Katherine Lee Bates sees the beautiful in America

On this day in 1893 was written the famous song ‘America the Beautiful’ by Katharine Lee Bates, following a trip to the Rocky Mountains.

Bates was an academic who spent most of her life teaching in Massachusetts, where she died aged sixty-nine. America the Beautiful with its stirring tune, has become an unofficial national anthem which anyone who has visited that country can respond to. It stresses the beauty and freedom of that great country but it makes no mention of the millions of African slaves and Native Americans who suffered.

Anthems are like that and it would be unreasonable to expect otherwise. It does not mean that we...

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