A few days ago I mentioned a comment used by Mark Twain, more than once I’m told, to convey a broad principle that perhaps the French are a people that cannot be trusted. My own study of history, including French…
Category: American Exceptionalism
A Letter from Cumberland Gap, Our Last Talk
I had expected a Quickening, but not before Christmas. This is from a Vietnam vet, Infantry platoon leader, college roommate one year, a fine prosecutor, then judge, and a good courthouse philosopher of Thomas Jefferson’s ilk: We will have to…
The Timeline of Freedom, How and Why
I want to tell this story as it was seen and heard the first time in a classroom filled with black mothers, and their babies in a nursery across the hall….in the 1990s. In 1996 I began teaching a…