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The Day Freedom Died.

Article Excerpt
The Day Freedom Died

Charles Lane

Henry Holt & Co.

www.henryholt.com

352 pp., $27

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Walking in Berlin recently, I was struck by the immediacy of history. The pedestal on the Victory Column in the Tiergarten is pocked with bullet holes, a reminder of how Soviet soldiers took the city. An illuminated gap in the cobblestones in Bebelplatz reveals row upon row of empty white bookshelves, which could hold 30,000 volumes--an unmarked memorial to the Kristallnacht pogrom.

History is necessarily inescapable, but in the United States, our history is less visible, less present. We have our share of historical markers, but they rarely capture the events memorialized--or betray their violence.

For example, if you visit Colfax, Louisiana, you would find a simple gray sign outside the present-day courthouse commemorating the "Colfax Riot," an event, it reads, "which marked the end of carpet bag misrule in the South." Aside from counting the dead, this monument suggests little of the massacre--its causes and its tragic personal, legal, and societal aftermath--that Charles...

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