Feisal G. Mohamed Quotes
… an old idea is not necessarily a good one — slavery is an old idea; so is polygamy.
There is much valuable in old ideas. However every terrible idea in history is today an old idea and we certainly don’t want to respect ideas because they were old and revered or believed by our forefathers.
Feisal G. Mohamed, Political Scientist, “The Tyrant As Target”, New York Times, May 12, 2013
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The polygamy referred to the Mormons.
The Republican Party condemned polygamy and slavery in its party platform of 1856
Ruffin is more widely known as the man who fired the first shot of the Civil War.
Brown was the richest man in Rhode Island and made much of his money in the slave trade. This quotation shows that slavery was not completely a North verses South split. Northerners like Brown for whose family Brown University was named, was as virulent supporter of slavery as the most ardent Southerner.
This was written under the name of Ragnar Redbeard. There are a few scholars who believe that it was written by Jack London, but most credit Desmond.
In the first part of the 18th Century, one county in Virginia became a magnet for runaway indentured servants, The more runaways settled there the more empathetic and hospitable they were to new runaway servants. The culture at the time had identified knowing your place in society and accepting it. So a runaway indentured servant had renounced their oath and contrast to serve their masters, and hence were not Christians. These renegades were armed and there was not enough political will or support for forcing the County to comply with the laws and mores of the time.
Feisal G. Mohamed is a scholar, critic, and essayist whose writing has appeared in The New York Times series "The Stone," in Dissent Magazine, the Chronicle Review, the Yale Review, The American Scholar, Huffington Post, and on the website of The New Republic. He is currently a Professor of English at Yale University. Among his awards and recognitions are a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation, an Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association's William Riley Parker Prize, and a James Holly Hanford Award for an outstanding book on poet John Milton. He holds a BSc in Biology (1997) and MA in English (1999) from the University of Ottawa, a PhD in English (2003) from the University of Toronto, and an LLM (2012) from the University of Illinois College of Law.
