This Sunday, we’re featuring two essays by noted historians—one from 2018 by Annette Gordon-Reed and the other from 2020 by David Blight—that examine the recurring clashes in the United States over race, voting rights, citizenship, federalism, and equality.
Since its beginnings, the United States has struggled to reconcile the values of freedom and equality espoused in its founding documents with its “original sin of slavery, the flaw that marred the country’s creation, warped its prospects, and eventually plunged it into civil war,” wrote Gordon-Reed. “Learning how to strike the right balance has proved one of the most difficult problems for American society.”
Blight looked back on the effort to strike that balance after the Civil War, when the United States “experienced a second founding,” with constitutional amendments enfranchising Black men and enshrining equality before the law. But the persistence of “racism, nativism, authoritarianism, [and] greed” have left the country “in desperate need of another remaking,” Blight argued. “If there are any lessons that Americans should take” from the Reconstruction era, he wrote, “they are that when it comes to protecting basic rights, there is no substitute for federal power, and that in the wake of national crises, healing and justice must be pursued together—which is no small feat.”
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