Sunday, April 26, 12:00 PM
Room 210 & via Zoom

This month we will discuss Our Fragile Freedoms, a book of essays by Eric Foner.

We propose that our group read four of the chapters so that we can focus our discussion. These chapters are:

• “The Rise and Fall of American Slavery” (pp. 3–10)
  A perspective on transatlantic slavery including times (starting about 1500) and places (Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti) beyond the U.S. “New World slavery was a constantly evolving institution….”
• “Why Reconstruction Matters” (pp. 124–128)
  “As the [19th century] Republican editor George William Curtis wrote, the Fourteenth Amendment changed a constitution ‘for white men’ to one ‘for mankind.’“
• “The War on Civil Liberties” (pp. 331–341)
  In the U.S. “by far the most extreme wartime violations of civil liberties (with the major exception of Japanese-American internment during the Second World War) took place during World War I.”
• “American Myth” (pp. 433–443)
  What are the framing stories we tell ourselves about American history, and what might we consider instead? “