William F. Spivey's History Channel

Black man Peter Salem shoots British Major Pitcairn -Scan by NYPL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons The United States could not have defeated the British Empire without Black participation. A fact the Founders largely suppressed, and history textbooks long ignored. Black people served in virtually every capacity the war demanded: as combatants, spies, sailors, laborers, guides, and suppliers. Here is the full record.

By Engraved by J.C. Buttre from a daguerreotype. — Frontispiece: Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom: Part I- Life as a Slave, Part II- Life as a Freeman, with an introduction by James M'Cune Smith.

Schultze, Louis, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons He was known simply as Dred. He was born somewhere around 1799, most historians agree, on a tobacco plantation in Southampton County, Virginia, owned by the Blow family. By the time he entered an American courtroom in 1847, Dred Scott was approximately forty-eight years old, gray at the temples, short of stature, and entirely unlettered.

Melina Kolburn, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons The 14th Amendment was written explicitly to destroy the logic of the Dred Scott decision, often cited as the worst Supreme Court decision in history. Dred Scott was an enslaved man who sued for his freedom in 1846, arguing that he had lived in free territory (Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory) and therefore should be legally free.

Boston Public Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons For more than half a century, Steeplechase Park was the beating heart of Coney Island — a place where New Yorkers of every class, color, and neighborhood came to forget themselves. It was the most democratic amusement park in America, not because it preached equality but because it practiced it.

Few ideas in American law are as simple, or as radical, as birthright citizenship. It is the principle that anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen, regardless of race, ancestry, or the legal status of their parents. It is the promise that the accident of birth confers full membership in the political community. It is also one of the most contested ideas in American history, and in 2026, it sits at the center of a political fight that will determine who belongs in the United States and who does not.

Long before the O.J. Simpson trial turned Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. into a household name, he had already spent three decades becoming the most formidable civil‑rights lawyer in Los Angeles, a strategist who understood police violence better than the LAPD understood itself, and a courtroom tactician whose victories shaped the legal landscape for Black Americans long before cable news ever pointed a camera at him. The O.J. trial didn’t create Cochran. It merely revealed him to the rest of the country.

I was looking for input on this story and queried my friends on Facebook/Meta on the best way to find the Black neighborhood in a strange city. There are any number of reasons why one might want to find the Black part of town. You might be traveling and have a taste for soul food, want to visit a church, or find a nightclub. I sometimes research stories and look for historical documentation that is found only in the Black community. There are some bad reasons to visit as well.

In a moment that reshaped his legacy, John McCain was unexpectedly confronted with an act of racism, and his response became the textbook response as to how one should act in such a circumstance. At a 2008 Minnesota town hall, an elderly woman stepped to the microphone, visibly nervous, and said something that instantly froze the room: “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him… he’s an Arab.” The crowd murmured, some cheering, others stunned.

The names sound innocent enough: The Poodle Dog, The Dairy Restaurant, and The Arctic Restaurant & Hotel. The Poodle Dog was Friedrich Trump’s first hotel venture in Seattle, founded in 1897. You might be wondering how a Bavarian-born immigrant ended up in Seattle. Trump had arrived in the United States in 1885 after leaving Germany without permission to avoid military service. He was 16 at the time.