Even though I’m not adding original posts right now, lively articles about history are all around us. Here are summaries of three, with links.
Charles Curtis: Republican, Native-American, and Vice President
Herbert Hoover’s vice president, Charles Curtis, was part-Native American, a member of the Kaw Tribe of Kansas. With Kamala Harris in the news, the Washington Posttells his interesting story (making the point that Harris will not be the first “person of color” to be an American vice president).
Curtis, whose mother was a Kaw member and whose father was white, grew up on the Kaw reservation in the late nineteenth century. As a teenager he moved sixty miles away to live with his paternal grandparents in Topeka, where he became something of a star horse jockey. When the tribe was forced to move to Oklahoma, Charles wanted to go, too, but his Kaw grandmother urged him to stay in Topeka and get an education. He did, and he was always grateful for her advice. He became an attorney and with his “winning personality,” a Kansas congressman, senator, and eventually vice president.
G. Stanley Hall. Photogravure by Synnberg Photo-gravure Co., 1898. Licensed under Creative Commons BY 4.0.
I was somewhat shocked to come across an American publication called the Journal of Race Development, published from 1910 to 1919.[1] I was especially surprised that a journal with such a name was a predecessor to Foreign Affairs, the respected journal of the Council of Foreign Relations. As I noted before, Foreign Affairs does not acknowledge this on its website.[2]
My post is about this Journal of Race Development. Here’s what I’ve learned.
First, the journal started publication soon after the United States began experimenting with colonialism. Having “freed” Cuba and the Philippines from the Spaniards in 1898, Americans kept the countries for themselves, more or less, along with islands such as Puerto Rico and Guam. The nation’s new role may have generated the journal—Americans suddenly realized the rest of the world might be relevant. Continue reading “What Was the Journal of Race Development?”
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.
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]
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’”
