A history of the Second Amendment in two paintings

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/15/a-history-of-the-second-amendment-in-two-paintings/?tid=pm_business_pop

“Are you at a computer?” asked Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School. I had called him because we had been scheduled to talk about the constitutionality of the filibuster. But just a few hours before our call, a madman had killed 26 people, mostly children, at a Connecticut elementary school. Neither of us was very interested in talking about the filibuster. So I asked Amar, one of the nation’s leading authorities on the Constitution, about the Second Amendment. That’s when he sent me to Google.

“Okay. Good. Go type in ‘John Trumbull’ — that’s T-R-U-M-B-U-L-L — and ‘death of General Warren’ in Google image search,” Amar continued. “Do you see the picture?”


John Trumbull’s ‘Death of General Warren at Bunker Hill’.

***SNIP

“Now go type in ‘Freedmen’s Bureau.’ Do you see it?”



“The militia men have become klansmen. The uniforms have come off. In the original, very far corner of the screen, right hand of the page, is one black person. Now there are lots of black people. Now there’s a uniformed officer keeping law and order. But as soon as the army goes, these blacks will be vulnerable. They’ll at least need these bayonets in their homes or they’ll be terrorized.”