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By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to go on a newly designed civil rights tour of the South organized by the Nation Magazine. I had been on an earlier civil rights trip in 2023. This trip started in New...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Most political coverage of the presidential election has treated the contest as a horse race between two conventional candidates. I would suggest that framing doesn’t do justice to the Harris-Trump match-up. We are...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. When it is election season, political parties typically pose to be seen as a friend to the working class. Nowhere is that more true than in the case of the Republican Party. No matter how anti-labor the party...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. For all the words written about Donald Trump, not much effort has been made to place him in historical context. There is a demagoguery tradition in America that Trump fits in. The tradition goes far beyond boldness...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. In her novel, “The Nightingale,” Kristin Hannah vividly recreates the mass deportation of Jews from France by the German Nazi occupiers during World War II. The brutality, violence and misery of the enterprise are...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.In the annals of American history there have been some truly horrible Supreme Court decisions. I have always thought Dred Scott v Sandford was the worst. Saying African Americans had no claim to freedom or citizenship...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. After the death of George Floyd and the movement it provoked, it looked like there might be a serious national effort to address racial bias in policing. It also looked like there might be a genuine dialogue about...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. After the coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, and considering Donald Trump’s refusal to recognize the results of the 2020 election, it is hard not to worry about election schemes Trump might have up his sleeve. Sometimes...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race obliterated the prevailing political narrative. Instead of old-age Biden versus old-age Trump, we had the emergence of not-old Kamala Harris. The reaction...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. In a term featuring multiple precedent-shattering decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a shocker in Snyder v. United States. The Court narrowed the definition of public corruption in a case that centered on the...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. As people give the candidacy of convicted felon and adjudicated sexual assaulter Donald Trump a closer look, more eyes have been drawn to Project 2025, a project launched by the Heritage Foundation, a well-endowed...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. During years working at New Hampshire Legal Assistance, I represented many homeless individuals. The reasons for homelessness were varied: eviction, job loss, divorce, domestic violence, and disability, among...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Back in 2017, in what was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 at a music festival held on the Las Vegas Strip. The gunman who was perched on the 32nd floor of...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.We just passed the Juneteenth holiday and although it may be the holiday with the coolest name, I don’t think the history behind the holiday is well-known or well-understood. I would argue it is one of our most...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Probably there is no more famous novel in American literature than Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” So it is an event that there is an audacious new novel, “James” by Percival Everett, that recreates...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. The collective freak out of the Republican Party leadership after the criminal conviction of their cult leader, Donald Trump, was predictable. They appeared to be in a state of disbelief when a New York jury found...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. The current round of student protests brings back memories. I started at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in the fall of 1968. One of my early college memories is demonstrating against then-Republican...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Last week I saw a letter to the editor in this newspaper about Republicans. The letter said we are inundated with misinformation and name-calling. The writer explained that Republicans believe in God, America,...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. May 6 was Holocaust Remembrance Day. The world failed the Jewish people both before and during the years of World War II, with catastrophic consequences. Six million Jews ended up dying in the concentration camps....

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Where the U.S. Supreme Court is concerned, the shocks keep coming. While you cannot always tell what a court will decide based on oral argument, it was bracing to watch a former president who tried to overthrow his...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. It has now been 14 years since Howard Zinn died. A historian, Zinn is mostly remembered for writing “A People’s History of the United States,” a controversial recounting of the American story. Zinn focused on the...