Antislavery Constitution News Today

In barely a century, capitalism led to more productivity "than have all preceding generations together," Marx and Friedrich Engels argued.

Six new paperbacks to check out this week.

February 2, 2021 Elizabeth R Varon THE WASHINGTON POST – In his illuminating and accessible new book, James Oakes, an acclaimed historian of emancipation, offers us a “third Lincoln”: Neither the mythic Great Emancipator nor a flawed reluctant emancipator, but instead a committed proponent of antislavery constitutionalism. Lincoln, Oakes argues in The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, consistently upheld the “federal consensus” on slavery: t...

Frederick Douglass The question at the center of the book is whether the Constitution should be viewed as a pro-slavery or anti-slavery document. And the reviewer, the historian Gordon S. Wood, never mentions Frederick Douglass. Good Lord. If there was one central takeaway from David Blight’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” (2018), it’s that Douglass embraced the Constitution as a weapon with which to fight slavery, breaking with William Lloyd Garrison, w...

Book World: Working to end slavery, Lincoln found power - and limits - in the Constitution Elizabeth R. Varon, The Washington Post Jan. 22, 2021 FacebookTwitterEmail By James Oakes - - - In his illuminating and accessible new book, James Oakes, an acclaimed historian of emancipation, offers us a "third Lincoln": neither the mythic Great Emancipator nor a flawed reluctant emancipator, but instead a committed proponent of antislavery constitutionalism. Lincoln, Oakes argues in "The Crooked Path ...