{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Circle For Original Thinking","title":"Freedom and Equality with Victor Yamada and Nikki Nojima Louis ","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4339,"description":"Freedom and Equality: What Does it Mean to Be an American?The United States has long held a curious and ambivalent relationship with freedom. The American founding fathers learned much about freedom and equality from Native Americans, who lived in truly egalitarian societies, but later confined the original Americans to reservations. The founding ideals of the United States – liberty, equality, and natural rights, came largely from Native America. It was Chief Canasatego, the Onondaga chief of the great Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy, who originally gave the colonists the idea to unite, beseeching them to “Be like the Haudenosaunee, to never fall out with one another,” to be stronger together than apart. Our national motto comes from the Latin E Pluribus Unum (“From the many, one”) but we have never fully lived in accord with that slogan.  The political nation began with a beautiful document, The Declaration of Independence, which declared “All men are created equal,” but the writer of that document, Thomas Jefferson, owned 600 slaves, and by then slavery had already been practiced in the New World for more than 150 years. The young nation had Dutch, English, French, Spanish, German and other influences, and was dependent upon immigration to survive and thrive. Eventually, the whole world started to come to America, including immigrants from Asia, fueled by the West Coast Gold Rush of the mid-19th century. Then, came the backlash from those already here.  In 1882, President Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law, the first of many anti-Asian discrimination bills, followed by the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1908, which limited Japanese immigration to the wives, children, and relatives of residents already living within the United States. It was not until 1952 that Japanese Americans could become US citizens, even as women and Native Americans achieved suffrage in 1920 and 1924, respectively.  The most egregious action ever taken by the US government...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/vSyRjf6eirP2Ay2hIpmFdcThamdhULjPmKyxBxF0Nqk/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzI3NDEyLzE2NDE5/NDkyMjUtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}