We tend to think of Victorian-era America as an oppressive environment for women—and in many ways it was. But it’s worth pointing out that during this period it was not unusual for governments to take great measures to protect the social position and respectability of women. In his book Crime and Punishment in American History,
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In a recent Slate podcast, a caller posed the following question: “My question is about when professional athletes call the owner of the franchise Mr. (last name). It seems odd to me that grown men would call their boss Mr. Something when they could just call him by either his first name or his full
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As you may have heard, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew just announced his decision to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. Regardless of your view on the change, one has to admit that Tubman was a remarkable woman. Because Tubman could not read or write, her story was first officially recorded in 1869 by Sarah
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When it comes to an emphasis on the individual, Americans lead the pack. That’s according to a Pew Research report which compared American and European sentiments on various democratic principles. Interestingly, Alexis de Tocqueville described this same tendency toward individualism nearly 200 years ago in his work Democracy in America. Individualism, Tocqueville observed, is a
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It seems no amount of time passes without a headline about some couple (usually believers in the free-range-parenting movement) getting arrested and having their children taken away for perceived neglect. The case of Danielle and Alexander Meitiv of Maryland received national media attention for an incident in December of 2014 in which they allowed their
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What do you do if you’re a contemporary institution realizing that it owes its very existence to having once profited from chattel slavery? A long and rich story in last Saturday’s New York Times describes, among other things, how in 1838, the Jesuit priests running what is now called Georgetown University sold off the plantation
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