Civil War

In Ethiopia, old ethnic tensions are being incited in new ways. And that means the bloody civil war may be entering an even more destructive phase.

To mark Juneteenth, NPR staff members read the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth — the celebration to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States — is now a federal holiday.

Maryland, though a slave-holding state, did not secede from the Union and attempted to maintain neutrality during the Civil War. The song was a full-throated defense of the Confederacy.

"The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free," states General Order No. 3.

Many U.S. military bases in the South are named after Confederate officers. Now protests over treatment of African Americans are prompting a new call to change those names.

In 1856, Frederick Douglass had a choice to make: support the big change he believed in — abolition of slavery — or settle for a less sweeping shift from a candidate better positioned to win.

NPR's Steve Inskeep, discussing his book Imperfect Union: How Jesse and John Fremont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity and Helped Cause the Civil War, touches on parallels to U.S. politics in 2020.

Kehinde Wiley's new sculpture mimics one of Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart. The new work stands in front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, a mile from its inspiration.

Two small-town Virginia churches with the same name, but very different congregations, recently found themselves tangled in controversy related to the president's tweets.

By repeating that these immigrants are "not ... you," the president defined them as "the other" in stark terms. The battle lines could not be more clear in a conflict nearly as old as America itself.