This Week in History: Nat Turner's Execution

Nat Turner was an American slave from Virginia who led the largest pre-Civil War slave uprising. During Nat Turner's Rebellion, Turner and his followers freed slaves and killed between 55-65 white people. On November 11, 1831, Nathaniel "Nat" Turner was executed for the murders during his "rebellion." Turner believed revolutionary violence would change the attitudes of white people about slavery. Instead, they killed him.

And in response to the "Rebellion," the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation making it unlawful to teach slaves, free blacks, and mulattoes to read.

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Duke Lacrosse Player Wears Blackface and the Athletic Department Posted the Photo

As if the Duke Lacrosse has not faced enough negative attention with those charges of rape from 2006, but the poor judgment of team members continues to prevail. A member of the women's lacrosse team dressed up in blackface for Halloween. Members of the team dressed up as characters from "The Little Rascals" for a party held at head coach Kerstin Kimel's house. Junior Taylor Virden dressed up as Buckweat and she donned blackface.

What is even more asinine is that the Duke Athletic Department allowed the blackface photo to be posted on its blog. The photo was taken down after complaints.

Statement from Duke University:

“The Duke Women’s Lacrosse program celebrates Halloween with an annual gathering. This year, some of our costume choices were insensitive and entirely inappropriate. No offense was intended, but that does not matter because we should have realized how these choices would be viewed by those outside of our program. On behalf of our coaching staff and our student-athletes, we apologize to anyone we may have offended and understand while we believed we were making decisions in good fun, we should have been much more sensitive to the implications of our actions.”

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40% of Babies are Born to Unmarried Women - Conspiracy Theorists Call Their Children "Anchor Babies"

The U.S. birth rate hit an all-time low in 2011, according to a Centers for Disease Control report.

“The 2011 preliminary number of U.S. births was 3,953,593, 1 percent less (or 45,793 fewer) births than in 2010; the general fertility rate (63.3 per 1,000 women age 15-44 years) declined to the lowest rate ever reported for the United States,” said the report.

Particularly interesting is that 40% of all babies born in 2011, were born to unmarried women. That means 1,606,087 babies were born to unmarried women compared to the 2,347,087 born to married women in 2011.

The conspiracy filled blogs and news articles suggest these unmarried women are birthing "anchor babies" and "the future carjackers of America."  Evidently, those commentators neglected to read the CDC report, or even glance at its Abstract. The total number of non-marital births has been on a three year decline.

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Check out the CDC Report.