Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Full of the Faith that the Dark Past Has Taught Us, Full of the Hope that the Present has Brought Us

Two hundred years of American history edited into four images, at roughly 50-year intervals:

1858:


(Slavery)

1908:


(The violence that was segregation. Image from here.)

1957:


(Little Rock, Arkansas: President Eisenhower has to call out the National Guard in order to get nine African American children their court-ordered place in a previously all-white school.)

2008:



"Have not our weary feet/Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?" -- If not even farther than they could have dreamed.

For all my usual focus on the negative, this was a historic election, and one that every American ought to be proud of, and pleased by.

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