How I became a citizen of the land of the free and the home of the brave – oh boy!

n 1973, I worked as a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Botanical Museum. My host, Professor Richard Evans Schultes, occasionally invited me to dine with him in the teachers’ dining room, where on one occasion I sat next to Professor Kenneth Galbraith’s table and a cross-table conversation developed between Schultes, a conservative, and Galbraith, a liberal. What I got to hear from Galbraith was pure neo-Marxist ideology and should have been a warning for me and a harbinger of things to come.

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A Brief History of Slavery

When we talk about slavery, we mostly mean the enslavement of Africans in America between approximately 1500 (arrival of first African slaves in North America) and 1865 (13th Amendment) – a period of approximately 365 years. However, slavery is one of mankind’s oldest institutions and America was a latecomer to it. Since our history is regrettably one of domination and subjugation it is probably safe to assume that slavery goes back into Neolithic times, when one group would raid the habitation of another group, kill most, and make the survivors slaves.

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