August 2013

Clearing the air on secession

The libertarian Cato Institute recently released a admirable video project addressing some of the philosophical implications of the Civil War and critiquing libertarian support for the Confederacy. I was pleasantly surprised by the direction it went, having previously criticized its narrator Jason Kuznicki for a counterproductive and somewhat philosophically troubling foray into this same issue

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If not Frederick Douglass, who was the first black visitor to the White House?

This weekend marks the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s first meeting with Frederick Douglass, an encounter summarized here and detailed in multiple published accounts by Douglass himself. While Douglass was probably the most famous African American visitor to the Lincoln White House, he was not the first to be received in an official capacity despite

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