July 18, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
From the beginning, these founders understood how change would come — just as King and all the civil rights giants did later. They understood that unjust laws needed to be overturned; that legislation needed to be passed; and that Presidents needed to be pressured into action. They knew that the stain of slavery and the sin of segregation had to be lifted in the courtroom, and in the legislature, and in the hearts and the minds of Americans.
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May 9, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln faced the challenge of proving himself worthy of national leadership, with only 2 years experience in the House of Representatives, 11 years prior to his candidacy. He arranged to deliver a major policy address in New York City. The topic was daunting: he would make the argument in favor of federal control of slavery in the territories which might become new states. Southern states where slavery was not only legal but was the structural basis for their economic culture, were opposed to such a policy, believing it would lead to the powerful and populous northern states forcing Congress to ban slavery throughout the US. [transcript follows comment...]
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January 18, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
Setting out from Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, a special inaugural Amtrak train carried President-elect Obama and his wife to Wilmington, Delaware, where they would pick up VP-elect Joe Biden and his wife, and where both men would deliver addresses to the crowd gathered outside the station. The train tour would take them on to Baltimore and Washington, DC, and was designed to recreate the final stages of Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 journey to his inauguration.
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November 27, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.
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November 3, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
It is often lamented that the United States suffers from a culture that plays to the “lowest common denominator”, even as it gathers its collective urges to proclaim the loftiest of philosophical aspirations. So we are forced, as citizens, as intellectuals, as free spirits —as followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson or of Kerouac, Jerry Springer or Madonna, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.— to grapple with the argument that American culture is inherently “anti-intellectual”, and therefore unable to deal with overtly complex thought patterns, or convoluted, multiply parenthetical (or as Woody Allen might say it, polymorphously nested) sorts of syntax.
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October 15, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The monumental series of 7 3-hour-long debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas ended on 15 October 1858, exactly 150 years to the day before tonight’s third Obama-McCain televised 90-minute debate. The two Illinois politicians were competing for one of the state’s two Senate seats, and their epic debates are considered a watershed for intellect in American politics, a transformative political moment and a media revolution that drove democracy’s expansion in human society.
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