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'Master' Jefferson: Defender Of Liberty, Then Slavery

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” there’s compelling evidence to indicate that he indeed meant all men, not just white guys.

But by the 1780s, Jefferson’s views on slavery in America had mysteriously shifted. He formulated racial theories asserting, for instance, that African women had mated with apes; Jefferson financed the construction of Monticello by using the slaves he owned — some 600 during his lifetime — as collateral for a loan he took out from a Dutch banking house; and when he engineered the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Jefferson pushed for slavery in that territory. By 1810, Jefferson had his eye fixed firmly on the bottom line, disparaging a relative’s plan to sell his slaves by saying, “It [would] never do to destroy the goose.”

Faced with these conflicting visions of Jefferson, scholars usually fall back on words like “paradox” and “irony”; but historian Henry Wiencek says words like that allow “a comforting state of moral suspended animation.” His tough new book, Master of the Mountain, judges Jefferson’s racial views by the standards of his own time and finds him wanting. Unlike, say, George Washington, who freed his slaves in his will, Jefferson, Wiencek says, increasingly “rationalized an abomination.”

7 minute book review of “Master”

The March Days of 1848: Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia and his "Dear Berliners

This document, based on a chapter from the author’s Germans and the Revolution of 1848-1849, which appears in the New German-American Studies series published by Peter Lang, is presented in recognition of the 150th anniversary of the March Days in Berlin that followed the deposition of King Louis-Philippe in France and the fall of the Austrian minister Clemens Metternich in Vienna, events that triggered a wave of revolutions all across the continent of Europe.

This account should be of special interest to descendants of Forty-Eighters who fled to the United States after conclusion of the revolutionary debates and hostilities.

A good chapter

Scottish independence: Cameron and Salmond strike referendum deal

The agreement, struck in Edinburgh, has paved the way for a vote in autumn 2014, with a single Yes/No question on Scotland leaving the UK.

It will also allow 16 and 17-year-olds to take part in the ballot.
The SNP secured a mandate to hold the referendum after its landslide Scottish election win last year.

The UK government, which has responsibility over constitutional issues, will grant limited powers to the Scottish Parliament to hold a legal referendum, under a mechanism called Section 30.

David Cameron says the agreement includes “one simple, straightforward question”

Read more about the deal at BBC

The American Revolution: The Game

When Assassin’s Creed III was in development, the game’s Canadian developers regularly quizzed Americans about their knowledge of the Revolutionary War. Who were the leading lights of the era? What did Boston look like? Just how deep would Ubisoft Montreal’s writers, artists, and cultural consultants have to dig to tell a story that felt fresh and surprising to Americans?
Not all that deep, it turns out. Alex Hutchinson, the game’s creative director, says Americans were as likely to identify Christopher Columbus and Billy the Kid as Colonial-era figures as they were to cite George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. In addition, some assumed that cities like Boston were little more than frontier campgrounds, with tiny communities huddling for warmth in tents.

You might argue that these sorts of answers reveal how ignorant Americans are about their own history, and you might be right. But they’re also a consequence of the dearth of popular depictions of this period. When Assassin’s Creed III comes out on Tuesday, millions of gamers will be exposed to the American Revolution for the first time. (Perhaps tens of millions—Assassin’s Creed II sold more than 9 million copies.) What they’ll find is the most accessible reconstruction of the Revolutionary War era that’s ever been made.

Read on at Slate

Video – Cuban missile crisis: The other, secret one

maximum peril.

On the 50th anniversary of the crisis, the BBC has had exclusive access to new information that paints an even more dangerous picture of how the crisis unfolded.

Papers to be published next week reveal that far from the crisis ending neatly with the deal struck by President Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev at the end of October, there was a second secret stage to the crisis with staggering implications for the world.

Joe Matthews spoke to Dr Svetlana Savranskay, Director of Russia Programmes, National Security Archive in Washington DC, about her research and has this report.

Secor on Ahmadinejad at the UN

And yet much has changed in Iran since Ahmadinejad took office, in 2005. He came to power as the establishment’s candidate; he inherited an economy that was sick but not wasted, and a polity that was disillusioned but not completely cynical. Today, the President is an isolated figure. His relationship with the Supreme Leader has soured. Last spring, Ahmadinejad became the first Iranian President to be summoned to parliament for hostile questioning, his close allies were barred from running for office, and one of his top aides was sentenced to prison. The Leader has even toyed with the idea of abolishing the Presidency.

Ahmadinejad’s economic policies stoked inflation well before the latest round of sanctions, but the current situation is far more severe. In the past year, the Iranian rial has depreciated by two hundred and fifty per cent against the dollar; official statistics put inflation at about twenty-four per cent, which means that it’s probably higher; and the price of chicken has increased threefold, leading to a riot in the city of Neyshabur, and an outpouring of “chicken crisis” jokes on the Web. Under the circumstances, New York must have been a welcome respite for Ahmadinejad, and not only because of the ready availability of an affordable chicken dinner. Here he’s a big man; in Tehran, he’s approaching irrelevance.

Lyndon Johnson: That day that changed everything

The weeks after the assassination may have been the “finest moment” in Johnson’s life, argues Robert Caro in this fourth—but not final—volume of his defining series on one of America’s most complex and compelling politicians.

By blending the outpouring of goodwill from the tragedy with his own legislative mastery, Johnson had got Kennedy’s stalled programme of legislation moving again in less than two months. That included the landmark civil-rights bill, which would forever bar discrimination in hotels and other public venues.

Johnson, Mr Caro writes, refused to campaign actively until it was too late because, much as he desired the presidency, deep down he feared the humiliation of losing—and not trying meant not losing. And so, indeed, he lost out to Kennedy, a man he described at the time as a “little scrawny fellow with rickets”.

Indeed, writes Mr Caro, in 1960 he told his staff to look up how many presidents had died in office. The answer was seven out of 33—and several more vice-presidents got elected in their own right after their predecessor left office.

Johnson took the odds, but the nearly three years he spent under Kennedy were sheer misery. He gave up enormous power as Senate majority leader to assume the sideline role of vice-president.

But the Kennedys shut him out. He became mocked around Washington as “Uncle Cornpone” and was left off the invitation lists for Camelot’s decadent parties (thrown by the “Harvards”, as Johnson called the Kennedy set).

Johnson in the vice-presidency is described as a “bull castrated very late in life” (Daniel Patrick Moynihan), a “great horse in a very small corral” (Bill Moyers), and a “cut dog” (Johnson himself).

By November 1963 things looked especially dire for Johnson. A former aide was under investigation for bribery, and journalists had begun looking into Johnson’s own business dealings. Washington chatter held that Kennedy might drop him from the 1964 ticket.

But when the president was shot, Johnson took over with preternatural calm.

He made a huge effort to retain Kennedy’s advisers, even those who had previously spurned him. And he gave new hope to black leaders, who emerged from his office amazed (and heartened) that a Texan would be so committed to desegregation. The odds against passing civil-rights legislation had been high because of the chokehold Southern senators had on Congress, yet Johnson schemed and cajoled and threatened, and in the end got it done—something Kennedy, for all his eloquence, had not managed.
From book review of The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

China’s princelings: Grappling in the dark

ON HIS visit to America this week China’s vice-president, Xi Jinping, serenely played the role his aides had scripted for him as the country’s leader-in-waiting, charming his hosts but revealing little. At home, however, the the Communist Party’s plans for a sweeping shuffle of its hierarchy later this year were beginning to appear less orderly...

There remains little doubt that Mr Xi will take over from Hu Jintao as party chief at a five-yearly congress to be held sometime in the autumn. But the prospects of another aspirant to top office, Bo Xilai (pictured above), have been overshadowed.

The Most Damning Evidence of a U.S. Coverup of Soviet War Crimes

On Monday, the U.S. National Archives released 1,000 declassified documents pertaining to the 1940 massacre of 22,000 Poles by the Soviet Union. The Cliffs Notes version? America’s coverup of the infamous Katyn Massacre was more extensive than previously thought.

For years, Poles and Polish-Americans have alleged that the U.S. government suppressed information about the Soviet Union’s guilt in the World War II-era murders, which were aimed at killing off Poland’s military and intellectual elite. As recently as 1992, the State Department said it “lacked irrefutable evidence” in the early 1950s to substantiate claims that the USSR, not Nazi Germany, carried out the crimes. But today’s documents show the concrete proof U.S. officials had in their hands in the 1940s regarding the Soviet Union’s guilt.

You can see all of the newly-released documents and maps at the National Archives site here.

10 Minute documentary on the Katyn massacre

NPR Interview: Mickey Edwards On Democracy's 'Cancer'

In his 16 years in Congress, Republican Mickey Edwards came to a strong conclusion: Political parties are the “cancer at the heart of our democracy,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross.

In his new book, The Parties Versus the People, the former Republican congressman from Oklahoma details how party leaders have too much control over who runs for office, what bills make it to the floor and how lawmakers vote.

How To Buy a Daughter

The conventional wisdom has always been this: Given a choice, couples would prefer sons. That has certainly been the case in places like China and India, where couples have used pregnancy screening to abort female fetuses. But in the United States, a different kind of sex selection is taking place: Mothers like Simpson are using expensive reproductive procedures so they can select girls.

Boko Haram Coverage

Who are Nigeria’s Boko Haram Islamists?

Boko Haram kills 67 in northeast Nigeria

Abubakar Shekau is the leader of the militant Islamist group Boko Haram, which has carried out a series of deadly attacks across northern Nigeria. Abdullahi Tasiu Abubakar from the BBC Hausa service looks at Nigeria’s most wanted man, who has been designated a terrorist by the US government.

Nigeria’s military has killed a top commander of militant Islamist group Boko Haram in the north-eastern city of Maiduguri, an army spokesman has said Nigerian troops have opened fire and burned buildings in the north-eastern city of Maiduguri, reportedly killing 30 civilians.

Nigeria oil spills: Shell rejects liability claim

The Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell has rejected claims by four Nigerian farmers that it should pay compensation for damage to their land.

  • 1958: Oil struck in Ogoniland. It lies in what is now one of Nigeria’s wealthiest states. Most Nigerians live on less than $2 a day
  • 1993: Large-scale protests by Ogoni people over neglect by government and Shell, led by Mosop group co-founded by activist Ken Saro-Wiwa
  • 1993: Shell pulls out of Ogoniland
  • 1994: Four community leaders killed. Mosop leaders including Ken Saro-Wiwa arrested
  • 1995: Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others executed by military government, sparking international outrage
  • 2009: Shell reaches $15.5m (£9.7m) settlement with families to stop case accusing it of complicity in Saro-Wiwa’s death and other human rights abuses
  • 2008-09: Shell accepts liability for two spills in Ogoniland
  • 2011: UN report says it could take Ogoniland 30 years to recover fully from damage caused by years of oil spills

The Boris and Dave show

A BLOND beast stalked David Cameron at the Conservatives’ party conference in Birmingham. Boris Johnson, the attention-loving London mayor, charmed and titillated the party faithful. Fringe event organisers reported that his appearance, entitled “Re-elected and Olymptastic” drew more attendees than the Friends of Russia vodka party and the perennially attractive “how to exit the EU” bash.

Free from the responsibilities and compromises of national coalition government, the mayor offered intoxicating, if improbable, hints of bringing back selective schools and slashing income taxes. Johnsonism is an own-brand product, only loosely affiliated with the Conservative Party. After he had delivered his umpteenth comment at odds with party policy, one senior cabinet minister coldly described the habit as “the Boris blurt”.

See how Boris is challenging Cameron

In Our Time: Bismarck

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the original Iron Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck. 45 minutes. One of Europe’s leading statesmen in the 19th Century he is credited with unifying Germany under the military might of his home state of Prussia.

An enthusiastic expansionist, Bismarck undertook a war against Denmark that has become a by-word for incomprehensible conflict. The British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, said: “The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.”

Was the unification of Germany a carefully planned campaign or a series of unpredictable events that Bismarck made the most of? Did his encouragement of militaristic nationalism bear fruit in Nazi Germany, and what is his legacy today in contemporary Germany?

With Richard J Evans, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge; Christopher Clark, Reader in Modern European History at the University of Cambridge; and Katharine Lerman, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at London Metropolitan University

Assange and Espionage Act

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, responds to critics, press reactions, the treatment of Private Bradley Manning and potential charges pressed against him under the The Espionage Act (1917).

What was the US press’ reaction to the controversy?

In what way does the US Justice Department have a potential right to charge Assange?

In what way doesn’t the US Justice Department have right to incriminate Assange?