Prince Andrew Stripped Of All Titles After Virginia Giuffre’s Memoir. Her Family Declares ‘Victory’

BY KATE CANTRELL

SENIOR LECTURER, WRITING, EDITING

AND PUBLISHING, UNIVERSITY OF 

SOUTHERN QUEENSLAND

Content warning: this article includes graphic details about sexual assault some readers may find distressing.

Prince Andrew will be stripped of his royal titles, including prince, and will move out of his home, Royal Lodge, to a private residence. Buckingham Palace issued a statement today that King Charles has initiated a formal process to remove the “style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew”, who “will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor”.

The decision comes in the wake of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, published this fortnight. The memoir includes an inside account of the two years Giuffre spent as a “sex slave” working for Jeffrey Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Giuffre died by suicide in April this year, aged 41, on her farm in Western Australia.

Three weeks before she died, she emailed her co-author, journalist Amy Wallace, and longtime publicist Dini von Mueffling: “In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that Nobody’s Girl is still released.”

“Today,” Giuffre’s family said, “she declares a victory. She has brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage”.

British historian and author Andrew Lownie (author of a book about Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, called Entitled), told Sky News earlier this month, “the only way the story will go away is if [Andrew] leaves Royal Lodge, goes into exile abroad with his ex-wife, and is basically stripped of all his honours, including Prince Andrew”. Sarah Ferguson will also move out of Royal Lodge.

As a trauma memoir, Nobody’s Girl forces us to bear witness to an uncomfortable truth: Giuffre’s abuse was hidden in plain sight.

“Don’t be fooled by those in Epstein’s circle who say they didn’t know what Epstein was doing,” she writes. “Anyone who spent any significant amount of time with Epstein saw him touching girls.” She continues: “They can say they didn’t know he was raping children. But they were not blind.”

Four days before the memoir was published, Prince Andrew announced he would no longer use the titles conferred upon him, including Duke of York. Three days later, leaked emails from 2011 suggested he gave Giuffre’s date of birth and social security number to one of his protection officers, hours before the infamous photograph of him with her was published.

Maxwell’s brother, Ian Maxwell, published an article in the Spectator today, headlined “Don’t take Virginia Giuffre’s memoir at face value”. The memoir keeps his sister, who was convicted of charges including sex trafficking of a minor, in world headlines – at a time Donald Trump has said he will “take a look” at pardoning her. Earlier this year, Maxwell was moved to a lower security prison to continue her 20-year sentence.

Allegations of parental abuse

Giuffre writes that her father began molesting her at the age of seven. He “strenuously” denies this. While the memoir makes this public for the first time, Giuffre’s older brother Danny Wilson told ABC’s 7.30 he first heard the allegations years before the memoir was published – and confronted his father about it.

Giuffre regularly wet her pants at school – earning her the cruel nickname “Pee Girl”. She recalls: “I began to get painful urinary tract infections. My infections were so severe, I couldn’t hold my urine.”

After one (of several) medical examinations, a doctor told her mother her primary school aged daughter’s hymen was broken. Giuffre writes of this moment:

My mother didn’t hesitate. ‘Oh, she rides horses bareback,’ she explained. That was the end of that. I didn’t even know what a hymen was.

Later, she recalls her mother raising suspicions about her involvement with Epstein and “apex predator” Maxwell, questioning “what this older couple wanted with a teenage girl who had no credentials”.

Giuffre writes: “I guess I was glad she cared enough to have suspicions, but at the same time, wasn’t it a little late for that? I knew she couldn’t save me; she’d never saved me before.”

Around the time of her doctor’s visit, the memoir alleges, Giuffre’s father began “trading” his daughter to a friend – a tall, muscular man with “a military bearing” who was also abusing his own stepdaughter. In 2000, the man was convicted of molesting another girl in North Carolina. He spent 14 months in prison and a decade as a registered sex offender.

Giuffre writes that she was abused by these men for five years, from ages seven to eleven; it only stopped when she began menstruating.

Heartbreakingly, Giuffre discloses that at one point she imagined Maxwell (or “G-Max” as she wanted to be known) as her mother: “While I was hardly equipped to judge, it often seemed to me that Epstein and Maxwell behaved like actual parents.” Among other things, the pair gave Giuffre her first cell phone, whitened her teeth, and taught her how to hold a knife and fork “just so”.

‘The younger, the better’

Giuffre’s memoir is a courageous and clear-eyed account of what trauma takes – and what recovery demands.

Told in four chronological parts – “Daughter”, “Prisoner”, “Survivor” and “Warrior” – the memoir meticulously records the “sexual assaulting, battering, exploiting, and abusing” Giuffre endured throughout her life, most notably at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell.

The result is a devastating exposé of the fetishisation and abuse of girls – “the younger, the better”, Epstein said – and society’s failure to protect the most vulnerable.

It is also a damning indictment of everyone who knew and looked away.

‘Please don’t stop reading’

Giuffre was 16 and working as a locker-room attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort when Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her to “service Epstein”, under the pretence of training as a masseuse. (In October 2007, Trump – who is portrayed favourably in the memoir – reportedly banned Epstein from his resort after Epstein hit on the teenage daughter of another member.)

Over the next two years, and roughly 350 pages, Giuffre tells how she was trafficked to “a multitude of powerful men”, including Prince Andrew, French modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, a prominent psychology professor and a respected United States senator.

Giuffre’s original memoir manuscript was titled “The Billionaire’s Playboy Club”.

In one of the most distressing scenes, Giuffre describes how she was trafficked to “a former minister”, who raped her so “savagely” she was left “bleeding from [her] mouth, vagina, and anus”. When Virginia told Epstein about the brutal attack, which made it hurt to breathe and swallow, he said, “You’ll get that sometimes.”

Eight weeks later, he returned Giuffre to the politician, who this time abused her on one of Epstein’s private jets. In the US version of the memoir, the politician is described not as a “former minister”, but as “a former Prime Minister”.

“I know this is a lot to take in,” Giuffre writes. “The violence. The neglect. The bad decisions. The self-harm. But please don’t stop reading.”

One of the most devastating revelations comes toward the end of the memoir. Giuffre – now in her forties – receives a phone call from a confidant claiming to have evidence that Epstein paid off her father when she was a girl. In 2000, when Epstein and Maxwell started abusing the teenager at El Brillo Way, it is alleged that her father accepted “a sum of money” from the paedophile.

According to Giuffre, when she confronted her father, there was “a brief silence” before “he started yelling at [her] for being an ungrateful daughter”.

Of all the betrayals she endured, this one stands alone: “I will never get over it”.
Girls no one cared about

“When a molester shows his face,” Giuffre writes, “many people tend to look the other way.”

In chapter 11, Giuffre describes how Epstein’s personal chef, the celebrity cook Adam Perry Lang, made her her favourite food – pizza. This, apparently, became something of a tradition – Lang feeding Giuffre, but never “ogl[ing]”, “even if I was standing naked in front of him, which was not unusual”. She wrote: “When I’d finished attending to Epstein or one of the other guests, Lang would have a cheesy hot pie waiting.”

In 2019, Lang issued a statement about working for Epstein: “My role was limited to meal preparation. I was unaware of the depraved behavior and have great sympathy and admiration for the brave women who have come forward.”

In another scene, Giuffre reveals that Epstein “never wore a condom”. After falling pregnant at the age of 17, she suffered an ectopic pregnancy.

On this day, Giuffre recalls how Epstein and Maxwell (“two halves of a wicked whole”) – with the help of Epstein’s New York butler – drove her to hospital after she woke in “a pool of blood”. Epstein lied to the doctor about her age, Giuffre alleges, and the two men seemed to enter “a gentlemen’s agreement” in which “whatever was going on between this middle-aged man and his teenage acquaintance […] would be kept quiet”.

“We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care,” Giuffre writes. “At times I think he even believed he cared.” She describes how Epstein “threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning, girls who had nothing, girls who wished to be and do better.” As a self-described “pleaser” who “survived by acquiescing”, Giuffre writes that Epstein and Maxwell “knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein” her childhood abusers had: abuse cloaked in “a fake mantle of ‘love’.”

Sex as birthright

In March 2001, at Maxwell’s upscale townhouse in London’s Belgravia – where Prince Andrew was famously pictured with his arm around the teenager – Giuffre recalls how Maxwell invited Andrew to guess her age. When the prince correctly guessed 17, he reportedly told her, “My daughters are just a little younger than you.”

Later that night, she writes, Prince Andrew bought the teenager cocktails at Tramp – an exclusive London nightclub – where she and the prince danced awkwardly and the prince “sweated profusely”. In the car, on the way home, Maxwell instructed Giuffre “to do for [Andy] what you do for Jeffrey”.

In November 2019, in his calamitous interview with BBC’s Newsnight, Prince Andrew denied any wrongdoing, claiming he had “no recollection of ever meeting this lady”. He told presenter Emily Maitlis he could not have danced sweatily at Tramp because he had “a peculiar medical condition” that prevented perspiration, caused by what he described as “an overdose of adrenaline” in the Falklands War.

In that interview, Andrew admitted his decision to stay at Epstein’s New York home in December 2010 – months after Epstein was released from jail for soliciting and procuring minors for prostitution – was “the wrong thing to do”. However, the prince claimed his decision was “probably coloured by [his] tendency to be too honourable”.

In her memoir, Giuffre describes Andrew as “friendly enough but entitled” – “as if he believed having sex with [her] was his birthright.” She alleges she had sex with the prince on two more occasions.

The last word

Publishing a book posthumously can be an ethical minefield. Critics often question whether posthumous publication is what the author would have wanted. They point to the author’s right to protect their work and their literary reputation – a right that cannot survive them.

However, Giuffre left no space for speculation. In the email she sent her co-author and publicist before her death, she made her wishes clear:

It is my heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time. The content of this book is crucial, as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals.

As the memoir progresses, Giuffre’s health spirals. The physical, emotional and mental toll of trauma closes in on her. Epstein is dead. Maxwell is in prison. But Giuffre is still “trapped in an invisible cage”.

“From the start,” she says, “I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.”

Before she died, Giuffre made a promise to her husband and children that she would try with “all her might” to believe her life mattered. Her final goal was to prevent “the emotional time-bomb” inside her from detonating.

While Giuffre may at last be beyond harm, the truth remains. She – like the hundreds of girls abused by Epstein and his associates – was wronged.

Her fight, like theirs, transcends death: release the Epstein files; hold abusers and their enablers accountable; expose the systems that protect predators; abolish statutes of limitations for the sexual abuse of minors. Ensure no other child suffers. This is what Giuffre wanted.

By publishing her memoir, she ensured the fight would survive her. She made certain her voice would outlast her pain.

In this way, she got the last word.

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Rediscovery Of African American Burial Grounds Provides Long-Overdue Opportunities For Collective Healing

Community members and faith leaders gather for a reinterment ceremony of 36 African ancestors in Charleston, S.C., on May 4, 2019. Contact The Conversation for photo rights

BY JOANNA GILM ORE

ADJUNCT PROFESSOR OF MUSEUM

STUDIES AND BIOARCHAEOLOGY,

COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON

In the course of construction work in 2013, the remains of 36 individuals of African descent were uncovered in the heart of downtown Charleston, South Carolina. They had lain hidden for some 200 years in an unmarked 18th-century burial ground.

For more than two centuries, such burial grounds, especially those in the former American slave states, have often been erased or obscured – paved over by parking lots, built upon by highways or private development, or simply left unknown and untended. In recent years, descendant communities in places such as Bethesda, Maryland, Richmond, Virginia, St. Petersburg, Florida, and Sugarland, Texas, have called for greater recognition and respect for these long-neglected sites.

As a public archaeologist and educator who has spent over a decade working in Charleston, South Carolina, I co-direct the Anson Street African Burial Ground project – the community-led effort to honor and respectfully lay to rest the 36 African ancestors whose remains were uncovered in 2013.

This Charleston project reflects a growing recognition of African American burial grounds as important historical memory sites and unique sources of genealogical information. Yet there is still limited public understanding about how engaging with these places of sacred rest can promote collective healing, reconciliation and cross-cultural understanding.
Cemeteries obscured by history

Since the British colonial period, racist laws and customs across America prevented enslaved and free people of African descent from using white burial grounds to bury their dead. On plantations, enslavers controlled where and how the enslaved were buried and whether burials could be marked or visited. In cities from Charleston to New York, segregated burial grounds, many now forgotten, were established by local authorities for indigent Black and white people.

Pushed to the margins, people of African descent maintained burial traditions and used impermanent or specific grave markers such as shells, bottles, clocks or ceramics – items that were culturally meaningful but often invisible or unimportant to white observers. As a result, many of these sites were neither recorded in historical documents nor officially recognized as burial grounds.

From the 1770s, African American churches, benevolent societies and funeral homes sought to establish cemeteries where Black communities could honor the dead with dignity. What began regionally – especially in Charleston and Philadelphia – quickly spread nationally during the 19th century across the American South and North.

In the decades after Reconstruction, and especially during the Jim Crow era, nearly 6 million African Americans moved north and west to escape racial violence and seek better opportunities – an event known as the Great Migration. This movement often severed ties between families and ancestral burial grounds in the South. As churches and burial societies lost members, many cemeteries fell into disrepair and were officially labeled “abandoned” by local authorities or developers.

In both rural and urban areas, Black burial grounds were often located on less valuable lands, sites that today are increasingly threatened by gentrification, development and the effects of climate change.

The Gullah Geechee, who descend from enslaved Africans from West Africa and still preserve unique cultural traditions in the southeastern U.S., argue these burial sites were never abandoned and that ancestors are still present. This perspective views the dead as actively connected to the living. For them, lacking formally designated cemetery space doesn’t make the sites any less sacred.
A tradition of sacred spaces

For many African Americans, especially in the South, death during slavery was seen as not merely an ending but a spiritual return — a “homegoing.”

Rooted in West African spiritual worldviews and carried through other traditions in America, the act of burial was often viewed as a release from bondage, a return to the ancestors and a step toward wholeness.

The Gullah Geechee traditions of coastal South Carolina emphasize ancestral presence, spiritual continuity and the sanctity of the land. In that worldview, with a porous boundary between the living and the dead, proper burial and remembrance are not only cultural imperatives but necessary for community well-being.

It was not until the early 1990s that recognition of rights over ancestral remains and sacred burial grounds began to find a wider audience.

Inspired by the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act that recognized Indigenous rights over ancestral remains, African American communities increasingly asserted their own rights to ethical research, respectful handling and meaningful memorialization, especially during the 1991 New York African Burial Ground project, which reshaped public memory and archaeological ethics.

Discovered during construction in lower Manhattan, the 18th-century burial ground contained the remains of more than 400 enslaved and free Africans. Community advocacy led to the site’s protection, descendant-led research, ceremonial reburial and the establishment of a national memorial in 2006.

Since this time, across the U.S. and the Atlantic world, descendant-led ceremonies from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Key West, Florida, have restored dignity to ancestral remains.

Meanwhile, efforts to preserve African American burial grounds, including by national scholar organizations and federal lawmakers, continue amid political debates over how history should be remembered and taught.
What made the Anson Street project unique

In Charleston, the Anson Street African Burial Ground project stands out for the way Gullah Geechee traditions and descendant collaboration shaped every stage of the process — from scientific study to reinterment.

Launched as a community-led initiative in 2017, the team began by listening. Through regular gatherings, they invited questions about the ancestors’ lives and identities, and about their hopes for the reburial, centering Black community voices at every stage. The team combined scientific investigations of ancestry and health while also creating space for spiritual guidance, ceremony and descendant leadership. In doing so, the project became more than a study of the past; it became a communal act of repair and remembrance, reconnecting Charleston’s present communities with the ancestors whose stories had long been buried.

Over the next two years, the team wove this commitment into every aspect of its work: youth art programs, a college course on memorial design, public exhibitions, and school partnerships. One of the most moving moments came from conversations with schoolchildren, who decided that the ancestors should be given names before they were reburied.

That naming ceremony took place in April 2019. The names were conferred by Natalie Washington-Weik, a Yorùbá-Orisa Ọ̀ṣun priestess, a spiritual leader in a West African tradition and an African historian. She described the ritual as an “important step forward in reclaiming the humanity of the deceased people who were most likely forced to travel across the Atlantic Ocean under the terror of other humans – who saw them merely as animals.”

The ancestors were finally reinterred in a powerful public ceremony that reflected their ancestries and West-Central African spiritual traditions.
When pain is acknowledged, healing can occur

The 2019 naming and reinterment ceremonies were not simply commemorations; they were rituals of remembrance and healing.

Construction for a permanent memorial at the Anson Street site, designed by artist Stephen L. Hayes Jr., has now begun. At its center is a basin fabricated with sacred soil collected from 36 African-descended burial grounds across the Charleston region. From the basin, 36 bronze hands will rise – cast from living community members whose profiles reflect those of the ancestors. Raised in gestures of prayer, resistance and reverence, these hands link past to present.

Throughout the memorialization process, community members reflected on what it meant to participate in such a project. Many spoke of feeling pride, reverence, joy, sadness and peace. “This conversation makes me feel complete,” one participant said.

As Charleston demonstrates, these projects are not only about preserving the past – they are acts of recognition, respect and reconciliation, helping communities nationwide confront and honor the histories long denied to African-descended peoples.

Trump’s Anti-Venezuela Actions Lack Strategy, Justifiable Targets And Legal Authorization

The U.S. deployed its largest warship, the USS Gerald R. Ford, to the Caribbean, north of Venezuela, following multiple strikes on vessels allegedly involved in drug trafficking. Omar Zaghloul/Anadolu via Getty Images

BY JEFFREY FIELDS

PROFESSOR OF THE PRACTICE 

OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,

USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE OF,

ARTS AND SCIENCES

“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We’re going to kill them. You know, they’re going to be, like, dead,” President Donald Trump said in late October 2025 of U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea north of Venezuela.

The Trump administration asserted without providing any evidence that the boats were carrying illegal drugs. Fourteen boats that the administration alleged were being operated by drug traffickers have been struck, killing 43 people.

On Oct. 24, the administration began a substantial military buildup in the region. The Pentagon moved the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and some of its strike group, along with several other naval ships, to the Caribbean and moved F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico. This is the largest U.S. naval deployment in the Caribbean Sea since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

According to the White House, the naval buildup and strikes on boats in international waters are part of counternarcotics operations. The vessels targeted allegedly belonged to Venezuelan drug smugglers, though the administration has produced no evidence that there were drugs on the boats, or what type. Trump has named fentanyl as one of them.

At times the president and some of his advisers have referred to the operators and occupants of the boats as “narco-terrorists.” But they have offered no explanation why the people would be considered terrorists.

The president and his advisers’ own words have also indicated that the larger intentions of the administration could be to topple the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

But as a former political-military analyst and former senior adviser at the Department of Defense, I find it hard to discern a coherent strategy or objective.

The puzzling drug angle

The boats that have been hit all had origins in, or connections to, Venezuela, and all were struck in the Caribbean Sea and in the Pacific north of Colombia, making the operation particularly puzzling. Venezuela is not a major producer of fentanyl or cocaine. The major cocaine trafficking routes are in the Pacific Ocean, not the Caribbean.

Typically, the U.S. Coast Guard stops vessels suspected of carrying illegal drugs in international waters. In 2025, the Coast Guard has interdicted a record amount of illegal drugs and precursor chemicals in the Caribbean. It is notable that the amount of methamphetamine precursor chemicals interdicted far exceeds that of fentanyl.

After interdiction, the Coast Guard typically begins a process that adheres to legal strictures, detaining the crew and eventually turning them over to a U.S. law enforcement agency.

But the Trump strikes have summarily killed most of the people on the boats and presumably destroyed any of the alleged illicit drugs. Many observers and legal experts have said the killings amount to murder.

Trump’s preoccupation with Venezuela

Trump has had a fixation with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua for some time, adding to his administration’s focus on Venezuela.

The administration designated Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization in January, along with several other drug cartels. But the White House statement announcing the designation made no mention of any behavior or activity that would constitute terrorism.

Under U.S. law, terrorism is defined as politically motivated violence, usually targeting a civilian population, intended to bring about political change. The terrorist designation allows the government to pursue actions such as seizing assets and imposing travel restrictions on those appearing on the list of Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

But the designation of a criminal gang with no clear political ideology or objectives mischaracterizes the group. That calls into question some of the White House’s motivations.

Then there’s the odd incident of the covert operation that wasn’t covert.

In early October, The New York Times reported that Trump had authorized covert operations in Venezuela and authorized the CIA to conduct “lethal strikes” inside the country.

Surprisingly, Trump confirmed that he had indeed authorized covert action. Yet the defining feature of a covert operation is that the role of the government is hidden.

Trump’s fixation on Venezuela goes back to his first term, when he also had Maduro’s regime in his sights. The administration eventually charged Maduro with leading the Cartel de los Soles – Cartel of the Suns – an informal criminal network tied to high-level Venezuelan military officials believed to have conducted drug trafficking into the U.S. The White House has also claimed that Maduro controls Tren de Aragua.

Independent observers assert that opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia handily won the 2024 presidential election. The government-controlled National Electoral Council, however, declared Maduro the winner. If the White House has greater intentions in Venezuela, such as regime change, which some anonymous officials have suggested, Trump has tipped off Maduro to be vigilant.

Thorny issues

If the goal of the administration is interdiction of dangerous illicit drugs like cocaine, Colombia is a much bigger source. Venezuela acts mainly as a minor trans-shipment conduit rather than a producer.

In terms of mitigating the effects of drugs and narcotics in the United States, multiple studies over decades have found that measures taken to decrease demand in the U.S. rather than supply-side interdiction are more effective in reducing harm.

With little public information to suggest an overall strategy or objective, legal problems related to the maritime strikes become apparent.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the activities were a “counter drug operation.” But he went further in saying that instead of interdicting the boats, they would be blown up.

The method of interdiction and destruction of the boats and lives of those involved by a military strike presents problems, especially in terms of U.S. armed forces performing law enforcement duties. This would be proscribed by the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal armed forces from performing law enforcement activities.

As for actions targeting Venezuela, Trump has said he would not ask Congress for a declaration of war but would notify it of any ground operation.

The 1973 War Powers Act, which requires the president to notify Congress before hostilities and brief it afterward, would apply to this situation. But almost every president since its passing has ignored it at some point.

Though some Republicans in Congress have objected to the military actions so far, the Senate in early October voted down a resolution that would have prevented further strikes in the Caribbean.

The Trump administration continues to depict its activities in international waters as a military operation and the smugglers as enemy combatants. Most legal experts dismiss this and characterize the strikes as extrajudicial killings.

In reply to a flippant and profane response from Vice President JD Vance about the killings, Republican Senator Rand Paul wrote on social media, “Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation?? What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.”

If Trump and his advisers like Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are taken at their word in scattered statements on the activities around Venezuela, many questions remain, such as why the boats are being destroyed and their occupants killed rather than interdicted.

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A Key Lesson Of The Cuban Missile Crisis? The U.S. Needs Allies

BY RENATA KELLER

It appears that America's leaders have forgotten the value of alliances. In the past few months alone, the United States has threatened neighbors across Latin America, carried out airstrikes on vessels in nearby international waters, bullied European leaders and abandoned NATO allies, and intentionally destroyed the aid programs that earned it goodwill in Africa. Ironically, it was those same regions that helped the United States peacefully resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis back in October 1962. The anniversary of the crisis offers an opportunity to remember how U.S. allies in Latin America, Europe, and Africa helped save the world from nuclear Armageddon.

On Oct. 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union had secretly stationed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba that could reach most of the United States and Latin America. He decided to set up a naval quarantine around Cuba to pressure Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to remove the missiles. Kennedy’s plan depended on coordinated action with the United States’ Latin American allies in the Organization of American States (OAS). Kennedy needed the OAS to establish the quarantine and give it legal legitimacy. Otherwise, under international law, the quarantine would be deemed an act of war.

Days later, on Oct. 22, Kennedy went on live television and revealed the danger of the Soviet missiles to the U.S. public and the entire world. He called for an immediate meeting of the OAS to invoke articles 6 and 8 of the Rio Treaty to establish the quarantine in defense of hemispheric security. The next day, representatives from all OAS member countries gathered in Washington, D.C., to discuss the crisis. Every single member country supported Kennedy’s proposal for a quarantine established under the auspices of the Rio Treaty.

The unanimous OAS vote gave the quarantine the international, hemispheric, and collective legal foundations it required to be accepted in the court of world opinion. Latin American support sent a clear message to the rest of the world that the Soviet missiles in Cuba were a matter of hemispheric security—not merely the latest tit-for-tat escalation in U.S. Cold War tensions with Cuba or the Soviet Union. Allies in Latin America thus helped Kennedy keep the moral high ground and portray the Soviets as unwelcome aggressors.

Latin American countries contributed to and participated in the hemispheric security effort in other ways as well. Argentina and Venezuela each provided two destroyers and airplanes; Venezuela contributed its only submarine to the quarantine. Costa Rica and Haiti made their port facilities available to ships participating in the quarantine, while the Dominican Republic offered ships, and Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras offered their air and naval bases. The combined forces of the OAS member countries formed the Inter-American Quarantine Task Force 137 under the direction of the commander of the South Atlantic Force based in Trinidad. This combined naval force helped the United States patrol the seas around the Caribbean, forming the southernmost part of the quarantine line.

The fact that so many Latin American nations showed solidarity with the United States and participated in the quarantine sent a clear message to Castro and to the Soviets. Soviet general Anatoli Gribkov recalled years later that the Soviets had received intelligence reports that “among the six or seven divisions that were getting ready to attack Cuba, there were Argentine forces, Venezuelan forces, and forces from the Dominican Republic, and military support was ready to come from Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru, Honduras, Haiti, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.” The coordinated efforts of multiple Latin American countries and their joint participation in the quarantine gave the Soviets the impression that Cuba was surrounded by enemies ready to strike if the missiles were not removed promptly.

While NATO allies in Europe were farther from the main theater of action, they also helped defend the U.S. position in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The leaders of France, Great Britain, and West Germany promptly sided with the United States. British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan publicly denounced Soviet duplicity. He argued that had Kennedy accepted the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, U.S. passivity would have cast doubt on American pledges around the globe and exposed “the entire Free World to a new series of perils.” West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told radio and television audiences that the crisis represented the greatest threat to world peace since 1945 and pledged “the full support of the West German people” to the U.S. effort to remove the missiles. NATO support was especially important, as European countries were the ones most exposed to possible retaliation from nuclear missiles in the Soviet Union.

While Latin American allies helped establish and maintain the naval quarantine around Cuba, and NATO countries supported the U.S. geopolitical position, two important West African countries also supported the United States in less public ways. Even with the naval quarantine in place, the U.S. military warned Kennedy that the Soviets could still fly atomic warheads into Cuba. Their planes, however, would need to refuel in West Africa. The only countries with large enough airfields and refueling stations were Guinea and Senegal. According to U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, his brother sent ambassadors to both countries asking for assistance. Guinea’s president, Sékou Touré, agreed to prevent Soviet planes from refueling in the capital, Conakry, explaining that he was not going to assist any country in constructing a military base on foreign soil. Likewise, Senegal’s president, Léopold Senghor, appreciated Kennedy’s turn toward Africa and his political and economic support for the recently decolonized nation. He also quickly agreed to refuse to let Soviet planes refuel in his nation’s capital, Dakar. These two West African countries helped the United States strengthen the quarantine around Cuba and prevent further nuclear weapons from arriving.

Today, the nation’s leaders have forgotten the most vital lesson of the crisis, even as we face new crises. Instead of working together with its Latin American neighbors to fight against the shared threat of militarized drug trafficking operations, the United States has insulted Mexico’s leaders and threatened to conduct its own unilateral military operations on Mexican soil. Illegal attacks on alleged drug trafficking gang members in boats off the coast of Venezuela undermine the rule of law both at home and on the international level. Instead of supporting allies in NATO and Ukraine against aggressive Russian territorial expansion, the United States has proposed drastic cuts to defensive military support measures and played fawning host to Vladimir Putin. Instead of continuing to provide desperately needed food and medical aid to African partners, the Trump Administration has dismantled the U.S. foreign aid infrastructure, causing thousands of deaths and exposing the world to the threat of new, unchecked epidemics.

Unilateralism has not been historically effective at confronting major collective international relations challenges. By recalling the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis, we are reminded of how critical allies small and large can be. And yet, these alliances are by no means inevitable; the multilateral sinews that bind peoples and nations need to be cultivated when times are good and bad.

As Robert Kennedy put it in his memoir about the Cuban Missile Crisis, “We cannot be an island even if we wished; nor can we successfully separate ourselves from the rest of the world.” At America and the world’s moment of greatest peril, allies helped the United States prevent nuclear war. President Kennedy did not stand alone, eyeball to eyeball, against Khrushchev. He had the hard-won backing of allies in Latin America, NATO, and West Africa.

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Demolishing The White House East Wing To Build A Ballroom Embodies Trump’s Heritage Politics

Demolition in process on the East Wing of the White House, Oct. 23, 2025. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

BY R. GRANT GILLMORE III

DIRECTOR, HISTORIC PRESERVATION

AND COMMUNITY PLANNING PROGRAM,

COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON

From ancient Egypt to Washington, D.C., rulers have long used architecture and associated stories to project power, control memory and shape national identity. As 17th-century French statesman Jean-Baptiste Colbert observed:

“In the absence of brilliant deeds of war, nothing proclaims the greatness and spirit of princes more than building works.”

Today, the Trump administration is mobilizing heritage and architecture as tools of ideology and control. In U.S. historic preservation, “heritage” is the shared, living inheritance of places, objects, practices and stories – often plural and contested – that communities value and preserve. America’s architectural heritage is as diverse as the people who created, inhabited and continue to care for it.

As an archaeologist with three decades of practice, I read environments designed by humans. Enduring modifications to these places, especially to buildings and monuments, carry power and speak across generations.

In his first term as president, and even more so today, Donald Trump has pushed to an extreme legacy-building through architecture and heritage policy. He is remaking the White House physically and metaphorically in his image, consistent with his long record of putting his name on buildings as a developer.

In December 2020, Trump issued an executive order declaring classical and traditional architectural styles the “preferred” design for new federal buildings. The order derided Brutalist and modernist structures as inconsistent with national values.

Now, Trump is seeking to roll back inclusive historical narratives at U.S. parks and monuments. And he is reviving sanitized myths about America’s history of slavery, misogyny and Manifest Destiny, for use in museums, textbooks and public schools.

Yet artifacts don’t lie. And it is the archaeologist’s task to recover these legacies as truthfully as possible, since how the past is remembered shapes the choices a nation makes about its future.

Architecture as political power and legacy

Dictators, tyrants and kings build monumental architecture to buttress their own egos, which is called authoritarian monumentalism. They also seek to build the national ego – another word for nationalism.

Social psychologists have found that the awe we experience when we encounter something vast diminishes the “individual self,” making viewers feel respect and attachment to creators of awesome architecture. Authoritarian monumentalism often exploits this phenomenon. For example, in France, King Louis XIV expanded the Palace of Versailles and renovated its gardens in the mid-1600s to evoke perceptions of royal grandeur and territorial power in visitors.

Many leaders throughout history have built “temples to power” while erasing or overshadowing the memory of their predecessors – a practice known as damnatio memoriae, or condemnation to oblivion.

In the ancient world, the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans, Chinese dynasties, Mayans and Incas all left behind architecture that still commands awe in the form of monuments to gods, rulers and communities. These monuments conveyed power and often served as instruments of physical and psychological control.

In the 19th century, Napoleon fused conquest with heritage. Expeditions to Egypt and Rome, and the building of Parisian monuments – the Arc de Triomphe and the Vendôme Column, both modeled on Roman precedents – reinforced his legitimacy.

Albert Speer’s and Hermann Giesler’s monumental neoclassical designs in Nazi Germany, such as the party rally grounds in Nuremberg, were intended to overwhelm the individual and glorify the regime. And Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union suppressed avant-garde experimentation in favor of monumental “socialist realist” architecture, projecting permanence and centralized power.

Now, Trump has proposed building his own triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial, as a symbol to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

An American alternative

Born of Enlightenment ideals of John Locke, Voltaire and Adam Smith, the American Revolution rejected the European idea of monarchs as semidivine rulers. Instead, leaders were expected to serve the citizenry.

That philosophy took architectural form in the Federal style, which was dominant from about 1785 to 1830. This clear, democratic architectural language was distinct from Europe’s ornate traditions, and recognizably American.

Its key features were Palladian proportions – measurements rooted in classical Roman architecture – and an emphasis on balance, simplicity and patriotic motifs.

James Hoban’s White House and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello embodied this style. Interiors featured lighter construction, symmetrical lines, and motifs such as eagles, urns and bellflowers. They rejected the opulent rococo styles associated with monarchy.

Americans also recognized preservation’s political force. In 1816, the city of Philadelphia bought Independence Hall, which was constructed in 1753 and was where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were debated and signed, to keep it from being demolished. Today the building is a U.S. National Park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Early preservationists saved George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, Jefferson’s Monticello, and other landmarks, tying democracy’s endurance to the built environment.

Architecture, memory and Trump

In remaking the White House and prescribing the style and content of many federal sites, Trump is targeting not just buildings but the stories they tell.

By challenging narratives that depart from white, Anglo-Saxon origin myths, Trump is using his power to roll back decades of work toward creating a more inclusive national history.

These actions ignore the fact that America’s strength lies in its identity as a nation of immigrants. The Trump administration has singled out the Smithsonian Institution – the world’s largest museum, founded “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge – for ideological reshaping. Trump also is pushing to restore recently removed Confederate monuments, helping to revive "Lost Cause” mythology about the Civil War.

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Syria’s New Leader Promised Democracy. Then He Excluded Women From Parliamentary Elections

A Syrian cleric from an electoral college casts his vote during the recent parliamentary elections in Syria. Hussein Malla/AP

BY KINDA AISAMARA, ELEANOR GORDON AND ELLIOT DOLAN-EVANS

Women’s political participation is often treated as a measure of a country’s commitment to equality and democracy.

Earlier this year, Syria’s new leader, President Ahmed al-Sharaa, described his country as moving in a “democratic direction” after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in late 2024. He said:

If democracy means that the people decide who will rule them and who represents them in the parliament, then, yes, Syria is going in this direction.

Yet, in Syria’s recent parliamentary elections, women only won six seats in the 210-member body. Exclusion was not merely reflected in the outcome, it was engineered into the very structure of the process.

A long history of marginalisation

Assad ruled Syria with an iron fist for more than two decades through widespread repression, war crimes and systematic violence against civilians.

Parliamentary elections were highly controlled, with Assad’s Ba’ath Party and its allies dominating every vote. Women held between 6% and 13% of seats from 1981 to the end of Assad’s tenure, according to estimates from a global organisation of national parliaments.

Although the parliament had little real power, it served to legitimise Assad’s rule through the appearance of a democratic process.

In December 2024, al-Sharaa’s Islamist-led coalition took advantage of the power vacuum created by the decline of Iran’s regional influence and the collapse of its allied armed groups to oust Assad and dissolve Syria’s symbolic legislature.

Al-Sharaa’s rise was initially hailed as a potential turning point toward political reform and reconciliation. However, early signs suggest that entrenched patterns of marginalisation – especially of women – are continuing to shape Syria’s politics.

How women (and others) were sidelined

The recent parliamentary elections in early October did not factor in the people’s will, nor were they permitted to vote. They weren’t involved in the process at all.

Instead, the elections were overseen by a government body called the Supreme Judicial Committee for Elections, appointed by al-Sharaa. Its composition was revealing: nine men and only two women.

The process was complicated and deliberately exclusionary. The Supreme Judicial Committee was tasked with forming electoral subcommittees around the country, which then reviewed applicants for individuals to be appointed to electoral colleges. Only those selected were allowed to participate in the voting process or nominate candidates.

Ordinary citizens had no direct role in the election.

Under this framework, the electoral colleges selected representatives for two-thirds of the parliament seats. Al-Sharaa will appoint the remaining third.

Unsurprisingly, women’s representation in the subcommittees was minimal. Drawing on raw figures published on the official Syrian election website, women only constituted about 11% of all subcommittee members (18 out of roughly 180 nationwide).

Even where women did have decent representation, no female parliamentarians were elected. In Damascus, for example, women comprised nearly a third of the registered applicants (44 out of 145) for the electoral college and a third of the local subcommittee members. Yet, not a single woman from the capital was elected.

Minority representation was also limited. Of the 119 members elected so far, only ten belong to religious or ethnic minorities, including Kurds, Alawites and Christians (who won just two seats). Christians are believed to make up 10% of Syria’s 24 million population.

Previous research on gender and political institutions has shown that exclusionary electoral structures tend to produce exclusionary outcomes. Syria’s case fits this broader pattern.

Syrian officials have explained women’s exclusion as a cultural matter. Mohammad Taha al-Ahmad, the head of the Supreme Judicial Committee for Elections, appeared on television to express “surprise” at the low number of female candidates, attributing it a society that traditionally views politics as the domain of men. He said the results also reflected alliances (based on established male networks) that formed among members of the subcommittees.

While such attitudes undoubtedly shape gender dynamics, they cannot by themselves account for the low participation of women in the election.

Women were constrained from the outset. Invoking “culture” shifts the blame away from the institutional barriers.

Ultimately, this was not a free or fair election. When women’s involvement is reduced to symbolic inclusion under state supervision, elections cease to be instruments of representation and become performances of legitimacy.

What can be done?

Reversing this pattern requires more than rhetoric. There must be institutional reform, including:

gender quotas that reserve a proportion of candidacies or seats for women, allowing them to gain political experience and visibility

increased funding, training and local networking initiatives to help women build community-based constituencies

reforming electoral processes to move toward more direct, transparent voting that limits alliances among elites and presidential control 

instituting new school curricula and civil society programs that normalise women’s participation in public life and challenge gendered perceptions of political leadership.

Until such reforms are enacted, Syria’s elections will continue to reflect not popular will, but the entrenched hierarchies of a state that governs through exclusion.

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1 In 3 US Nonprofits That Serve Communities Lost Government Funding In Early 2025

BY LEWIS FAULK AND MIRAE KIM

About one-third of U.S. nonprofit service providers experienced a disruption in their government funding in the first half of 2025.

That’s what we found when we teamed up with Urban Institute researchers to collect nationally representative survey data from 2,737 nonprofits across the country.

These organizations run food pantries, deliver job training and offer mental health services. They provide independent living assistance, disaster relief and emergency shelter, among other services.

Our team found that 21% lost a grant or contract, 27% faced delays or funding freezes and 6% were hit with stop-work orders. Some of the nonprofits had experienced more than one of these funding problems, which affected nonprofits of all kinds. But they were especially disruptive to larger ones that employ more people and provide key services, such as large social service agencies, food banks and organizations serving people enrolled in Medicaid.

These findings came from the most recent Nonprofit Trends and Impacts survey, which we conducted from April to June 2025 with colleagues at the Urban Institute, including Laura Tomasko, Hannah Martin, Katie Fallon and Elizabeth T. Boris. They follow findings from a prior survey that the project fielded between October 2024 and January 2025.

When funding dries up, nonprofits tend to shrink and scale back their services. About 21% of those hit by funding cuts in the first half of 2025 were already serving fewer people by the time they completed the survey in April, May and June 2025, and 29% had reduced their staff. Many of these nonprofit leaders also told us they expect to have to lay off more of their employees by the end of 2025.

Nonprofits had already been facing financial pressure.

In the prior round of the survey that our team conducted in the fall of 2024, more than half of nonprofit leaders said they were worried about their organization’s finances. Many of them said they had received less money through donations and were facing tougher competition when they applied for grants, largely due to a tougher economic climate and the end of federal funding that had been disbursed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why it matters

Nonprofits often partner with the government to deliver essential services. This government support is vital – it makes up about 20% of the revenue that most nonprofits rely on. What’s more, government funding provided more than half of total revenue for about 1 in 5 service-oriented nonprofits in 2023, which is the most recent data available.

That same year, about 2 in 3 nonprofits received at least one federal, state or local government grant or contract.

Government funding made up 42% of total revenue for service-providing nonprofits that experienced government funding disruptions in our 2025 survey. The rest of their funding came from donations, foundation grants and service fees.

Nonprofits get less than half of their total revenue from foundations and individual donations, and total government funding for nonprofits amounts to around three times total foundation funding. That makes it unlikely that philanthropy will replace the government funding that’s being lost.

What still isn’t known

Nonprofits from California to Florida are seeing their funding withheld, and the government shutdown that began Oct. 1, 2025, is compounding the effects of the Trump administration’s longer-term spending cuts. The full extent of the impacts of these federal disruptions on nonprofits’ budgets won’t be known until 2026 or later.

In addition, our survey doesn’t include the leaders of very small nonprofits, or several kinds of nonprofits – including hospitals, colleges, universities, churches and foundations.

What’s next

Our upcoming Nonprofit Trends and Impacts surveys in early 2026 will convey more of the effects of government funding cuts on nonprofits’ budgets and programs.

A more complete picture will not be possible until the Internal Revenue Service publishes data that it collects from the 990 form that most charitable nonprofits must file on an annual basis. Historically, The IRS has taken years to release comprehensive nonprofit financial data, requiring additional research beyond the 990 form.

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Pharaohs In Dixieland – How 19th-Century America Reimagined Egypt To Justify Racism And Slavery

In the American South, ancient Egypt and its pharaohs became a way to justify slavery. Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis via Getty Images

BY CHARLES VANTHOURNOUT

PH.D STUDENT IN ANCIENT HISTORY,

UNIVERSITE DE LORRAINE

When Napoleon embarked upon a military expedition into Egypt in 1798, he brought with him a team of scholars, scientists and artists. Together, they produced the monumental “Description de l’Égypte,” a massive, multivolume work about Egyptian geography, history and culture.

At the time, the United States was a young nation with big aspirations, and Americans often viewed their country as an heir to the great civilizations of the past. The tales of ancient Egypt that emerged from Napoleon’s travels became a source of fascination to Americans, though in different ways.

In the slaveholding South, ancient Egypt and its pharaohs became a way to justify slavery. For abolitionists and African Americans, biblical Egypt served as a symbol of bondage and liberation.

As a historian, I study how 19th-century Americans – from Southern intellectuals to Black abolitionists – used ancient Egypt to debate questions of race, civilization and national identity. My research traces how a distorted image of ancient Egypt shaped competing visions of freedom and hierarchy in a deeply divided nation.

Egypt inspires the pro-slavery South

In 1819, when lawyer John Overton, military officer James Winchester and future president Andrew Jackson founded a city in Tennessee along the Mississippi River, they christened it Memphis, after the ancient Egyptian capital.

While promoting the new city, Overton declared of the Mississippi River that ran alongside it: “This noble river may, with propriety, be denominated the American Nile.”

“Who can tell that she may not, in time, rival … her ancient namesake, of Egypt in classic elegance and art?” The Arkansas Banner excitedly reported.

In the region’s fertile soil, Chancellor William Harper, a jurist and pro-slavery theorist from South Carolina, saw the promise of an agricultural empire built on slavery, one “capable of being made a far greater Egypt.”

There was a reason pro-slavery businessmen and thinkers were energized by the prospect of an American Egypt: Many Southern planters imagined themselves as guardians of a hierarchical and aristocratic system, one grounded in landownership, tradition and honor. As Alabama newspaper editor William Falconer put it, he and his fellow white Southerners belonged to a “race that had established law, order, and government on earth.”

To them, Egypt represented the archetype of a great hierarchical civilization. Older than Athens or Rome, Egypt conferred a special legitimacy. And just like the pharaohs, the white elites of the South saw themselves as the stewards of a prosperous society sustained by enslaved labor.

Leading pro-slavery thinkers like Virginia social theorist George Fitzhugh, South Carolina lawyer and U.S. Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett and Georgia lawyer and politician Thomas R.R. Cobb all invoked Egypt as an example to follow.

“These [Egyptian] monuments show negro slaves in Egypt at least 1,600 years before Christ,” Cobb wrote in 1858. “That they were the same happy negroes of this day is proven by their being represented in a dance 1,300 years before Christ.”

A distorted view of history

But their view of history didn’t exactly square with reality. Slavery did exist in ancient Egypt, but most slaves had been originally captured as prisoners of war.

The country never developed a system of slavery comparable to that of Greece or Rome, and servitude was neither race-based nor tied to a plantation economy. The mistaken notion that Egypt’s great monuments were built by slaves largely stems from ancient authors and the biblical account of the Hebrews. Later, popular culture – especially Hollywood epics – would continue to advance this misconception.

Nonetheless, 19th-century Southern intellectuals drew on this imagined Egypt to legitimize slavery as an ancient and divinely sanctioned institution.

Even after the Civil War, which ended in 1865, nostalgia for these myths of ancient Egypt endured. In 1877, former Confederate officer Edward Fontaine noted how “Veritable specimens of black, woolyheaded negroes are represented by the old Egyptian artists in chains, as slaves, and even singing and dancing, as we have seen them on Southern plantations in the present century.”

Turning Egypt white

But to claim their place among the world’s great civilizations, Southerners had to reconcile a troubling fact: Egypt was located in Africa, the ancestral land of those enslaved in the U.S.

In response, an intellectual movement called the American School of Ethnology – which promoted the idea that races had separate, unequal origins to justify Black inferiority and slavery – set out to “whiten” Egypt.

In a series of texts and lectures, they portrayed Egypt as a slaveholding civilization dominated by whites. They pointed to Egyptian monuments as proof of the greatness that a slave society could achieve. And they also promoted a scientifically discredited theory called “polygenesis,” which argued that Black people did not descend from the Bible’s Adam, but from some other source.

Richard Colfax, the author of the 1833 pamphlet “Evidence Against the Views of the Abolitionists,” insisted that “the Egyptians were decidedly of the Caucasian variety of men.” Most mummies, he added, “bear not the most distant resemblance to the negro race.”

Physician Samuel George Morton cited “Crania Aegyptiaca,” an 1822 German study of Egyptian skulls, to reinforce this view. Writing in the Charleston Medical Journal in 1851, he explained how the German study had concluded that the skulls mirrored those of Europeans in size and shape. In doing so, it established “the negro his true position as an inferior race.”

Physician Josiah C. Nott, Egyptologist George Gliddon and physician and propagandist John H. Van Evrie formed an effective triumvirate: Through press releases and public lectures featuring the skulls of mummies, they turned Egyptology into a tool of pro-slavery propaganda.

“The Negro question was the one I wished to bring out,” Nott wrote, adding that he “embalmed it in Egyptian ethnography.”

Nott and Gliddon’s 1854 bestseller “Types of Mankind” fused pseudoscience with Egyptology to both “prove” Black inferiority and advance the idea that their beloved African civilization was populated by a white Egyptian elite.

“Negroes were numerous in Egypt,” they write, “but their social position in ancient times was the same that it now is, that of servants and slaves.”

Denouncing America’s pharaohs

This distorted vision of Egypt, however, wasn’t the only one to take hold in the U.S., and abolitionists saw this history through a decidedly different lens.

In the Bible, Egypt occupies a central place, mentioned repeatedly as a land of refuge – notably for Joseph – but also as a nation of idolatry and as the cradle of slavery.

The episode of the Exodus is perhaps the most famous reference. The Hebrews, enslaved under an oppressive pharaoh, are freed by Moses, who leads them to the Promised Land, Canaan. This biblical image of Egypt as a land of bondage deeply shaped 19th-century moral and political debates: For many abolitionists, it represented the ultimate symbol of tyranny and human oppression.

When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, Black people could be heard singing in front of the White House, “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt Land … Tell Jeff Davis to let my people go.”

Black Americans seized upon this biblical parallel. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a contemporary pharaoh, with Moses still the prophet of liberation.

African American writers and activists like Phillis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth also invoked Egypt as a tool of emancipation.

“God has implanted in every human heart a principle which we call the love of liberty,” Wheatley wrote in a 1774 letter. “It is impatient with oppression and longs for deliverance; and with the permission of our modern Egyptians, I will assert that this same principle lives in us.”

Yet the South’s infatuation with Egypt shows how antiquity can always be recast to serve the powerful. And it’s a reminder that the past is far from neutral terrain – that there is rarely, if ever, a ceasefire in wars over history and memory.

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