The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as tha...t of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
High from the summit of a craggy cliff, Hung o'er the deep, such as amazing frowns... On utmost Kilda's shore, whose lonely race Resign the setting sun to Indian worlds, The royal eagle draws his vigorous youngLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
According to the record of an old inhabitant of Tyngsborough, now dead, whose farm we were now gliding past, one of the greatest f...reshets on this river took place in October, 1785, and its height was marked by a nail driven into an apple tree behind his house.... The revolutions of nature tell as fine tales, and make as interesting revelations, on this river's banks, as on the Euphrates or the Nile. This apple tree, which stands within a few rods of the river, is called "Elisha's apple tree," from a friendly Indian who was anciently in the service of Jonathan Tyng, and, with one other man, was killed here by his own race in one of the Indian wars,--the particulars of which affair were told us on the spot. He was buried close by, no one knew exactly where, but in the flood of 1785, so great a weight of water standing over the grave caused the earth to settle where it had once been disturbed, and when the flood went down, a sunken spot, exactly of the form and size of the grave, revealed its locality; but this was now lost again, and no future flood can detect it; yet, no doubt, nature will know how to point it out in due time, if it be necessary, by methods yet more searching and unexpected. Thus there is not only the crisis when the spirit ceases to inspire and expand the body, marked by a fresh mound in the churchyard, but there is also a crisis when the body ceases to take up room as such in nature, marked by a fainter depression in the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and... stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While lying there listening to the Indians, I amused myself with trying to guess at their subject by their gestures, or some prope...r name introduced. There can be no more startling evidence of their being a distinct and comparatively aboriginal race than to hear this unaltered Indian language, which the white man cannot speak nor understand. We may suspect change and deterioration in almost every other particular but the language which is so wholly unintelligible to us. It took me by surprise, though I had found so many arrowheads, and convinced me that the Indian was not the invention of historians and poets.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Verily, the Indian has but a feeble hold on his bow now; but the curiosity of the white man is insatiable, and from the first he h...as been eager to witness this forest accomplishment. That elastic piece of wood with its feathered dart, so sure to be unstrung by contact with civilization, will serve for the type, the coat-of-arms of the savage. Alas for the Hunter Race! the white man has driven off their game, and substituted a cent in its place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. The proper place to-day, the onl...y place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable, ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,--the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body ...of inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked.... Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh mother of a mighty race, Yet lovely in thy youthful grace!... The elder dames, thy haughty peers, Admire and hate thy blooming years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gende...r politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »