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Articles on Emancipation Proclamation

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Emancipation Day celebration, June 19, 1900, held in ‘East Woods’ on East 24th St. in Austin, Texas. Austin History Center

Juneteenth celebrates just one of the United States’ 20 emancipation days – and the history of how emancipated people were kept unfree needs to be remembered, too

Known as Juneteenth in Texas, Emancipation Days symbolized America’s attempt to free the enslaved across the nation. But those days were unable to prevent new forms of economic slavery.
Nixon resigned after tapes he had fought making public incriminated him in the Watergate coverup. Bettmann/Getty

Trump wants the National Archives to keep his papers away from investigators – post-Watergate laws and executive orders may not let him

Donald Trump’s lawsuit to stop the release to Congress of potentially embarrassing or incriminating documents puts the National Archives in the middle of an old legal conflict.
A studio group portrait of the Fisk University Jubilee singers. James Wallace Black/American Missionary Association

The power of a song in a strange land

Spirituals were created out of the experience of enslaved people in the US. They weren’t songs of anger – but of an abiding belief in the victory of good over evil.
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates, left, and actor Danny Glover, right, testify about reparation for the descendants of slaves during a hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Capitol Hill on June 19, 2019. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

What Canada and South Africa can teach the U.S. about slavery reparations

Reparation opponents who oppose truth and reconciliation by insisting that America’s “original sin” of slavery is in the distant past should heed the lessons of Canada and South Africa.
President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and Vice President Joseph Biden in 2019. Library of Congress, photo Alexander Gardner; AP/Nati Harnik

Abraham Lincoln, Joe Biden and the politics of touch

The news is filled with stories about inappropriate touching by politicians. But touch by politicians was long important in the US, and Abraham Lincoln’s handshake helped engage and guide the nation.

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