Sublime

“Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world,” writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. “Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist settler-state’s willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess

1917, the US Congress passed the Jones-Shafroth Act, which authorized a Puerto Rican bill of rights and bicameral legislature, an elected resident commissioner to the US Congress, and immediate US citizenship for Puerto Ricans.6 Critics of the bill—including the Puerto Rican House

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

It was estimated that within a couple of decades, as much as 95 percent of allotted Indian land would pass into white ownership.

Ideas have been at least as important as law in the shift of status of indigenous Americans, for even the legal gains seem to be built on a foundation of changed imagination and rewritten history. Columbus Day became an occasion to rethink the past, and rethinking the past opened the way to a different future.

Then, in January 1934, the Nationalist Party led an agricultural strike that paralyzed the island’s sugar economy for a full month and doubled workers’ wages to an average of twelve cents per hour. From that moment forward, the party was under a severe microscope.