Daily Archives: September 26, 2021

A word to know: semiquincentennial, which will appear with increasing frequency as the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches. Joseph Ellis, author of well-regarded biographies of Americas founders, is out early with a history of the revolution.

Or, as he terms it, the American Evolution. For generations, treatments of the revolution have reflected the interests and prejudices of their times. Ellis provides numerous analogies to the politics of the moment, notably bitter opposition to a strong national government, the dangers of debt and misplaced hubris.

The work covers some familiar ground from his other works with a focus on bottom-up politics. Ellis terms the story The Cause, because the patriots used it as the operative term from the summer of 1775 to the summer of 76. Leaving aside the actual cause of the split (briefly, power, not money and George IIIs policy after the peace of 1763), Ellis emphasis is the uncomfortable nature of its legacy and its impact on politics. The revolutionary cause contained the seeds of others.

That the promises of the revolution and Jeffersons unalienable rights failed, not least on slavery and Native Americans, is a shameful blight on the founding. But as Ellis writes, not all revolutions end in gulags and guillotines. Compromise was indispensible to uniting 13 colonies to achieve victory.

Was that compromise the essence of the revolution or a painful cost of it, laying a deposit or promissory note of freedom? On that question hangs the meaning of the revolution, both for greater understanding of the past and applying its lessons in the present.

Ellis succeeds more on the first, noting many founders discomfort with the compromises they made.

On politics, Ellis takes the division back to the war itself, when conspiracy-minded True Whigs asserted that those who favoured strong national government were seeking to replicate George IIIs power, even as the continental army went unpaid and Washington prevented a military coup against Congress, shaming those who would overturn the liberties of our country and open the flood gates of civil discord. The conspiratorial mindset found a home early in American politics.

History is by definition selective, and what is selected reflects the historians perspective as well as the zeitgeist. This is a relatively short history for the general reader, reflecting contemporary concerns, including relative brevity. There are some curious omissions, notably the Boston Massacre, in which Crispus Attucks, a Black and Native American patriot, was probably the first killed. Ellis cites three, not all four, of the 1774 Coercive Acts. Writing about the British North America (Quebec) Act would have enabled him to address religious prejudice in American history. More prosaically, Emerson, not Longfellow, wrote of the shot heard round the world.

Much of the book concerns military history.Vietnam/Iraq analogies to British policy and warfare serve a purpose but become tiresome. Ellis argues that Great Britain never had a realistic chance to win American victory was not a miracle; it was foreordained.

That seems wrong. A failed crossing of the Delaware, an annihilation of American forces on Long Island (where even Ellis admits the fate of the war would have become uncertain), Cornwallis escaping at Yorktown, the French fleet not arriving in time, Americans tiring of war there are many points at which the military outcome could have been different, despite repeated failings of British leadership. Here, the triumphalist perspective (which Washington endorsed, calling victory a standing miracle) seems justified: the world turned upside down. Valley Forge really was as terrible as popular myth holds, Washingtons leadership preserving the army in impossible circumstances was equally strong.

There is an urgent need for history for the general reader. Elliss story is generally told well. British perspectives receive sensitive attention, continuing a tradition exemplified by the great Bernard Bailyn.

Ellis ends with an emotional recounting of Washingtons resignation of his commission in 1783 but also on a sour, pessimistic note, describing an antinational, even antigovernment feeling seeing an American nation-state as a preposterous distortion of The Cause. He identifies two legacies from the revolution: Any robust expression of government power was placed on the permanent defensive; second, conspiracy theories that might otherwise have been dismissed as preposterous shouts from the lunatic fringe enjoyed a supportive environment because of their hallowed association with The Cause.

This is presumably description, not endorsement. But then why not add a chapter taking the history to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, to show the victory of the nationalist view Washington espoused? Ellis has written this before.

Shining a bright light on terrible moments in American history and expanding the understanding of the founding to include other voices is necessary and wise. Contemporary Americans should understand that The Cause contained a double-barreled legacy: government was Them and government was Us a debate that continues sharply today.

The danger, though, is that Ellis approach merely becomes history for an age of debunking history, which contains its own dangers not least when others try to offer alternative history for their own, for conspiratorial agendas.. Ellis tries to defend history against both presentistic and conspiratorial views but may not succeed as well as he hopes.

Like the deepest meaning of The Cause itself, he writes, if you had not lived it, no one could explain it to you. Thats what historians are supposed to do explain. Ellis eschews triumphalism, yet on occasion even he gets caught up in the wonder of it all: There was something almost elegiac about ordinary farmers, accustomed to gather in order to pass regulations about roaming cows or pigs, meeting now to debate the fate of Americas role in the British Empire.

Despite the revolutions serious discontents and compromises, perhaps one need not force a choice between triumphalism and skepticism. Perhaps one may even consider the place of idealism, permitting Americans to be inspired once again by the Declaration of Independence and Valley Forge and to redeem their implicit promises of union, freedom and justice for all.

Originally posted here:

The Cause: a history of the American revolution for our own troubled time - The Guardian

AUGUSTA, Maine More than 50 years after Maine first instituted a state income tax, former Gov. Paul LePage is calling for its eliminationas he seeks a third term in office next year.

The former two-term governor officially kicked off his campaign this week after filing to run for a third term earlier this summer. He is looking to unseat Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat who has sought to undo much of his legacy on issues including Medicaid and the size of state government, but has left his tax cuts in place despite objections from progressives.

Efforts to reform Maines personal income tax are not new, and they have not always fallen neatly along partisan lines. Maine first enacted a personal income tax on a bipartisan basis in 1969. More recently, Democrats attempted to move Maine toward a mostly flat income tax rate just over a decade ago, only to have the change rejected by Republicans who mounted a successful peoples veto.

LePage was successful in reducing tax rates in Maine as governor, but made little headway on his goal of eliminating the personal income tax, as even Republicans in the Legislature were skeptical. The historical debate provides insightinto the key obstacles LePage could encounter if he wins the Blaine House and tries to eliminate the tax.

The Maine Legislature contemplated a state income tax more than a centuryago, going so far as to bring forward an amendment to the state Constitution, but it failed via a referendum in 1920. The Republican-led Legislature considered a personal income tax 30 years later, but opted instead to adopt Maines first sales tax in 1951.

The idea gained traction in the 1960s as lawmakers looked for additional sources of revenue, and it became an issue in the 1966 gubernatorial race between incumbent Gov. John Reed, a Republican who opposed the income tax, and then-Secretary of State Ken Curtis, a Democrat who said he would favor it as a mechanism to raise revenue if necessary.

Curtis won that election by six points, and remains to this day the last challenger to unseat an incumbent governor in Maine. The Legislature debated the income tax again in 1967, but lawmakers were skeptical, citing the administrative cost of a new tax, along with worries that it would cause workers to leave the state, according to the Bangor Daily News archive. The effort failed, with only a handful of Democrats voting in favor.

There is no such thing as a fair tax, Senate Minority Leader Floyd Harding, D-Presque Isle, who favored the measure, said after it came up short. It boils down to a matter of what people will tolerate.

But concerns about state revenue and tight municipal budgets forced lawmakers to reconsider the income tax again in the following legislative session. In March 1969, a University of Maine professor warned the Legislatures taxation committee that local property taxes could double over the next decade without increased financial assistance from the state.

Proponents pitched the income tax as an alternative to increasing other taxes. They argued it was more fair than a sales tax, as it would have less of an effect on low-income people and retirees, according to a Bangor Daily News article at the time, and that it would be more responsive to economic growth, producing more revenue without an increase in rates.

Enacting such a tax would require bipartisan support, as both chambers of the Legislature were controlled by Republicans. But lawmakers ultimately achieved consensus and passed Maines first state income tax in 1969, setting up a tiered system with a top marginal rate of 6 percent. The corporate income tax was also enacted that year.

Political spectators predicted the new tax would be unpopular, but Curtis still won reelection in 1970. A year later, opponents of the tax gathered enough signatures for a ballot question aiming to repeal it. But the referendum failed in November 1971 by a 75-25 margin.

The Legislature continued to make changes to the personal income tax over the years, adjusting the tax brackets and raising the top marginal rate as high as 8.5 percent. A Democratic Legislature under former Gov. John Baldacci passed a law in 2009 to create a 6.5 percent flat tax on income, except for a surcharge on individuals making more than $250,000.

The change was to be paid for by extending the sales tax to apply to more services and increasing the food and lodging tax, a provision that garnered significant pushback from much of the states business community.

Opponents mounted a peoples veto challenge, and, in June 2010, they were successful, with 61 percent of voters casting ballots to overturn it. Republicans built on that momentum to sweep back control of the Legislature later that year, when LePage was elected governor for the first time.

LePage and the Legislature ultimately lowered the top marginal tax rate from 8.5 percent to 7.15 percent in 2011. And four years later, fresh off his reelection, the Republican governor proposed another set of income tax cuts offset in part by extending the sales tax to more goods and services. He said he was working toward phasing out the personal income tax entirelyover five years. But his plan was met with skepticism from Republicans and Democrats alike, and the constitutional amendment LePage suggested to eliminate the income tax never made the ballot.

Even with the LePage-era tax cuts, the personal income tax still generates more revenue than any other source in Maine. For the current state fiscal year, it is expected to account for about 44 percent of all undedicated state revenue, roughly $1.8 billion.

Efforts to eliminate it in the coming years will have to confront the same issue lawmakers have debated for more than 50 years coming up with another way to raise revenue.

More articles from the BDN

Excerpt from:

Paul LePage wants to eliminate Maine's income tax. History offers a glimpse of the battle that awaits. - Bangor Daily News

Laura Kariuki, Elisha Williams, Saycon Sengbloh and Dule Hill star as the Williams family. Erika Doss/ABC hide caption

Laura Kariuki, Elisha Williams, Saycon Sengbloh and Dule Hill star as the Williams family.

Experienced critics know: sometimes it pays to be skeptical of TV show revivals that try to make an old series feel fresh by changing the race of the main characters.

But ABC's Black-centered reimagining of TV's classic exercise in nostalgia, The Wonder Years, avoids that pitfall for a simple reason. The year in which it is set, 1968, was one of the most pivotal times for Black America in recent history.

Think about it. Malcom X had already been assassinated. Riots over racial issues convulsed poor Black neighborhoods from New York City to Los Angeles. The Vietnam War was claiming more young brothers every year. And Black artists like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield were trying to shrug off their buttoned-down images and bring a grittier, street-level energy to their art.

That's why I was so excited to see that, in ABC's new version of The Wonder Years, 12-year-old Dean Williams' father was a too-cool R&B musician who also teaches at a local college in Birmingham, Alabama. Played by The West Wing and Psych alum Dul Hill, Papa Williams has a hit record on the radio and a habit of telling his family to "be cool" whenever a tense moment approaches.

The pilot episode set the scene quickly, with charismatic star Don Cheadle serving as Dean's grown-up voice, narrating the action as if he was looking back through a slender haze of nostalgia.

"Growing up, Mom and Dad gave me 'the police talk,' about how to handle yourself around cops," Cheadle says over images of young Dean (Elisha "E.J." Williams) riding a bike through his neighborhood, a Sam and Dave song percolating in the background. "There was a presidential election that created a racial divide, and there was a flu pandemic that they said would kill a million people around the world. But it was 1968... and that's the state our country was in."

Surprise! Turns out that 1968 was more like 2021 than you might think.

What I love most about this new Wonder Years is how it balances coming-of-age moments which are universal for middle class Americans bullies at school, wanting your crush to notice you, struggling not to embarrass yourself at a Little League game with stuff that was specific to Black families like mine.

Dean's dad cautions him that setting up a Little League game against a white team might not end well. When Dean asks about certain subjects his parents are talking about, he's reprimanded with a curt command: "Stay out of grown folks' business." Dean has to wonder if his white teacher is racist in a way that might actually help him and gets beat up in school for acting too white.

Elisha Williams plays Dean Williams in The Wonder Years reboot. Erika Doss/ABC hide caption

Elisha Williams plays Dean Williams in The Wonder Years reboot.

And a twist at the episode's end brings home how different this era can be for Black folks hoping to reach toward equality in the years to come.

A recent rewatch of the original Wonder Years pilot from 1988, starring Fred Savage as 12-year-old Kevin Arnold and soon-to-be Home Alone costar Daniel Stern as his grown-up voice, reveals a show positioned as a baby boomer's manifesto. Kevin is heading into middle school struggling to balance his geeky friends, overbearing siblings, a simmering crush on a neighbor and the occasional intrusion of bigger events, including spoiler alert the death of a neighborhood boy drafted to serve in the Vietnam War.

Filled with needle drops worthy of The Big Chill soundtrack When a Man Loves a Woman, Turn, Turn, Turn and With a Little Help From My Friends were in the pilot episode alone the show explained the formative years of a generation reared in a suburban paradise and tempered by war in Vietnam, sliding from the Age of the Greasers to the Age of The Hippies.

Their world was so white it almost hurts your eyes to look at it now.

One big reason changing the races of characters in a series reboot can make sense is because the adjustment can reclaim a bit of cultural space allowing people of color to tell their own stories in a fictional world where they had previously been rendered invisible. (Though it is interesting that series star Fred Savage also serves as an executive producer for the reboot and directed the pilot episode.)

That's the real reason I enjoyed the new Wonder Years reboot so much. Here, I'm not the one trying to imagine how people like me would fit into a narrative set at such an important time.

And, just maybe, the rest of America might learn a little more about its history by seeing those pivotal moments from a perspective different than their own.

Original post:

'The Wonder Years' Review: A Successful Reboot By ABC - NPR

Posted: Sep 24, 2021 / 06:47 PM EDT / Updated: Sep 24, 2021 / 06:47 PM EDT

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) Former Syracuse mayor Rolland Marvin invited people to the big event, in a newsreel that played in theaters far and wide.For more than two centuries, Syracuse has been known as the city where the trains pass through the heart of the town,he said.

The city planned a jubilee celebration 85 years ago, on the weekend of September 24, 1936. Thats when the last locomotive rumbled through downtown streets, and trains were re-routed over elevated tracks to a new $17 million station along Erie Boulevard East. The Onondaga Historical Association estimates that investment equates to more than $335 million today.

It was incredibly dangerous, and as those locomotives got bigger and they got faster and the population got bigger, people were getting injured, people were getting killed,says OHA Curator of History Bob Searing.So, it was a major public safety issue. Butit was first discussed in the 1870s and it isnt until 1936 that its actually completed.

Thousands of people lined Washington Street as the last train through downtown Syracuse made its way past City Hall, which is still here, and the Yates Hotel, which is not.

From newspaper headlines of the day, Bob Searing describes the scene.People are singing Auld Lang Syne. Theres a band playing. Theres thousands of people standing in the rain on a cold fall day in Syracuse, cheering this giant Iron Horse.

Ruth Pass Hancock was there with her family.My father made sure all of us girls knew what was going on in the city, and so he took us to the event when they celebrated the last passing through of the train. Mrs. Hancocks grandfather and father both ran Syracuse China, which made dishware for the New York Central and other railroad lines.

She was 13 at the time, and still remembers the jubilee marking the occasion.I dont remember too much about it,she said with a chuckle.I think I was more interested in who else was there!

Mrs. Hancock has no trouble remembering her first train ride to New York, leaving from the Franklin Street station to see the legendary actress Eva Lagalienne playPeter Pan.

She remembers three cross-country trips by rail, once sneaking her grandchildren into a private observation car full of Rockefellers. She says she made her grandsons keep diaries on those tripsand boasts that the now-grown men still have those diaries today.The romance of taking a train ride, and the excitement of watching the countryside go by, cant be beat,she says.

That romance continued for another quarter-century before cars and planes largely overtook rail travel, and the elevated rail beds became the foundation of Interstate Route 690. But its nice to think back, to a time when the railroad helped define our town.

As that newsreel put it as one of the final engines pulled down the middle of Washington Street:So, its all aboard for a safer Syracuse, in which this sight will be just a memory.

Visit link:

Tell Me Something Good: History behind last train through downtown Syracuse - WSYR

The Silk Road wasnt a single route, but rather a vibrant trade network that crisscrossed central Eurasia for centuries, bringing far-flung cultures into contact. Traveling by camel and horseback, merchants, nomads, missionaries, warriors and diplomats not only exchanged exotic goods, but transferred knowledge, technology, medicine and religious beliefs that reshaped ancient civilizations.

The term silk road was coined in 1877 by Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen, a German geographer, who focused on the flourishing silk trade between the Chinese Han Empire (206 B.C. to 220 A.C.) and Rome. But modern scholars recognize that the Silk Road (or Silk Roads) continued to enable cross-continental trade until large-scale maritime trade replaced overland caravans in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Here are eight of the most important trade goods that fueled centuries of Silk Road cultural exchange:

Its called the Silk Road for a reason. Silk, first produced in China as early as 3,000 B.C., was the ideal overland trade item for merchant and diplomatic caravans that may have traveled thousands of miles to reach their destinations, saysXin Wen, a historian of medieval China and Inner Asia at Princeton University.

Your carrying capacity was very limited, so you brought whatever was most valuable, but also the lightest, says Wen, whose upcoming book is titled The Kings Road: Diplomatic Travelers and the Making of the Silk Road in Eastern Eurasia, 8501000. Not only does silk fit these characteristics exactlyhigh value, low weightbut its also extremely versatile.

The Roman elite prized Chinese silk as a luxuriously thin textile, and later, when silk-making technology was brought to the Mediterranean, artisans in Damascus created the reversible woven silk textile known as damask.

But silk was more than clothing, says Wen. In Buddhist cultures it was made into ritual banners or used as a canvas for paintings. In the important Silk Road settlement of Turfan in Eastern China, silk was used as currency, writes historian Valerie Hansen, and in the Tang Dynasty (618 to 907 A.C.), silk was collected as a form of tax.

Terra cotta statues of a Qin Dynasty Horseman, on display in France 1992.

Patrick Aventurier/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Horses were first domesticated in the steppes of Central Asia around 3700 B.C. and transported nomadic tribes that hunted and raided across vast territories that bordered China, India, Persia and the Mediterranean. Once the horse was introduced into agrarian societies, it became a sought-after tool for transport, cultivation and cavalry, writes historian James Millward inSilk Road: A Very Short Introduction.

The silk-for-horse trade was one of the most important and long-lasting exchanges on the Silk Road. Chinese merchants and officials traded bolts of silk for well-bred horses from the Mongolian steppes and Tibetan plateau. In turn, nomad elites prized the silk for the status it conferred or the additional goods it could buy.

Wen says that horses, by providing their own transportation, were the ultimate high-value, low-weight commodity on the Silk Road, and were a very unique luxury item for the elite of the Eurasian world.

Its not surprising that the famous tomb of the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang (259210 B.C.) not only contains 8,000 terra cotta warriors, but also lifelike statues of 520 chariot horses and 150 cavalry horses.

Paper, invented in China in the second century A.C., first spread throughout Asia with the dissemination of Buddhism. In 751, paper was introduced to the Islamic world when Arab forces clashed with the Tang Dynasty at the Battle of Talas. The Caliph Harun al-Rashid built a paper mill in Baghdad that introduced paper-making to Egypt, North Africa and Spain, where paper finally reached Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries, writes Millward.

On the Silk Road, travelers carried paper documents that served as passports to cross nomadic lands or spend the night at a caravansary, a Silk Road oasis. But the most important function of paper along the Silk Road was that it was bound into texts and books that transmitted entirely new systems of thought, especially religion.

Its not a coincidence that Buddhism spread to China around the same time that paper became prevalent in the region, says Wen. Same with Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism. One of the central significances of the Silk Road is that it served as a channel for the spread of different ideas and cultural interactions, and much of that relied on paper.

Cinnamon seller, miniature from Tractatus de herbis, 15th-century France.

Leemage/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Spices from East and South Asia, like cinnamon from Sri Lanka and cassia from China, were exotic and coveted trade items, but they didnt typically travel the overland routes of the Silk Road. Instead, spices were mainly transported along an ancient maritime Silk Road that linked port cities from Indonesia westward through India and the Arabian Peninsula.

Across the Silk Road, spices were valued for their use in cooking, but also for religious ceremonies and as medicine. And unlike silk, which could be produced wherever silk worms could be kept alive, many spices were derived from plants that only grew in very specific environments.

That means theres a clearer origin for spice than for some of the other luxury items, which adds to their value, says Wen.

Millennia before there was such a thing as the Silk Road, China traded with its western neighbors along the so-called Jade Road.

Jade, the crystalline-green gemstone, was central to Chinese ritual culture. When jade supplies ran low in the 5th millennium B.C., it was necessary for China to establish trade relations with western neighbors like the ancient Iranian Kingdom of Khotan, whose rivers were rich with hunks of nephrite jade, the best variety of jade for carving intricate figurines and jewelry. The jade trade to China flourished throughout the Silk Road period, as did trade in other semi-precious gems like pearls.

Westerners often assume that most Silk Road goods traveled from the exotic Far East westward to the Mediterranean and Europe, but Silk Road trade went in all directions. For example, archeologists excavating burial mounds in China, Korea, Thailand and the Philippines have found Roman glassware among the prized possessions of the Asian elite. The distinct type of soda-lime glass made in Rome and fashioned into vases and goblets would have eagerly been traded for silk, which Romans were obsessed with.

The taiga is the vast stretch of evergreen forest that runs through Siberia in Eurasia and continues into Canada in North America. In the days of the Silk Road, writes Millward, the taiga attracted hardy bands of trappers who harvested fox, sable, mink, beaver and ermine pelts. This northern fur road supplied luxurious coats and hats to Chinese dynasties and other Eurasian elites. Millward writes that Genghis Khan cemented one of his earliest political alliances with a gift of a sable coat. By the 17th century, in the waning days of the Silk Road, rulers from the Chinese Qing Dynasty could buy furs from Siberian trappers.

Enslaved people were a tragically common trade good along the Silk Road. Raiding armies would take captives and sell them to private traders who would find buyers in far-flung ports and capitals from Dublin in the West to Shandong in Eastern China,writes Silk Road historian Susan Whitfield. The slaves became servants, entertainers and eunuchs for royal courts.

Wen says that while enslavement was pervasive in premodern Eurasia along the Silk Road, none of these kingdoms or societies could be classified as slave-based in the same way that the African slave trade operated in the New World.

Slaves were more like an ornament of the life of the Silk Road elite, says Wen, Not a major economic source.

See the rest here:

The Silk Road: 8 Goods Traded Along the Ancient Network - History

A 30ft wave crashes over your head as you enter the museum, dragging you instantly down into the roiling waters. The waves keep coming at you in gunmetal grey surges, with nothing to cling to amid the loneliness of the sea.

Across the giant screen in front of you, words start emerging that ask you to reflect on the terrifying, tragic and deadly ocean journey which 12.7 million men, women and children were forced to make having been kidnapped from their homes in Africa and sold into slavery. For about 2 million of them, the voyage to the Americas would end in a watery grave at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

The cinematic representation of the horror of the middle passage forms the start of an agonizing journey through the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.

As the name suggests, the visitor is taken on a white-knuckle ride through some of the most painful elements of Americas long history of racial injustice slavery, lynching, segregation, all the way to the present-day epidemic of police killings of African American teenagers and the societal addiction to putting Black people behind bars.

The museum pulls no punches. One section memorializes the children killed in racial terror lynchings: Four-year-old Black girl Lillie Mike, her six-year-old sister Emma Mike, lynched by a white mob 1884, Calhoun County, Georgia.

Bryan Stevenson, the mastermind behind the Legacy Museum, sees such searing detail as bitter but necessary medicine for the American soul. The new institution, which starts on 1 October, lands at a time when racial violence is again on the rise and when critical race theory is being used as a ruse to prevent the history of Americas racist past being taught in schools.

It will open its doors less than a year after a white mob spearheaded by far-right groups and fueled by white supremacist anger stormed the US Capitol, egged on by the then US president.

We really felt the need to be even more precise in detailing the harm that people in this country have inherited and failed to address, Stevenson said. In a moment when its so tempting to say thats not true, it didnt happen, it wasnt that bad, when all these false narratives are being created, we had to be even clearer about the nature of the injury that was done.

The Legacy Museum is the latest manifestation of a vision of truth-telling and repair that Stevenson, 61, has been developing for years. His ruminations began when he first came down to the deep south as a young Harvard Law graduate in the early 1980s.

He cut his teeth fighting for justice for innocent death row inmates, which became the subject of his 2014 memoir, Just Mercy, and the subsequent movie of the same name in which he is played by Michael B Jordan. The non-profit he founded, Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), has won reversals, relief, or release from prison for more than 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row.

Over the years he reflected on why it was that 42% of Americas death row inmates are African American when the Black population makes up just 13% of the US total. He kept being drawn back into American history, and what had happened in his adopted home of Montgomery.

The Alabama capital was the site of the first Confederate White House, where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy. When Stevenson arrived in the city, all its main public monuments were devoted to glorifying white supremacy.

In the 1980s you couldnt find the word slavery anywhere in Montgomery. There were 59 markers and memorials to the Confederacy. Jefferson Daviss birthday is still a state holiday in Alabama, as is Confederate Memorial Day.

Stevensons response has been to slowly, stealthily remake the city in a very different mould. The monuments he is championing are devoted to memorializing not the Confederacy but the horrors of racial injustice and honoring not only its many victims but also the courageous civil rights activists who fought against it.

He began by putting up markers to the slave trade which are now dotted through Montgomery. Then in 2018 he opened the first national memorial to the more than 4,000 people of color who were killed in racial terror lynchings, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice which sits audaciously on top of the hill overlooking the state capitol.

Now he has taken the nascent Legacy Museum that opened in 2018 and expanded it fourfold into a giant 40,000 sq ft space in which his desire for truth-telling vision has room to flourish. The new exhibition is housed on the exact location of a former slave warehouse where Black people were held in bondage, forced to process cotton and held in pens in preparation for being sold.

Stevensons hope is that if Montgomery a cradle of the Confederacy, ground zero of lynchings, birthplace of the civil rights movement can be reconfigured from a city glorifying slavery into one dedicated to racial healing, then anything is possible.

If we can create a new architecture, a new landscape, a new conversation, a new relationship to history in Montgomery, Albama, then theres not another community in the country that can say, We cant do that.

Which brings the story back to the 30ft cinematic Atlantic wave crashing over our heads at the entrance to the new museum. Stevenson said that he wanted to immerse visitors into the violence that the ocean represented to so many kidnapped Africans.

We did something to millions of people to disconnect them not just from their families and homes but from their identities. Two million people died during the middle passage, there are hundreds of thousands of bodies buried at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and yet we are more interested in exploring the wreck of the Titanic than this unparalleled human tragedy, he said.

From the trauma of slavery, the museums journey takes you through the slim glimmer of hope that was emancipation and the Reconstruction period into the renewed subjugation of lynching. A wall of contemporary newspaper headlines records such unconscionable events as: Lynched Because He Didnt Say Mr, Oil Soaked Negroes Burned and Triple Lynching in Georgia Lynchers Could Not Find the Negro They Wanted and So Took Three Others.

The museum traces how when lynching began to decline in the 1930s, the white mob gentrified its violence and took it indoors. White supremacy found a new home in the legitimized, sanitized manifestation of racial terror killings that is the death penalty.

Later rooms explore the battle to secure fundamental freedoms in the civil rights era, including Montgomerys own bus boycott. Then the Legacy Museum arrives at the present day.

It is here at the end of the museums journey that Stevensons holistic vision becomes clear history must be understood not only as an end in itself but as a cure to the sickness coursing through the veins of modern America.

This is about changing the larger narrative, he said. Most people in this country, to the extent they knew anything about slavery, they were taught it was benign and not that big a problem; they knew nothing about lynching; and when you get to segregation, well Black people wanted it that way, they wanted their own schools. You end up in a place where you just dont think weve done anything so problematic that we need to talk about it.

The new Legacy Museum opens at an exceptional moment for America. On the positive side, last years wave of Black Lives Matter protests inspired a rethinking of the past that led to scores of Confederate monuments being toppled, including the statue of Robert E Lee that was removed earlier this month in the slave-owning capital of Richmond, Virginia.

But such winds of change only go so far in Stevensons reckoning. For him, fundamental change first requires truth-telling.

We are in this phase where truth-telling has to happen. Its going to require more than taking down statures, more than the easy symbolic stuff. The harder stuff is, what does it mean that most of us were born in this country at a time when there were legal restrictions on who you could love. Whats the legacy of that?

Then there is the negative side of the present moment. The museum makes plain that the sores of Americas racial wounds remain very much open.

It records the fact that Black children today are killed by police at six times the rate of white children. That 2.3 million people are still incarcerated, affecting all Americans almost two-thirds of all adults in the US, whatever their race or ethnicity, have family members who have been behind bars.

Many of the exhibits trigger chilling parallels with the modern day. A room that examines the myriad imaginative ways in which Black citizens were disenfranchised in the deep south answer the question How many bubbles are in a bar of soap? or you dont get registered to vote is resonant at a time when voter suppression is once again sweeping the country.

The disturbing images displayed at the museum of white men at public lynching spectacles, their faces contorted into wild, elated grimaces, beg comparison to the expressions of the mob that stormed the US Capitol on 6 January. The same white rage, aggravated by fears of Black democratic participation, fueled both.

Thats the problem with fear and anger, Stevenson said. Its toxic, its infectious and it will destroy a healthy democracy. Which is why no one should be indifferent to the threat that these events represent.

Visitors to the new museum are likely to emerge from the end of all this challenged and shaken. But the journey contains a note of healing.

One of the final rooms is a large reflection space given over to the stories of 400 people who had the courage to stand up against racial injustice. Some are familiar Rosa Parks, Billie Holiday, WEB Du Bois, John Lewis others have all but been forgotten.

Stevenson hopes the room will inspire people to action, and act as a segue to the next chapter in his ambitious plan. After the truth-telling comes the remedy and repair.

His team has started to reach out to a range of institutions hospitals, schools, banks, insurance companies, professional sports teams, newspapers inviting them to engage with EJI and launch their own truth and justice project. These are institutions with histories and they have an obligation to repair the damage theyve created, he said.

He hopes that by now people will appreciate that the lessons of history are not debilitating, they are restorative. We have helped people understand that we can talk about slavery, lynching, segregation, mass incarceration, and survive. The world will not end. It will not erupt into flames. And we will get to a better place.

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Truth-telling has to happen: the museum of Americas racist history - The Guardian

Former President TrumpDonald TrumpGraham says he hopes that Trump runs again Trump says Stacey Abrams 'might be better than existing governor' Kemp Executive privilege fight poses hurdles for Trump MORE on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against his niece, Mary TrumpMary TrumpMary Trump calls Donald Trump Jr. her 'stupidest' relative The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by Alibaba - House Democrats plagued by Biden agenda troubles Trump sues NYT, Mary Trump over story on tax history MORE, along with The New York Times and three of its reporters over a 2018 story on his tax records, arguing they engaged in an insidious plot to gain access to sensitive records and were motivated by a personal vendetta.

The complaint, filed in New Yorks Dutchess County, specifically names Times reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russell Buettner, who together published a series in 2018 based on Donald Trumps confidential tax and financial records, which the former president has for years resisted making public.

The reporting revealed, among other findings, that Donald Trump made the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his fathers real estate empire, with the help of efforts to dodge taxes.

The Times reporters won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for their extensive series into the Trump family's tax history.

Donald Trump noted in his lawsuit that while his niece had signed a confidentiality agreement in 2001, she was convinced by Times journalists to smuggle the records out of her attorneys office and turn them over to The Times.

The former commander in chief went on to argue that the Times attempted to capitalize on their receipt of the confidential record through their publication of various news articles, while Mary Trump also engaged in an ill-conceived effort to profit from these same events by publishing her memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the Worlds Most Dangerous Man.

A judge in 2020 ruled in a legal effort to trytostop Mary Trump and publisher Simon & Schuster from releasing the book that the 2001 confidentiality agreement she signed along with other family members had been too vaguely defined and that the books publisher was not a signatory to the agreement and could, therefore, not be forced to comply.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump argued in his Tuesday suit that his niece committed a material breach of the Settlement Agreement by disclosing, assisting and/or providing confidential information to The Times.

The former president argued that the Times was aware of the agreement but still relentlessly sought out Mary Trump and intentionally procured her breach of the Settlement Agreement.

Donald Trump in the complaint, which was first reported by The Daily Beast, wrote that he is seeking damages from the defendants for a total of no less than One Hundred Million Dollars.

In response to the lawsuit, Mary Trump told The Daily Beast, I think he is a f------ loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can.

Its desperation, she added. The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that will stick.

As is always the case with Donald, hell try and change the subject, she said.

"The Times's coverage of Donald Trump's taxes helped inform citizens through meticulous reporting on a subject of overriding public interest," a Times spokesperson said in a statement. "This lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations and we plan to vigorously defend against it."

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Trump sues NYT, Mary Trump over story on tax history | TheHill - The Hill