Search results for ""author ernest freeberg""

In 1920, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs ran for president while serving a ten-year jail term for speaking against America’s role in World War I. Though many called Debs a traitor, others praised him as a prisoner of conscience, a martyr to the cause of free speech. Nearly a million Americans agreed, voting for a man whom the government had branded an enemy to his country.In a beautifully crafted narrative, Ernest Freeberg shows that the campaign to send Debs from an Atlanta jailhouse to the White House was part of a wider national debate over the right to free speech in wartime. Debs was one of thousands of Americans arrested for speaking his mind during the war, while government censors were silencing dozens of newspapers and magazines. When peace was restored, however, a nationwide protest was unleashed against the government’s repression, demanding amnesty for Debs and his fellow political prisoners. Led by a coalition of the country’s most important intellectuals, writers, and labor leaders, this protest not only liberated Debs, but also launched the American Civil Liberties Union and changed the course of free speech in wartime.The Debs case illuminates our own struggle to define the boundaries of permissible dissent as we continue to balance the right of free speech with the demands of national security. In this memorable story of democracy on trial, Freeberg excavates an extraordinary episode in the history of one of America’s most prized ideals.

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Gilded Age Americans lived cheek-by-jowl with free range animals. Cities and towns teemed with milk cows in dark tenement alleys, pigs rooting through garbage in the streets, geese and chickens harried by the packs of stray dogs that roamed the 19th century city. For all of American history, animals had been a ubiquitous and seemingly inevitable part of urban life, essential to sustaining a dense human population. As that population became ever-denser, though, city dwellers were forced to consider new ways to share space with their fellow creatures-and began to fit urban animals into one of two categories: the pets they loved or the pests they exterminated.Into the fracas of the urban landscape stepped Henry Bergh, who launched a then-shocking campaign to bring rights to animals. Bergh's movement was considered wildly radical for suggesting that animals might feel pain, that they might have rights. He and his cadre of activists put abusers on trial, sometimes literally calling the animal victims as witnesses in court. But despite all the showmanship, at its core the movement was guided by a fierce sense of its devotees' morality. A Traitor to His Species is a revelatory social history, bursting with colorful characters. In addition to the eccentric and droopily-mustachioed Bergh, the movement and its adversaries included former Five Points gang-leader-turned-sports-hall-entrepreneur Kit Burns and his prize bulldog Belcher, larger-than-life impresario P.T. Barnum, and pioneering Philadelphia activist Caroline Earle White. There are greedy robber barons and humanitarian visionaries-all bumping up against one another as the city underwent a monumental shift. For better or worse, they all forged our modern relationship to animals.

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