The speech included a reminder that the American story "is a story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, the story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom."

This complicated and deadly piece of machinery seemed very much out of place with the primitive slave-holding society, and Jason wished that he could get a better look at the device.

The area was settled by predominately by natives from the Southern United States, who brought the slave-holding cotton-plantation society with them.

The story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom.

Thus a very small percentage of humans had counted as true equals in slave-holding societies like ancient Greece or revolutionary America, and the circle of true equals had only enlarged a bit more in the later "capitalist democracies."

Its description of America as "a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom" was a cleansing acknowledgment of America's original sin.

Mr. Gerson's brand of concise, rhythmic and sometimes alliterative descriptions are at the heart of Mr. Bush's speeches, be it the Inaugural Address, with its musings on "a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom," or recent remarks at Catholic University.

One reason The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains so affecting and so profoundly threatening is that Huck shows us what it meant to grow up in a slave-holding society and learn to navigate its pathologies.

The point here is that miscegenation, in Brazil and in other former slave-holding societies, began as acts of dominance and not as an egalitarian principle that led to the erosion of unequal relations.

For many centuries the Church was part of a slave-holding society.