07/16/2026
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Trail of Tears

608 Words: The Stain on Our Soul

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

And now, a lowlight. A stinking, shitty, disgusting lowlight in our nation’s history. It’s only nominally less abhorrent than anything the Nazis ever did in Europe. The difference is the Nazis were far more efficient in their approach to genocide.

May 28, 1830: The date President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. The legislation effectively allowed the federal government to displace any and all Indigenous Peoples from their lands east of the Mississippi River.

Jackson had been a loud advocate for sweeping Indigenous Peoples off their lands in  the United States.

The Act covered fertile lands, primarily in the southeast, including South Carolina, Georgia, and part of Florida. Jackson and the feds had their eyes on millions of acres of potential farmland that could be occupied by Whites. The legislation opened up vast spreads of land for cotton growing, now exploding in the US thanks to the development of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. In addition to ethnically “cleansing” the region, the Act spurred a huge increase in slavery, even as other federal legislation was enacted to gradually chip away at the practice.

The Act called for negotiations in good faith between the feds and Indigenous Peoples, with the promise of fair exchanges — you agree to move and we’ll let you resettle west of the Mississippi. At the time, the area west of the Mississippi was thought of, largely, as irrelevant to the future of the US.

Good faith negotiations and fair exchanges, though, were the last things Jackson and his gang intended. Seizing land was their first — and only — priority. Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Choctaws had been getting whipped in skirmishes and wars for decades as White “settlers” poured into what had been traditional tribal lands and the US Army forcefully moved the tribes out. Those Indigenous Peoples, known as the Five Civilized Tribes, decided to sit down and bargain with the United States.. Perhaps, they figured, we can get a good deal.

They couldn’t.

Dealmaking was not a top priority for the US. Removal was. And if it couldn’t be accomplished at the bargaining table, it’d be done at the point of a gun. Oh, sure, there some were nice little tracts of land west of the Mississippi where the Natives could relocate, but over the next half century, as the expanding United States began to realize those tracts, too, were mighty attractive, the deals and treaties it made with tribes were broken. Tragically.

Worse, 60,000 Cherokees, among some others, who hadn’t been any too pleased with “negotiations” for their lands, were forced to march from their ancestral homelands in the Smoky Mountains to what was then called “Indian Territory” (present day Oklahoma). As abominable as the Bataan Death March or the Nazi “cattle cars” of the future, the forced relocations that became known as the Trail of Tears resulted in mass suffering and death.

Painting, “Forced Move,” by Max Standley.

By 1840, virtually no Indigenous Peoples lived any longer in the southeastern United States

Hitler would have approved.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/15/2026
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Library of Congress

830 Words: All The World’s Knowledge

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

Ready for another highlight in the history of this holy land?

The date was April 24, 1800. President John Adams signed into law an act creating the Library of Congress. It was America’s first national library.

Today, it is one of the world’s largest such repositories of books, audio recordings, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, prints, photographs, films, videos, relics, keepsakes, knickknacks, tchotchkes, gadgets, and whatnots. It contains, in several locations both public and behind the scenes, upward of 180 million things. It maintains some 838 miles of bookshelves. It boasts a mint-ish condition Gutenberg Bible (the darned thing is going on 600 years old!) It has George Washington’s personal papers, Madison’s draft copy of the Bill of Rights, Jefferson’s draft copy of the Declaration of Independence, Lewis & Clark’s map, copies of Frederick Douglass’s North Star abolitionist newspaper, the contents of Lincoln’s pockets the night he was shot, a grainy film clip of the Wright Brothers’ first flight in 1903, a comic book based on the life of Jackie Robinson, perhaps the smallest book in the world (it is tinier than the periods in this post), Harry Houdini’s collection of rare magic books…, in fact, the LoC acquires up to 15,000 items in a day (it employs about 3000 people — I imagine they scarcely have time to eat lunch.)

Unfortunately, neither you nor I can check out books or other materials from the Library of Congress. Dang. I would have loved to bring Rosa Parks’ peanut butter pancakes recipe home.

Rosa Parks’ “Featherlite Pancakes” Recipe, the Librrary of Congress.

The whole idea behind the LoC was to provide Congress, both the House and Senate, a place to do their homework. As the nation’s capital moved from New York to Philadelphia (or vice versa, I forget — the seat of government was awfully nomadic in the country’s early days) a sort of ad hoc congressional library moved with it. Congressbeings were expected to delve through books (imagine that!) to familiarize themselves with issues they’d be legislating on. Now, of course, they simply sit back and wait for lobbyists to bribe them; it’s more efficient. Adams’ signature on the LoC’s creation act authorized the purchase of 3000 tomes from a publisher in England. That collection, plus whatever remained from previous library incarnations, would be housed in the shiny new Capitol building.

Ironically, it was the English who destroyed that first Library of Congress. Our ex-cousins had been teed off that American forces had burned several towns and forts in Canada during the War of 1812, so when British Gen. Robert Ross marched into Washington on August 24, 1814, he ordered the burning of the Capitol as well as several other government buildings. The Capitol fire was a hell of a conflagration; after all, it was chock full of fuel, thanks to the thousands of books in the LoC.

Lucky for us, Thomas Jefferson was strapped for cash. The then-ex-president in 1815 sold his personal collection of 6487 books (he was an insatiable reader and an autodidact) to the United States for the princely sum of $23,950. That purchase seeded what would become one of the world’s biggest libraries. The LoC actually claims to be the world’s largest; other sources say the British Library is bigger. (Fun fact: the Russian and Turkish national libraries rank fourth and fifth in the world, oddly enough. You’d think China and India, each with a population well over a billion, would have bigger national libraries, but no.)

The Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress.

Over the years, the Library of Congress has evolved from legislators’ proto-Wikipedia to a destination for scholars, researchers, historians, you, and me to rifle through most of the world’s curated materials. I’ll go out on a limb here and say I’d bet the entirety of humanity’s knowledge, in some form another, can be found at the LoC.

The Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress.

In this day and age of greed monkey anti-intellectualism, the idea that the federal government should create and maintain such a place, had the LoC not been founded 226 years ago, seems preposterous. The Project 2025/Heritage Foundation/Trump Family Mafia/Christian nationalist/White supremacist/science-denying anencephalics who currently run this land would view any proposal to start a taxpayer-supported public library as the demonic fever dream of commie rats.

Me? I think the existence of the Library of Congress is one very big reason to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

 

 

07/14/2026
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Underground Railroad

661 Words: Fugitives

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

Here’s an heroic highlight  — the Underground Railroad.

No need for any contradictory/complimentary lowlight. Let’s just celebrate the incredibly brave people who made this thing go.

The Underground Railroad was a metaphorical moniker. It wasn’t a train and all its routes and “stations” were aboveground.

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a museum and shrine, is wedged between Cincinnati’s downtown baseball and football stadiums. You might think that’s an odd locale for such a place but the Queen City was a busy port for runaway slaves, who often rafted across the broad Ohio River from Kentucky in hopes of finding freedom.

All the routes and safe houses of the Underground Railroad were secret and zealously guarded. Maintained primarily by freed Blacks, with help from some sympathetic Whites, the UR ran from about 1780 through 1863. Slaves had escaped before 1780 but they did so on their own. Once freed Blacks and abolitionists began working together to help more slaves run away, a complex system of paths, routes, information nodes, “depots,” safe houses, cryptic signs, and more was set up. Rather than rails, the escape routes, largely, were wooded paths and waterways.

Tens of thousands of escaped slaves made their way through the Underground Railroad. The exact number can never be known because, of necessity, records weren’t kept. Similarly, signs weren’t posted to help fugitive slaves make their way north. Look for such and such a gnarled tree, they were told, or a big bend in the river, or even a distinctive barn and then turn, say, right. The routes were as obscure and mysterious as that. Not only were slaves taking their lives in their hands by running away, they were in danger of getting lost in a vast wilderness, or getting shot on sight by some jittery farmer, or — ironically tragic — even captured and re-enslaved by Native Americans.

At risk of enraging some of my progressive sisteren and brethren, I’m compelled to report that many Indigenous Peoples of North America kept slaves. Native Americans had practiced varying forms of slavery for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years before the Europeans came to this continent. In fact, by watching and learning as the Colonists practiced their brand of primarily Black slavery, some tribes adopted that type of race-based involuntary servitude.

Some routes on the Underground Railroad led to Mexico and a few Caribbean islands but most fugitive slaves made their way north to free states and Canada. Routes and safe houses existed in virtually every state of the Union as well as the western territorie up until 1863.

Even if fugitive slaves made successful escapes, their lives didn’t always turn out to be idyllic. All too few Whites in the late 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries, even those in, say, Massachusetts, Minnesota, or Manitoba were eager to embrace them. For every Hollywood-ending slave escape, like Frederick Douglass’s, there were thousands of fugitive slaves whose lives turned, at best, only nominally better after escaping. Many were abused, ostracized, marginalized, and even terrorized.

Nevertheless, the urge to escape was strong among many Black slaves in the South. They were helped in their escapes by the likes of:

Harriet Tubman

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Stephen Myers

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William Henry Johnson

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Henry Highland Garnet

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Abigail Mott

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John Brown

Click on any image to link to that person’s biographical sketch.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/13/2026
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Confusions, Revolutions

525 Words: Ball of Confusion

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

I suppose it makes sense that the new nation, the United States of America, should have been so contradictory. It came into being just as several momentous developments had been or were taking place around the globe:

  • The Scientific Revolution
  • The Enlightenment
  • The Age of Revolution
  • The Industrial Revolution

The Scientific Revolution was hatched in the 1500s and it gave birth to The Enlightenment (1680s-1790s). In those pre-mass media days, both those radical transformations in thought had yet to completely overtake the old ways of thinking in every corner of the world. In fact, neither phenomenon, to this day, has been universally embraced. Millions of people, here and elsewhere, continue to believe an all-powerful god still steers the course of history and his (always his) word forever triumphs over reason, science, natural rights, Newton, Copernicus, Aquinas, and Aristotelian evidence.

The Founders, though — Jefferson, Franklin and others among them — were influenced and driven by both the Scientific Revolution and The Enlightenment. But no change ever really happens in the snap of a finger, so their thought processes were both revolutionary and hidebound. Contradictory, in other words.

Today’s contradictions — a modern, computer-driven, post Einstein, post-Heisenberg, space-traveling age in which many leaders implore us to pray for solutions to our problems — exist not only in this country but all around the planet. We humans are a baffling bunch.

The Revolutionary fervor played out here, in France, in Haiti, in Ireland, and in Central and South America. It featured a rejection of hereditary royalty and colonialism. People, revolutionaries preached, could lead themselves. Nations didn’t need god-appointed, blood lineages to boss them around. We, the revolutionaries said, could boss ourselves.

Then again, that hallowed we possessed then, and continues to possess today, an unerring capacity to exclude certain peoples from the club of us.

And then the Industrial Revolution, in which combustion engines and electric motors drove machines that replicated our human motions and labor, freeing us to live lives of leisure and intellectual and artistic pursuits came along. Yeah, sure. The people of 2026 are busier, more stressed, more neurotic, more scared, more in danger of wiping ourselves out than any previous generation.

The world is filled with contradictions and the United States, the most representative nation on Earth, is the most contradictory land of all.

It was born in an age of confusion. Ironically, the smarter we’ve become, the less sure we are of what, where, and who we are. And that’s all of us, not just Americans.

 

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/11/2026
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Eli Whitney, Slavery

477 Words: Unintended Consequences

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

Eli Whitney’s cotton gin was viewed by a lot of abolitionists as a godsend that would swiftly make slavery disappear.

After all, most Southern slaves worked at picking the seeds out of cotton bolls with their fingers, endless, tedious labor in the hot sun. Whitney’s device, patented in 1794, did that task mechanically. Huzzah! No more slaves!

It took human beings a long time to get every stinking seed out of the mass of cotton fiber in each boll. The cotton gin, relatively, did it in the snap of a finger.

Perhaps the new United States could rid itself of its Original Sin — America hadn’t yet fully embarked on its genocide of Indigenous Peoples here, so slavery will suffice as the forbidden fruit in our nascent Garden of Eden — or so went the most pollyannish thinking of the time. Things didn’t quite work out that way.

The Cotton Gin.

What actually happened was Whitney’s gadget turned the South into a humming economic powerhouse. His invention enabled cotton plantations to produce huge amounts of the fiber, quickly and cheaply. Growers immediately expanded their acreage and began supplying the world with the comfortable, breathable, washable fabric. The South went from a sleepy region of slow-moving drawlers into one of the centers of the nascent Industrial Revolution.

So much cotton was planted and grown that more slaves than ever before were needed! Hordes of slaves were imported to trudge through the fields, picking cotton. The cotton gin worked so well it made a certain strain of the plant, short-staple cotton, economically viable. This type of plant grew faster and more abundantly than long-fiber cotton but had been far more difficult to de-seed. Whitney’s gin made it a profitable strain. Short-staple cotton, too, could be grown in areas previously inhospitable to the crop, greatly expanding the range of plantations — and slavery.

Seemingly before anybody knew what was happening, the South had become the new nation’s money tree.

In terms of making the United States a world economic power, the cotton gin was a fabulous highlight. In terms of its effect on human physical and emotional suffering, it was a horrendous lowlight. As such, it might be the most American invention ever.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/10/2026
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Bill of Rights, Fugitive Slave Act

686 Words: Freedom & Slavery

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

Contradictions.

The history of the United States of America is chock full of them. Let’s look at two dates. The first is December 15, 1791.

That was the date the Virginia legislature ratified the Bill of Rights. That made the Commonwealth the eleventh state to okay that first package of Amendments to the US Constitution. It takes three fourths of the states to ratify an Amendment before it becomes part of the Constitution. As far as I can recall from my elementary school arithmetic lessons, Virginia’s eleventh vote put the Bill over the top in the then-13 state union. And, BTW, that little bit of figuring foreshadows a future lowlight, in 1982.

We like to believe that we’re the world’s beacon of freedom. The Bill of Rights is the reason why. Those first ten Amendments to the US Constitution, guarantee and/or codify, mainly, the following:

  • Freedom of speech
  • Freedom of the press
  • Freedom of religion
  • Freedom of assembly
  • The right to possess firearms
  • Protections againts unreasonable serach, arrest, and seizure
  • The establishment of the Grand Jury system
  • Protections against double jeopardy
  • Due process
  • Fair compensation for Eminent Domain seizure
  • No self-incrimination
  • The right to a speedy, public trial by an impartial jury
  • The right to confront witnesses
  • The right to legal counsel
  • Explicit distinctions between the roles of judge and jury
  • No excessive bail or fines
  • No cruel and unusual punishment
  • One person’s rights do not trump another person’s
  • and finally, the tasks and duties of the Congress include declaring war, collecting federal taxes, regulating interstate commerce, and other such stuff.

That, Pencillistas, is a highlight. Remember, though, that the Founders were really good at making promises; they and too many of their successors were not so hot at keeping them.

Still, the Bill of Rights is something to brag about.

Not so, the legislation passed on the second date, February 12, 1793. Considering the fact that news traveled slowly in the waning years of the 18th century, there may well have been scads of Americans who hadn’t even heard about the Bill of Rights ratification by then. On a date that, ironically, would eventually be proclaimed a national holiday, President George Washington signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.

For all our efforts to relegate responsibility for slavery solely to those misguided, erring souls of the South, the federal government and way, way, way too many people of the North really were complicit in that crime against humanity. The first Fugitive Slave Act (another would be enacted in 1850) meant the entire new nation was guilty for it.

A little background: A couple of years earlier, a Black man named John Davis, who’d been held as a slave in Virginia, had escaped to Pennsylvania. Soon three men from Virginia tracked him down and forced him back into servitude. The Pennsylvania governor hollered that the three Virginia men were criminals — kidnappers, really — and demanded their extradition. The governor of Virginia told him, in so many words, to go to hell. Their conflict eventually reached the halls of Congress and the president’s desk.

More irony. The Pennsylvania governor, Thomas Mifflin, had turned to the feds in hopes his argument would spur legislation to protect the residents of his state, even if they were escaped slaves, from kidnapping by out-of-state miscreants. Instead, Congress passed and Washington signed a new federal law allowing “fugitive” trackers to cross state lines and chase down escaped slaves.

The “property” rights of slaveholders, America now held, trumped the human rights of John Davis and any other slave who might dare flee to the North to escape bondage.

The slave state/free state argument would takes countless twists and turns over the next nearly 70 years, culminating in the Civil War.

Which, as Heather Cox Richardson has written, the South eventually won.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

 

07/08/2026
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Abigail Adams

335 Words: Remember the Ladies

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

America’s first feminist was Abigail Adams.

Oh, this is a highlight!

She was the wife of John Adams, the first Vice-President of the United States and the second President of the United States. Just seven years after the Colonies adopted Britain’s “coverture laws,” relegating women to the status of possessions of their husbands, like their hats and their goats, Abigail Adams in March 1776 wrote a monumental letter to her husband. At the time, he was serving on the Revolutionary committee that would edit Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

Abigail’s letter to her husband arrived just four months before the 13 Colonies announced to the world they were now a new nation. In her letter, she conveyed to him a sentiment  that might have sounded up to date in 1970, say, or even 2026, as long as you ignore her era’s flowery language, that is.

““Remember,” she wrote (all sic), “all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

Holy shit!

You want a Revolution? she’s saying. We women’ll show you a revolution if you guys continue to ignore us.

Wow!

Abigail Adams

I imagine John Adams would have acceded to his wife’s wishes but there were far too many hard headed old mules who’d stick their fingers into both the Declaration and the US Constitution (1789) and so Abigail Adams’ plea (or demand) went unfulfilled.

For my money, Abigail Adams ought to be venerated as much as any of the stubborn men whom we call the Founding Fathers.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/07/2026
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Amy Krouse Rosenthal

945 Words: Funny Girl

This’ll be a one-day break from my ongoing series on the highs and lows of American history.

The memory of this person popped into my head overnight and I have to write about her today. An old friend. Amy Krouse Rosenthal. The writer, the children’s book author, the memoirist, the prankster, the wife and mother.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Image: Brooke Hummer Photography.

She may have been the most imaginative person I’ve ever met. At least she’s in the top three and, to tell the truth, I can’t think of who the other two might be. Maybe Tristra Newyear would be one of them.

You want a shining example of Amy’s imagination? Sure. Ten days before she died of ovarian cancer in March of 2017, she penned a lengthy article that ran in the New York Times titled, “You May Want to Marry My Husband.” In it, she listed, chapter and verse, the qualities of her husband, Jason Rosenthal. She knew she was on the way out and she wanted to do all she could to ensure he’d eventually get on with his life. “He is an easy man to fall in love with,” she wrote. “I did it in one day.”

Amy, seemingly every day, came up with a new idea for a project, an antic, a piece of performance art that never failed to elicit a titter or a guffaw. For instance, in the late 1990s signs reading, “Employees Must Hold Hands before Returning to Work” began to appear above sinks in all the hippest watering holes in Chicago, as well as two-thirds of all the dive bars therein. Sometimes, the signs’d be pasted over the obligatory “Employees Must Wash Hands….” placards. The signs were well-designed and professionally produced. They were Amy’s work. She went around affixing the signs to barroom bathroom walls over a period of many months.

That’s the kind of thing she did. Once, she staged an event on Chicago’s lakefront, in Millennium Park, calling it “17 Things I Made.” Among the things she’d made were several of her books, her kids, her wedding vow, a song, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Hundreds showed up to help her make an 18th thing.

I was sitting with her in Katerina’s coffeehouse on Irving Park Road one summer afternoon. I told her I’d just read that the noted existentialist philosopher, feminist, and author of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, had spent a lot of time in Chicago in the 1940s  and ’50s while she carried on a torrid affair will the author Nelson Algren. de Beauvoir, I told her, wrote that she’d had her first orgasm in Algren’s Wicker Park apartment. Well…, here, let me quote from a Chicago Reader story I wrote about Amy in December 2000:

“They should have a bronze sign there!” Rosenthal nearly hollered. “That would be awesome. That would be the most brilliant example of insight and creativity, and they could have one of those brown highway directional signs like they have for the Children’s Museum or Navy Pier.”

I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if one day I’d see an historical marker, proclaiming the location of Simone de Beauvoir’s first sexual climax, posted outside Algren’s Evergreen Street home. Amy Krouse Rosenthal was perfectly capable of pulling that off.

She authored 30 children’s books, including the beloved, Duck! Rabbit! She wrote several memoirs, riffing on motherhood and family life, including, The Mother’s Guide to the Meaning of Life: What I’ve Learned on My Never-ending Quest to Become a Dalai Mama. She was a TED speaker and an NPR commentator. She contributed to Oprah Winfrey’s magazine and Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls. She frequently appeared in the New York Times — in fact, her first essay for that august rag, on “busy-ness,” ran side by side with a Salman Rushdie op/ed on the chances India and Pakistan might launch nuclear missiles at each other. Heady company, indeed.

That piece she wrote for the New York Times, her valedictory extolling the virtues of her husband? It drew better than 4.5 million online hits, so claimed the paper’s obit on her.

I met Amy when we both hung out and wrote at that storied center of the coffeehouse universe, Urbus Orbis, in the early 1990s. Invariably, she’d have kicked her shoes off and had tucked her legs under her as if she were in her own living room. She lived on her laptop as did I (and I still do to this day.) She laughed easily and often, her face crinkling as though she were on the verge of tears. Tears of glee.

She was a tiny thing, even though she acknowledged that as a little girl she was “chubby.” I have a photo of her in a box somewhere wearing my motorcycle helmet, taken in 1999 at her insistence. The helmet fit her the way the oversized carapace fit over Dave Thomas Dartn Vader takeoff character in Spaceballs.She grew up in the tony North shore suburb of Lake Forest, next door, in fact, to the renowned artists and writers residence Ragdale House, its alumni including Lynda Barry, Stanley Crouch, Alex Kotlowitz, Dennis Lehane, Rebecca Makkai, Sara Paretsky, Katha Pollitt, Alice Sebold, Ravi Shankar, and…, um, me. Amy cut her teeth as an advertising copywriter in Chicago and San Francisco, that is, until she realized that the ad world was way too cut-throat and pressure packed for her.

Amy turned to writing what she called “Brain Lint” gags and aphorisms and then expanded her range in every direction imaginable.

There’s no particular reason why I should be engaging in this eulogy other than Amy Krouse Rosenthal was one of the people I’ve known who shouldn’t be forgotten.

07/06/2026
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Declaration of Independence, US Constitution

804 Words: New & Improved

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

So desperate were the Colonies to break away from the English crown that the northern contingent pinched its collective nose and went to bed with the slave-holding Southern bunch. Each half figured the Revolution would be a bomb if the other wasn’t spooning with it at night.

How does that sound?

It’s the best possible spin I can think of to put on the contradiction that was the creation of the United States of America, a brand new nation in 1776 that bragged “All Men Are Created Equal” while initiating a mass assassination of Indigenous Peoples and counting Black slaves as less than human. And, you know, it wasn’t the last time this holy land embraced a savage, sadistic bedmate. Consider our World War II allies, the Soviets. Old Joe Stalin had just finished whacking some 7-10 million of his fellow countrymen in order to further his program of collectivization and remind the remainder of Russian et al citizenry that he could very well slit their throats too if they weren’t careful.

We’ll get to FDR’s decision to throw in our lot with the Soviets in 1942 later in this series on the highlights and lowlights of our nation’s history.

For now, let’s look at both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

To iterate what I wrote last week about our land’s two founding documents:

Those White, erstwhile Brits decided to form their own country, issuing a Declaration of Independence, and then writing themselves a Constitution. They preached, “All men are created equal.” Beautiful words. Gorgeous words. No society had ever before advanced the notion that people could govern themselves, without relying on a god-given noble class, without submitting to a powerful priesthood, without acknowledging that one group of people were superior to another. Except, women weren’t included under the rubric “people.” Nor were non-landowners. Black’s were fractions of people, 3/5 to be precise. It took fully 188 years before the United States got around to ensuring that every human being, no matter their sex, gender, skin color, wealth or lack thereof, was equal under the law. And to this day, forces within this nation continue to chafe against those guarantees.

I’ll say it again — as an aspiration, the Declaration was beautiful. As a national charter, the Constitution was spectacularly good, except it carried within itself small (and large) print that said, “Yeah, but….”

Counting slaves as 3/5 human, considering women as 0/5 human, and viewing Natives as pests to be pushed westward or exterminated all were written, either explicitly or by legal wink into the Constitution. In that sense, we were no better than the Nazis, whom we justifiably continue to vilify to this day (well, most of us do; some Americans, apparently, are more “tolerant” of White male supremacy.

A Patriot Front Member.

America felt the Nazis were such an awful gang that we had to link arms with a putatively less awful nation in order to defeat them. Pragmatism, I guess. The same rationale, I suppose, that drove northern abolitionists to ally with southern slave-holders.

Anyway, the Constitution is filled with admirable Articles and clauses, The ability the change it, leading to the Bill of Rights that includes freedoms of speech and assembly, calls for redress and remedies for government wrongs, and later Amendments calling for due process and equal protection under the law and women’s suffrage show the 1787 document to be one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

“We the people” is the Constitution’s momentous opening line. It may be the most important thesis in all of human history. And, as Molly Ivins has pointed out, we’ve spent all the succeeding years of our history trying to include everybody in that club.

It’s the ifs, ands, and buts of the Constitution that rob the original draft of its sheen. I’ll put another spin on things — no document, philosophy, charter, hypothesis, or machine is ever fully realized (or perfect, in the word’s strict definition) right off the bat. Each must be kneaded, massaged, oiled, salted, tweaked, and/or pummeled into a better form. It would be of little solace to a Black woman living in South Carolina in 1830 to be told that the Constitution of 2026 would give her progeny a fair shake, but it’s true.

Lyndon Johnson Signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The US Constitution, it’s 27 Amendments inclusive, is a vastly greater legal guarantee than James Madison et al‘s first stab at it. It’s a living thing. As such, it also can be maimed or even killed.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/05/2026
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Common Sense, Thomas Paine

696 Words: Common Sense & Our Cardinal Sins

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

Now here’s a highlight. A real one. A butt-kicking, nearly earth-shattering highlight in this, my cherry-picked listage (a word I just made up * ) of the highs and lows of American history.

( * Upon further snoopage 1, I find listage already has been coined. It’s French and it means precisely what I want it to mean and it’s occasionally allowed in English usage. By golly, I’m a polyglot!)
( 1 Dang. Snoopage exists as a word already, too, but it doesn’t mean what I want it to. So much for my coinage career. It actually connotes a sneaky, underhanded prying into someone’s personal affairs, papers, or other such stuff. Sounds like fun but it doesn’t work in this context.)

Anyway, today’s highlight is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Google it and you might find, as I did, plenty of people saying it remains the best-selling publication in the history of the United States. I don’t want to be cynical but, for pity’s sake, that doesn’t sound quite right. What about The Bible? What about Valley of the Dolls? What about any of the two dozen books Stephen King writes in a year?

For that matter, what about JK Rowling and that Harry Potter series of hers?

The Los Angeles Times, perhaps, sets things straight. “Common Sense,” according to an article written by AT Williams in the January 20, 2025 edition, “remains one of the best-selling works of all time relative to the U.S. population (2.5 million in 1776, not counting slaves and Native Americans).”

I buy that much more readily than I buy that Paine’s pamphlet remains the top-selling book/tract/thingy of all time in America.

The Original Common Sense Was 47 Pages, Stitched Together, No Cover.

William’s caveat, in fact, inadvertently brings up a lowlight that existed even as the Founders were printing the words “All men are created equal” on their parchment or Paul Revere iPads or whatever they were writing on.

A lowlight? Call it the lowlight. It is America’s mortal sin. Our own pair of proto-holocausts — our  genocide of the Indigenous Peoples who lived here and slavery.

“Not counting slaves and Native Americans,” indeed. Nothing defines us any better than that brobdingnagian contradiction. It proves my basic point: because we’re such a vast melange of humanity, the most diverse on the planet, we also represent the best and worst of human behavior.

We’ll look into our worst behaviors as this series goes on. Today, though, just to be celebratory, let’s stay positive and take a look at the most famous piece of writing by inventor, philosopher, statesman, British immigrant, hellraiser, American expat, deist, and drunkard, Thomas Paine.

Common Sense, a 47-page pamphlet, was America’s first bestseller. It was written in clear, concise language (shockingly, for its time) that laid out arguments for the establishment of a new nation, a principled, moral, progressive, egalitarian, almost utopian nation, one that hadn’t been seen in world in all of human history.

Paine lambasted monarchy and its hereditary lineage. Individual rulers, he wrote, led inevitably to corruption and tyranny. He argued that an independent United States would be the ideal for all the Earth’s peoples. He called for representative republican government. “The law,” he wrote, “is King.”

Government, Paine continued, was “a necessary evil” whose purpose was to curb the worst instincts in humans.

Grab your muskets, he advised, and let’s kick the hell out of the British. More than half a million copies of his pamphlet were printed and sold as the Colonies plunged headlong toward revolution.

In fact, the very notions Paine elucidated in Common Sense were revolutions in and of themselves. The pamphlet, you can say, kicked the common man — the common white man; remember the other kinds weren’t counted — into action. Common Sense, perhaps more than any other single thing, made the America Revolution go.

Here’s it is, in its entirety, online.

Thomas Paine’s Death Mask.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins

 

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