More than a century and a half before the American Revolution, a human hierarchy had evolved on the soil of the future United States. To comprehend the current upheavals one must understand the human pyramid encrypted into us all: the caste system.
Only in the U.S.A. does a large section of the population think owning an assault weapon is a sacred right, but wearing a mask in a pandemic is a restriction on liberty.
An earlier generation of civil rights struggle saw things differently. They, and their opponents, understood that black equality required a fundamental transformation of American society.
Thaddeus Stevens was born on this day in 1792. A fierce, uncompromising opponent of slavery, he was a true American revolutionary.
Eric Foner, who recently retired from Columbia University, has focused much of his work on the Civil War and its aftermath. Foner’s work deftly chronicles what he calls “a usable past.” This isn’t history as propaganda, but, in Foner’s words, “a historical consciousness that can enable us to address the problems of society today in an intelligent manner.”
This is a response by Greg Grandin to a review of his book, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World. The review was titled, “Slavery: Not Black or White.” It appeared in the Economist and was unsigned.
Historians cannot understand the behavior of the American people past and present without paying serious attention to nationalism and religion--or, more precisely, religions, since religion is a weak category. The relationship between religions and foreign relations is more problematic. Thus my text for this sermon is an old American adage, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: For someone with a hammer everything looks like a nail.
“The Wars of Reconstruction” defies current trends in Reconstruction scholarship. Reconstruction’s central story, Egerton insists, takes place in the South, in the struggle of former slaves to breathe substantive meaning into the freedom they had acquired.
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