If (since) the Trump administration was this afraid of the questions of ONE US Senator, imagine how they (do) feel about the voices of 10 million organized citizens

Historian Heather Cox Richardson quoting California Senator Alex Padilla...

June 20, 2025 by Heather Cox Richardson

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Ken Burns film, American Revolution, will be broadcast on PBS beginning November 16, 2025

 

Ken Burns' documentary series "The American Revolution" will premiere on PBS on November 16, 2025. It explores the war for independence, featuring various historical figures and examining the impact of the revolution on civil liberties and democratic movements worldwide. (AI search engine generated text about Burns' project)

Recently, Burns' team sat for a panel discussion in Concord, Mass to discuss the project. You can view the YT video (here) at 1.75x speed and understand it quite well.

Please plan to view the project when PBS broadcasts it.

Charles Sumner: The brutal caning of Sen. Charles Sumner in 1856 shows the difference between courage and concession.

Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner's status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War and ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

Zaakir Tameez, (pictured above) is author of a Charles Sumner biography to be published on Tuesday, June 3rd by Henry Holt & Co. On June 9th, Tameez appeared at Politics and Prose bookstore in DC.

   

Washington Post today published an op-ed by Tameez headlined: What we can learn from the senator who nearly died for democracy. The embedded link in this paragraph is to a "gift article" in WaPo so readers can read the op-ed for no charge. It begins:

On May 13, a man who made death threats against Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) for her foreign policy views was sentenced to nearly four years in prison. Last month, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she was “afraid” of using her voice to speak about political controversies. A month before that, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) released audio recordings of death threats he received while he was considering how to vote on Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary.

From News & Observer: 

Threats to lawmakers are nothing new and happens on both sides of the aisle.

Capitol Police reported 9,625 threats against members of Congress in 2021, a record high. That number dropped to 7,501 in 2022, but began to climb again with 8,008 threats in 2023 and 9,474 in 2024. And those are the threats that have been reported.