Tribute: Of Howard Zinn and Other Heroes
In less than a year the battle for truth has lost three of its most innovative and stalwart voices, historians John Hope Franklin, Ivan Van Sertima and now Howard Zinn. Each challenged aspects of the cheerfully bigoted narrative that has passed for history in schools, colleges, texts and the media. Each created works that made history by awakening millions of fellow citizens to a new host of heroic men and women whose daring contributions had been shamefully ignored... {Read this essay}

History: Christmas Eve To Remember: The Freedom Fighters of 1837
Each Christmas Eve marks the anniversary of a battle for liberty in 1837 on the banks of Lake Okeechobee, Florida, that helped shape the United States of America. An estimated 380 to 480 freedom-fighting African and Indian members of the Seminole nation threw back more than a thousand U.S. Army and other troops led by Colonel Zachary Taylor, a future President of the United States... {Read this essay}

History: The Real Thanksgiving Day
Thanksgiving Day remains the most treasured holiday in the United States. Work comes to a halt, families gather, eat turkey, and count their blessings. A presidential proclamation blesses the day. But we must never forget that it is pre-eminently a political holiday serving political ends... {Read this essay}

History: The Historical Record as a Tribute to Native Americans
Early European explorers and settlers in the Americas depended on the skills and generosity of their Native hosts. No early foreign settlement could have lasted without the cooperation of Native Nations... {Read this essay}

Tribute: Homage to Dear Friend Dr. Ivan Van Sertima
On September 12, 2009 colleagues, students and family members gathered at Kirkpatrick Chapel on the Rutgers University campus for a Memorial Service honoring Ivan Van Sertima, the distinguished anthropologist, historian, linguist and author. William Loren Katz prepared these words about his colleague and friend of many years... {Read this essay}

Current Events: Tortured Reasoning And Tortured Results
Almost every day new evidence emerges showing that torture was authorized at the highest levels of the Bush administration. Dick Chaney's flurry of admissions and denials captured media attention, but in ways that only drew more attention to a host of grim crimes carried out in secret and distant places... {Read this essay}

Current Events: Gunplay and the Presidency
On February 18th, Rupert Murdock's New York Post published a cartoon of two beefy white policemen who have just slain the author of the stimulus package—a chimpanzee who lies in a pool of blood. The paper's defense—just good-hearted fun, no harm intended to the first African American President who devised and just signed the package... {Read this essay}

Current Events: The Election of 2008
Yes, a Black man will command the world's strongest nuclear-armed military, a Black First Lady will preside over White House functions, and their little children will play on the country's most famous lawn. But has the poison of racism been driven from the political arena, the school system, the justice system, the prison system and the housing and job market? {Read this essay}

Current Events: "Kill Him"—A Political Chronicle
Two white skinhead believers in "white power" who planned to assassinate candidate Barack Obama in a shooting spree that also targeted African American school children have been arrested by federal authorities in Tennessee. The two men, 20 and 18, are charged with illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun, plans to rob a firearms dealer and making threats against a presidential candidate. The arrest, weeks before the election, is a concrete sign that the terrifying "A-word" of U.S. politics has entered a tumultuous and ground-breaking battle for the White House.... {Read this essay}