansion had been de facto colonial autonomy.37 When Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy Virginia planter, led a rebellion against the governor in 1676 (accusing him of being soft on the Pamunkey people) and burned down the colony’s capital at Jamestown, there was little or nothing that London could

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck,