The Black Lives Matter protests that have followed the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police officers remind Margaret Burnham of 1968. At that time, the national response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. combined with ongoing protests over civil rights and the Vietnam War to plunge an already divided nation more deeply into turmoil.
“This is taking place in a world that is not only deeply fractured, but also deeply fragile because of the coronavirus, the economic crisis that makes the country look a little bit like 1929, and the existential threat of climate change,” says Burnham, university distinguished professor of law at Northeastern. “It’s everything collapsing all around us.”
Commodore Matthew Perry's expedition in 1853 to Tokyo to force trade with Japan displayed the use of "gunboat diplomacy" by the united states, since the United States was threatening (by implication) to use force if diplomacy failed.
war fought from October 1835 to April 1836 between Mexico and Texas colonists that resulted in Texas’s independence from Mexico and the founding of the Republic of Texas (1836–45).
