Category: American History

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The Sad History of Homesteading

McCarthy Homestead

Over time, many historical events take on a romantic aura that obscures what actually occurred. As I have written previously, that was true of the passage of the 1862 Morrill Act, which launched land-grant colleges..

The 1862 Homestead Act, too, acquired “a halo of political and economic significance which has greatly magnified the importance to be attributed to it,” as historian Paul Gates wrote in 1936. [1] Free land! Yes, it sounded (and still sounds) humanitarian. Under the Homestead Act, a person could obtain ownership of 160 acres (320 acres for a husband and wife) by building a cabin, improving the land, and living on it for 5 years.

Yet homesteading created heartache. Continue reading “The Sad History of Homesteading”

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Going Against the Grain, Environmentally Speaking

Beaver Dam

When economist Harold Demsetz looked into the history of the fur trade in the Labrador Peninsula in 1967, he was not studying environmental protection. He was exploring the origins of property rights. Yet his findings contributed to a major rethinking of environmental issues. Here’s what he found.

Before 1700, Indians hunted beaver in forests around Quebec, using them for food and fur. Because the demand for beaver was limited, says Demsetz, “hunting could be practiced freely.”[1]

But around 1700, Europeans came to the peninsula, eager to purchase beaver skins from the Indians. Continue reading “Going Against the Grain, Environmentally Speaking”

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The War against ‘Unbridled Capitalism’

 

Aware of my interest in history, a friend gave me a textbook he had used in college in the 1950s, Arthur S. Link’s American Epoch: A History of the United States since the 1890s.[1] Aha! I thought to myself, now I can read history as it used to be written, without the “politically correct” distortions of the past thirty or so years.

So I started reading. The book is a rich mine of information, especially about politics and political decisions. But as I turned the pages, I began to feel uncomfortable. The first part of the book is about the Progressive Movement (roughly from the 1890s to the 1920s). I began to wonder. Is there bias here? Continue reading “The War against ‘Unbridled Capitalism’”

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The Furor over the 1619 Project

Anti-Slavery Broadside

My last post addressed the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Published in August 2019—400 years after the arrival of African slaves in Virginia—the project‘s essays took up almost the entire New York Times Magazine plus a ‘broadsheet” of African-American history prepared with the Smithsonian Institution. It was a show-stopper. It argued that modern America, from capitalism to health care, was shaped almost entirely by slavery.[1]

Many praised this tour-de-force and it received the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. But criticism also emerged very quickly, and that is the subject of this post. Continue reading “The Furor over the 1619 Project”

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Regarding the Times’ 1619 Project

American flag painted on wall

I’m a year late, but I’ve finally had the time and motivation to read the New York Times Magazine’s 2019 compendium called “The 1619 Project.”[1] As you may know, nearly the entire 100-page issue on Sunday, August 18, 2019, was devoted to the project. Its astonishing goal was—and is—to reset the true founding date of this country to 1619 rather than 1776.

In August 1619, the arrival of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans to the British colony of Virginia inaugurated slavery in this country. As the Times writes in its introduction, chattel slavery “is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.”[2] Continue reading “Regarding the Times’ 1619 Project”