...former Guatemalan army commandos testify about the massacre of 250 villagers in...Dos Erres during the country’s civil war.

Or how about the lawmakers who say none of this would have been necessary if the United States, more than a year ago, had provided extensive military support for a no-fly zone/safe area within Syria to train the opposition—all without congressional approval...Then there are the historians and lawyers who want to bring in precedents such as Kuwait, Kosovo or Libya, citing moral and international laws. Not that Obama needs any more guidance, but perhaps we in the public should pause for a moment and put ourselves in his shoes.

The North had won the war and slavery had ended, but there the gains stalled, leading Quaker poet/abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier to lament that, between...carpet-baggers and Confederate vigilantes, the newly freed slaves in the South "had not been saved from suffering," yet "I see no better course"..."The negro will disappear from the field of national politics," wrote the Nation, a modern liberal beacon then in its infancy. "Henceforth that nation, as a nation, will have nothing to do with him." It's hard in an era of voter suppression efforts in minority neighborhoods, with a Supreme Court that devalues the Civil Rights Act, and when an armed Florida vigilante can spark a confrontation and then claim self-defense, to not measure past against present. Especially given the argument streaming through conservative America that this is a post-racial society in which blacks no longer need special protections from the legal system. Whites and blacks have a different history in these same United States, and it behooves us to recognize that. And to sense—in the present—the weight of the past.

One fall day at the South Carolina Medical College, a construction crew unearths dozens of...bodies of slaves stolen in the Civil War era so that white medical students could study anatomy...the dean...assigns Jacob Thacker to rebury the bodies. Jacob is a former internist from the school who’s on probation after a Xanax addiction...While waiting desperately to return to medicine, he bides his time as the school’s obedient public affairs officer. But the discovery of these bodies will ruin his week, thrust him into a racial power play and nearly decompose his soul. Guinn [also] tells a parallel story about the school’s first nine years....

A photo exhibit to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, 'Experience Civil War Photography: From the Home Front to the Battlefront'...at Smithsonian Castle...

In the years immediately following the Civil War, America appeared to possess the will and the means to end racial segregation and give the same rights enjoyed by whites to its 4 million...freed black slaves. These...goals, of course, were not achieved for another century. During the intervening decades, the South saw the rise of Jim Crow and Judge Lynch...Goldstone convincingly lays the blame for this tragedy at the door of the institution that could have made the difference but did not: the United States Supreme Court.

...like the Emancipation Proclamation that made it possible, the Combahee raid is essential to the meaning of the Civil War. It did not save the Union. But coming between the fiasco of First Wilderness and the grim glory of Gettysburg, Harriet Tubman’s Combahee Raid indelibly illustrated what made the Union worth saving.

...grasps and conveys that the Civil War was not really over, as it may never be.

...while black women may have been particularly vulnerable to wartime rape, the Lieber Code brought them for the first time under the umbrella of legal protection. In fact, some black women were able to mobilize military law to their advantage. In the summer of 1864, Jenny Green, a young “colored” girl who had escaped slavery and sought refuge with the Union Army in Richmond, Va., was brutally raped by Lt. Andrew J. Smith, 11th Pennsylvania Calvary. Thanks to the Lieber Code, though, she was able to bring charges against him, and even testify in a military court...The idea that a former slave, and an adolescent girl at that, could demand and receive legal redress was revolutionary. Despite his attorney’s argument that Green had consented, Smith was discharged from the Army and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor.

...the majority of the Supreme Court hoped that the Dred Scott decision would mark the end of antislavery agitation. Instead, the decision increased antislavery sentiment in the North...

...phrases likely to foster paranoia, distrust, hatred and violence in the run-up to next week’s election. They work for the monitoring group Umati and are part of a multi-strand high-tech attempt, much of it by volunteers, to ensure that Kenya doesn’t come to the brink of civil war as it did after its last election, in 2007. Working in five vernacular languages, Swahili and English, they are on the alert, in particular, for terms that reduce entire ethnic groups to the status of animals. “Cockroaches,” a favorite during Rwanda’s genocide, is also popular here. So are “worms,” “rats,” “vermin” and “jiggers”—a reference to a parasite that burrows under toenails.