Our fragile freedoms: essays

Part I : Slavery and antislavery. The rise and fall of American slavery ; The slave ship ; American slavery: the first two centuries ; The line ; Washington and slavery ; Inside the largest slave auction ; Israel Hill ; States Rights and Fugitive Slaves ; Lincoln and Brown ; Lincoln and Douglass

Part II : The Civil War and Reconstruction. Death and meaning in the Civil War ; The Civil War in "Post-racial" America ; The emancipation of Abraham Lincoln ; On Jefferson Davis ; The making and breaking of the legend of Robert E. Lee ; Longstreet ; The war within the Confederacy ; Why Reconstruction matters ; Donald Trump's unconstitutional dreams ; We should embrace the ambiguity of the Fourteenth Amendment ; Boston's Black activists ; Colfax ; When the Court chooses the President

Part III : Jim Crow America. American freedom ; The right to discriminate ; Land and freedom in the aftermath of slavery ; A Black dynasty and its fate ; Race, rights, and the law ; Everyday violence in the Jim Crow South ; Tulsa: Forgetting and remembering Part IV : The Movement. Reporting the Movement ; The double V ; The real Rosa Parks ; Riding for freedom ; A great American ; King's dream at 60 ; Whatever happened to integration?

Part V : An imperfect democracy. The Electoral College ; Political wars of the Gilded Age ; The oldest Mass party ; The first black president ; Free speech and its history ; American anarchists ; The war on Civil Liberties ; Chicago, 1968 ; The Court: Grave of liberty ; American Exceptionalism, American Freedom ; Letter to Bernie ; The enemy within

Part VI : History, memory, historians. The monuments question ; Textbook history ; Twisting history in Texas ; Du Bois ; Rayford Logan ; Vann Woodward ; Hofstadter ; American myth.