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.
Some years ago in my search for causes of the West’s prosperity I came across Deepak Lal’s 1999 book Unintended Consequences. The book planted the seed of an idea that has recently borne some exotic fruit.[1]
According to Lal, in 597 AD Catholic missionaries were trying to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons in England. Augustine, a monk who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to Pope Gregory I asking him whether several of the converts’ marriage habits were allowed.
In his reply, the pope was strict. He did the following: 1) he rejected marriage to close relatives or to close in-laws (called affines by anthropologists), 2) he banned the adoption of children, and 3) he prohibited concubines. (Divorce was already prohibited, based on scripture). Why? Continue reading “The Medieval Church and Its Consequences”
As you know, I’ve paid a lot of attention to child labor in British factories during the Industrial Revolution. Child labor was a big issue back then; public agitation probably started in 1796, when the Manchester Board of Health issued a devastating paper about the health of families in that increasingly industrial city.
But it wasn’t until 1833 that Parliament passed a law that was effective in limiting the hours young children worked. Earlier acts had no method of enforcement. The Factory Act of 1833 (also called “Althorp’s Act) did have teeth: it required inspectors.
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”
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”
