Jeremy Brecher's vivid history of the first mass strike in US history: the great upheaval of 1877 where workers took over the railways and took on police and federal troops.
National Security Agency director Robert O’Brien, 2020
U.S. fantasies of expansion, commercial dominion, and military prowess have long hinged on a premise of Pacific exceptionalism. Couched in the millenarian language of manifest destiny, the Pacific region and its multitudinous ecosystems, cultures, peoples, and nations have been vacated in favor of an
aqua nullius that frames the region as an empty space designated for U.S. possession by divine providence.
This manufactured Pacific
idea what David Palumbo-Liu describes as a “repository of the American imaginary” has borne many names.
3 Amid the nineteenth-century annexation of Hawai‘i and the colonization of the Philippines, politician Whitelaw Reid heralded the ultimate conversion of the Pacific into an “American Lake.”
For decades, the government discriminated against Asian immigrants’ right to earn a living and hold property April 28, 2021 I By JAMES BURLING
When the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1875, it stood as a beacon for freedom and openness, welcoming immigrants from around the world. Millions came seeking a country where they could flourish and pursue their own happiness.
But that promise rang hollow to many Asian immigrants who had to endure a host of state laws and state constitutions as well designed to stop immigration and deny employment opportunities, and even the right to own property.
By stripping these immigrants of the right to earn a living and later the right to own property, state-sponsored discrimination against Asian immigrants became a hallmark of late 19th- and early 20th-century legislation.