What American Students Aren’t Taught About Slavery. Plus. . .

It’s Thursday, June 19. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Condi Rice on Juneteenth; business leaders warn of an exodus from New York City; should the U.S. blow up Fordow?; and much more.

But first: How to teach young Americans about slavery.

Today marks Juneteenth, the day when news of the Emancipation Proclamation first reached Galveston, Texas, weeks after the Civil War came to an end in 1865. It’s a moment for Americans to reflect on the legacy of slavery—and, as I argue in my latest piece, a time to reevaluate how we understand that legacy.

I recently taught a University of Austin freshman class on the legacy of slavery. It was an enlightening experience, in large part because I found out how little young Americans know about slavery as a worldwide phenomenon.

In high schools across the country, kids are told that slavery was essentially an American invention. This narrow perspective is doing us no favors as a country. It’s also, as a historical matter, simply incorrect.

We don’t need to minimize the horrors of American slavery to give our young people a sense of how this odious practice existed throughout the world. So today I propose a new way of teaching students about slavery—one that’s actually rooted in historical reality. I hope you give it a read.

—Coleman Hughes

• President Trump maintained strategic ambiguity toward Iran yesterday, telling reporters that he “may” or “may not” order strikes on Iran. “Nobody knows what I’m going to do,” Trump said. His comments came after Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei flatly rejected Trump’s calls for an “unconditional surrender.” Meanwhile, Iran’s strikes on Israel have begun to wane, a result of both Israel’s air dominance over Iran and their destruction of Iranian missile launch sites.

• It’s the end of an era in the NBA: The Buss family has agreed to sell their majority stake in the Los Angeles Lakers for roughly $10 billion to Mark Walter, the CEO of Guggenheim Partners. Current owner Jeanie Buss will remain as the Lakers’ governor; her father, Jerry Buss, bought the team in 1979. Walter is also the primary owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

• Japanese-owned Nippon Steel completed its long-sought acquisition of U.S. Steel, capping a yearslong, politically fraught effort to purchase the Pittsburgh-based company. President Biden, citing national security concerns, sought to block the deal, and Trump opposed it while on the 2024 campaign trail. The deal is unique in its inclusion of the U.S. government on the company’s board. Nippon also agreed to make an investment of over $11 billion in U.S. Steel.

• According to White House officials, Trump has grown frustrated with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard over her recent public, anti-interventionist broadsides. Her comments (such as when she said “political elite and warmongers” are “carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers” in a video she posted to X last week) reportedly set Trump on edge as the White House weighs military involvement in Iran.

• Hungary’s largest opposition party surged ahead of right-wing populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Ahead of an election season, the liberal opposition party now has a 15-point lead over Orbán, capitalizing on a sluggish European economy. A conservative culture warrior, Orbán is a hero to many on the American right, in large part because of his criticism of Western liberals.

• During a public appearance on Tuesday, Barack Obama warned that the current political climate is not “consistent” with American democracy. Rather, he said, “It is consistent with autocracies.” The former president went on to say that among leaders in Washington, there is only a “weak commitment” to “our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work.”

• Senator Tim Kaine introduced a Senate resolution requiring congressional approval or a formal declaration of war in order for Trump to strike Iran. Kaine explained that the resolution, which mirrors the bipartisan bill put forward by Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie in the House, “will ensure that if we decide to place our nation’s men and women in uniform into harm’s way, we will have a debate and vote on it in Congress.” Check out Peter Savodnik’s piece on the right-left alliance against U.S. involvement in the war.

• A new Squad is emerging in the Democratic Party as a counterpoint to the progressive wing led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, and Elissa Slotkin have begun to take leading roles in their party as centrists, with the “mod squad” attempting to lead a nationwide shift toward a moderate platform and “war plan” for taking on Trump.

• More than 200 weather records are set to be broken in New York next week, with searing heat expected for the majority of next week. Elsewhere in the city, Waymo—the driverless taxi service—applied for a permit to operate in New York, paving the way for the San Francisco staple to appear in the Big Apple, albeit with human drivers due to a state law forbidding robot ones.