Our fragile freedoms: essays

Introduction

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.