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The prominent placement of an Andrew Jackson portrait during an event meant to honor a group of Native Americans at the Oval Office on Monday has raised questions about the White House’s message. Jackson is known for his harsh treatment of Native Americans as president, famously signing the Indian Removal Act, which led to thousands of Native American deaths as tens of thousands were forced to relocate. Some observers thought the juxtaposition of his portrait during the event with the stated purpose of honoring three Navajo code talkers was strange. [Snip] The Cherokees called Jackson "Indian killer"; the Creek called...

WASHINGTON -- Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is raising speculation that Harriet Tubman's future on the $20 bill could be in jeopardy. Mnuchin is avoiding a direct answer when asked whether he supports the decision made by the Obama administration to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, the 19th century African-American abolitionist famous for the Underground Railroad. During last year's campaign, Donald Trump praised Jackson, the nation's seventh president, for his "history of tremendous success" and said the decision to replace him with Tubman was "pure political correctness."

NEW ORLEANS, LA (WVUE) - There's a new push to have more monuments removed in New Orleans, including the French Quarter's iconic Andrew Jackson statue. The group Take Em Down Nola says the removal of four statues is not enough. "We're issuing an invitation to the mayor to finish the job. He has already begun the job, and we want him to finish the job," said Malcolm Suber, Take Em Down NOLA spokesman. "What we would like to see in their place is people who stood for people and liberation. For instance, we think since Harriet Tubman is going to...

President Jackson's Proclamation Regarding Nullification, December 10, 1832 Whereas a convention, assembled in the State of South Carolina, have passed an ordinance, by which they declare that the several acts and parts of acts of the Congress of the United States, purporting to be laws for the imposing of duties and imposts on the importation of foreign commodities, and now having actual operation and effect within the United States, and more especially “two acts for the same purposes, passed on the 29th of May, 1828, and on the 14th of July, 1832, are unauthorized by the Constitution of the United...

A Private Letter Written By General Jackson, on the 1st of May, 1833, to Rev. A.J. Crawford Washington, May 1st, 1833 My Dear Sir--- I have just received your letter of the 6th ultimo, and have only time in reply to say that General Coffee well understood Mr. Shackleford, and urged your nomination in his stead. I had nominated you; but, on the serious importunity of Col King, your Senator, with General Coffee, the change was adopted, and you nominated for the office you now fill. The Senate cannot remove you, and I am sure your faithfullness and honesty will...

President Trump made further comments about Andrew Jackson on Monday evening, saying the seventh president saw the Civil War coming. “President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War started, saw it coming and was angry. Would never have let it happen!” Trump wrote on Twitter. The tweet comes after Trump drew widespread backlash for asking "Why was there a Civil War?" and saying Jackson would have stopped it if he had "been a little bit later." Jackson died in 1845. The Civil War began in 1861. Trump has previously compared his own presidential campaign to that of...

Twitter went wild on Monday morning over President Trump’s comments in praise of slave owner Andrew Jackson, and his declaration that the seventh president of the United States would have prevented the Civil War. “Why was there the Civil War?” Trump even asked. Jackson died 16 years before the Civil War started. His term as president ended 24 years before the war kicked off.

President Trump hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office on Tuesday, The New York Times reports, an apparent nod to the populist sentiments of the new administration. Trump's rise has often been compared to the populist election of Jackson, including by some of the new president's own team. Chief White House strategist Steve Bannon called Trump’s inauguration speech on Friday “Jacksonian,” saying it struck the populist and patriotic tones Jackson was known for.

Inauguration Day 2017 has placed the U.S. on a new political and economic trajectory. President Donald Trump won the votes of the so-called Rust Belt, where workers and their children and grandchildren, who have been dispossessed and displaced by the economics of globalization, turned blue counties into red counties. Thus, in a legitimate sense, Trump's appeal to the "forgotten man" – so similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt's appeal to the same symbol – is valid. FDR's forgotten man was a composite of all those who were unemployed in the Great Depression who were "forgotten" in the sense that their plight...

Harriet Tubman, the sword-wielding, gun-toting spy and freedom fighter who led dozens of slaves to freedom in the north after escaping from slavery herself is set to become the first black woman to be featured on American currency—specifically, the $20 bill. According to a new report from TIME, however, the impending inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump and the administrative changes that will come along with it have some within the Department of the Treasury concerned about the future of the new legal tender.

U.S. government officials say Treasury Secretary Jack Lew could release early images of redesigned $5, $10 and $20 bills in an effort to pressure the Trump Administration away from reversing their plans. . . . ...in the throes of the primary election, Trump called the move “pure political correctness” and suggested moving Tubman to a lower denomination like the $2 bill. “Andrew Jackson had a great history. I think it’s very rough when you take somebody off the bill,” Trump said last spring.

In 2004, when the comedian Dave Chappelle performed at UNO Lakefront Arena, he asked a white guy sitting in the audience to imagine that he and Chappelle could take a time machine back to colonial Virginia. He asked him to imagine them stepping out onto a road just as George Washington was approaching. "You might say, 'Look, Dave, there's George Washington, the father of our country. Let's go say hi.' And I'd say, "Run! It's George Washington!'"There might not be a better explanation for why some black Americans look askance at white Americans' heroes. How much should it matter to...

NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) — Community activist Malcolm Suber believes tearing down the Andrew Jackson statue in the heart of Jackson Square and the French Quarter is an act of civil rights.“We want every white supremacy monument in this city taken down,” he says.Suber is a coordinator of the group Take Em Down NOLA, which is planning a march this Saturday (September 24). It will start in Congo Square and end in Jackson Square, possibly with marchers using ropes to remove the statue dedicated to the seventh U.S. President and the hero of the Battle of New Orleans.“We think that this...

This July 4, let's not mince words: American independence in 1776 was a monumental mistake. We should be mourning the fact that we left the United Kingdom, not cheering it. Of course, evaluating the wisdom of the American Revolution means dealing with counterfactuals. As any historian would tell you, this is a messy business. We obviously can't be entirely sure how America would have fared if it had stayed in the British Empire longer, perhaps gaining independence a century or so later, along with Canada. But I'm reasonably confident a world in which the revolution never happened would be better...

The Democratic Party is poised to change the name of its annual fundraisers from The Jefferson and Jackson Day Dinners to the Harriet Tubman and the Artist Formerly Known as Prince Day Dinners, where crow will be served to atone for the sins of slavery and misogyny and celebrate the triumph of racial- and gender-identity politics over reality. Not really. But the $20 bill is about to get a pc makeover, with Harriet Tubman, an obscure figure in U.S. history (an escaped slave who aided the Underground Railroad), replacing the 7th president of the United States, a man who gave...

In Samuel Eliot Morison’s “The Oxford History of the American People,” there is a single sentence about Harriet Tubman. “An illiterate field hand, (Tubman) not only escaped herself but returned repeatedly and guided more than 300 slaves to freedom.” Morison, however, devotes most of five chapters to the greatest soldier-statesman in American history, save Washington, that pivotal figure between the Founding Fathers and the Civil War – Andrew Jackson. Slashed by a British officer in the Revolution, and a POW at 14, the orphaned Jackson went west, rose to head up the Tennessee militia, crushed an Indian uprising at Horseshoe...

Opposition to the National Bank Main article: Second Bank of the United States Democratic cartoon shows Jackson fighting the monster Bank. "The Bank," Jackson told Martin Van Buren, "is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!"The Second Bank of the United States was authorized for a twenty year period during James Madison's tenure in 1816. As President, Jackson worked to rescind the bank's federal charter. In Jackson's veto message (written by George Bancroft), the bank needed to be abolished because: It concentrated the nation's financial strength in a single institution. It exposed the government to control by foreign...

How many things are in a person's pocket that they don't even know about? We take money for granted -- most people can't tell us which way George Washington is facing on the quarter. They can tell us that Ben Franklin is on the front of the hundred, but they can't tell us that Independence Hall (where he helped draft the Constitution) is on the back. One might think that as denominations get smaller and more common, the pictures on them would become more famous and well-known. The ten-dollar bill features Alexander Hamilton on the front. Since he was never...

In 2016, angry citizens tired of being abused and mistreated are looking for a leader like Andrew Jackson once again In many of our history books today, Christopher Columbus did not discover America, instead he was a ruthless white European marauder who brutalized peaceful indigenous people and helped spread disease among their midst. This type of historical revisionism was on full display this week when one of our greatest Presidents and military heroes, Andrew Jackson, was removed from the front of the $20 bill. Eventually, he will be featured on the back of the bill, while the image of Harriet...

Conservative Republicans are worried that political correctness is creeping into their party. They point to the decision by a House committee to replace 50 state flags — including Mississippi’s, which is emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag — with 50 state coins from the U.S. mint. Separately, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) sidestepped the controversy this week raging over a North Carolina law barring transgender people from using bathrooms that do not match their born sex, saying he didn’t know enough about what he said was a state proposal. And while conservative Republicans grumble that President Obama’s decision to pull Andrew...