IN 1807, the slave trade was ended in Great Britain. Twenty-six years later, the Slavery Abolition Act made human bondage itself illegal throughout the British Empire. In the United States, the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865 inserted a ban on slavery directly into the Constitution. The League of Nations in 1926 approved an international treaty "to secure the complete suppression of slavery in all its forms." And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted unanimously by the United Nations in 1948, categorically bans the practice worldwide: "Slavery and the slave trade," Article 4 proclaims, "shall be prohibited in all their forms."

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AT ABOUT 11 p.m. on Sept. 6, the Republican candidate for state auditor, Anthony Amore, issued a press release. It congratulated state Senator Diana DiZoglio on defeating Chris Dempsey in the Democratic primary election for auditor and welcomed her to the general election campaign.

In an amused tweet, my Globe colleague Samantha Gross noted that Amore had congratulated DiZoglio even before the race had been called. Amore genially replied: "Because we're really good at data analysis. Key part of being Auditor."

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ON JAN. 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as the chancellor of Germany. Over the next 100 days, American newspapers published more than 3,000 thousand stories about the eruption of antisemitic attacks whipped up by the new regime.

"Bands of Nazis throughout Germany carried out wholesale raids calculated to intimidate the opposition, particularly the Jews," reported Edmond Taylor of the Chicago Tribune. "Men and women were insulted, slapped, punched in the face, hit over the head with blackjacks, dragged from their homes in night clothes. Never have I seen law-abiding citizens living in such terror."

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OVER THE past five months, hundreds of chartered buses from Texas and Arizona have transported thousands of undocumented migrants to Washington, D.C., New York, and Chicago. Republican governors in the border states have dispatched the buses as a ploy to subject Northern Democrats to the chaos and costs associated with the nation's immigration crisis. With unlawful border crossings hitting an all-time high, Governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona claim they are being "overwhelmed by hordes of illegal immigrants" and insist the busing operation is their response to "President Biden's inaction at our southern border."

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TO AMERICANS with a deep-seated bias against guns, it is a self-evident truth that more firearms in private hands lead to more crime and violence. The best way to reduce deadly shootings, they have insisted for years, is to make guns harder — or impossible — to acquire.

But that isn't the prevailing view in this country, no matter how entrenched it is in progressive strongholds like the Democratic Party and traditional newsrooms. Millions of Americans believe that the ability to own guns makes them safer, which helps explain why 44 percent of adults live in a household that owns one or more guns, a rate that has remained steady for many years.

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