The Children Who Broke an Empir- June 16, 1976

The Children Who Broke an Empir- June 16, 1976

On June 16, 1976 fifty years ago today the schoolchildren of Soweto, South Africa marched against a system designed to educate them into permanent inferiority, and police opened fire on them with live ammunition. We know the photograph. What we don't know is who organized that uprising, who took credit for it, what happened to the man who documented it, and what the official anniversary leaves out. This is the history beneath the history of Soweto.

The Ground Beneath the Glory - June 15, 1865

On June 15, 1864, Montgomery Meigs, a general who despised Robert E. Lee as a traitor, signed the order creating Arlington National Cemetery on the Lee family’s seized estate. But hidden inside this founding act was a second story: Freedman’s Village, a community of three thousand freed Black Americans who built homes, churches, and schools on that same ground and were later bulldozed to make room for more graves. America’s most sacred national site began as a personal vendetta, on constitutionally contested land, over an erased community most visitors have never heard of. Every headstone at Arlington rests on a more complicated foundation than the official history admits.

Before Auschwitz was Auschwitz - June 14, 1940

On June 14, 1940, 728 Polish priests, soldiers, students, and resistance members became the first prisoners at Auschwitz not Jewish victims, but Catholic Poles targeted for who they were. This episode tells the forgotten first chapter of history's most notorious camp, and asks how a political prison becomes a death factory through the ordinary machinery of bureaucratic decision-making. Both the Polish story and the Jewish catastrophe that followed are true. Neither cancels the other.

The Hills They Would Not Sell - June 13, 1979

On June 13, 1979, the U.S. Court of Claims ruled that the seizure of the Black Hills from the Sioux Nation was one of the most dishonorable acts in American history and ordered compensation. The Supreme Court confirmed it the following year, awarding $105 million. The Sioux refused every cent. Today that fund has grown to approximately two billion dollars, unclaimed, as the people it was meant for live in some of the deepest poverty in the United States. This is not a story about winners and losers. It's a story about what justice looks like when the law finally tells the truth and the truth isn't enough.

The Election That Ended Russian Democracy - June 12, 1991

On June 12, 1991, I stepped off a Delta flight in Moscow, walked out of the National Hotel on Mokhovaya Street, and found myself in the middle of Russia's first free election. A stranger handed me a Yeltsin campaign poster. I still have it framed in my home office.  That day, the most democratic moment in Russian history is also where Vladimir Putin's Russia begins.