"In 1851, Elizabeth Parker, a free black child in Chester County, Pennsylvania, was bound and gagged, snatched from a local farm, and hurried off to a Baltimore slave pen. Two weeks later, her teenage sister, Rachel, was abducted from another Chester County farm. Because slave catchers could take fugitive slaves and free blacks across state lines to be sold, the border country of Pennsylvania/Maryland had become a dangerous place for most black people....

"The Thirteenth Amendment is one of the most important acts in the legal history of the United States. It is often said that the amendment abolished slavery. But its legacy is more complicated than that. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery except as a form of punishment. Southerners seized on this loophole. They unjustly arrested thousands of Black people. Black convicts were forced to do hard, unpaid labor. In this way, slavery was reconstructed...

This report by the Constitution Project's blue ribbon Task Force on Detainee Treatment is the most comprehensive, bipartisan investigation into the detention and treatment of suspected terrorists yet published. The product of more than two years of research, analysis and deliberation by the Task Force members and staff, it provides the American people with a broad understanding of what is known, and what may still be unknown, about the past and current...