Category: Historical Facts

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How Quaint the Past

“Barbados has a fascinating past,” says a brightly-colored brochure from Hilton Grand Vacations featuring the island’s blue-green waters and beautiful sand beaches. “Wherever you go, you’ll be pacing through history.” The brochure advises visitors to take the “rum tour” and visit the St. Nicholas Abbey Plantation, built during the height of Barbodos’ wealth in the seventeenth century.

The brochure does mention the “painful history” of slave labor, which, it explains, can be reviewed at the Museum & Historical Society. Then it lists where to eat and the best beaches.

How lightly the past sometimes weighs on the present!

I have just written a paper about Barbados for a history class. Barbados’s history was grim. Barbados was the first English colony to take advantage of the rising English demand for sugar. By 1680 Barbardos  was the richest of England’s colonies. It was the best of times and the worst of times, depending on who you were.

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A Way to Repair the Past

These days, the judgment of history saturates our public discourse. We battle over the meaning of Confederate statues; we discuss reparations for slavery; even the “#MeToo” movement brings the transgressions of the past into the present. Unfortunately, all this division is breaking the nation apart.

In North Carolina, there is a way to address the past in a positive way. It is by pardoning a governor who, during Reconstruction, put down an uprising of the Ku Klux Klan—and was impeached for it. Strangely enough, in spite of all the chatter these days about atoning for the sins of the past, obtaining a posthumous pardon for the governor has been impossible so far.

Governor William Woods Holden, impeached in 1871.

I know this because Arch T. Allen, a retired attorney in Raleigh, conducted an extensive study of Holden in 2010 and petitioned the North Carolina state legislature to pardon him. Allen’s paper was reviewed by several prominent historians in the state, so it is accurate.[1] Here is the story.

In 1868, William W. Holden was elected governor of North Carolina. “There had been little Klan activity in the state prior to the 1868 elections,” writes Allen, “but after the Republican victories violence erupted in several parts of the state.  . . . The Klan committed arson, lynching, and political assassination, including one of a white Republic sheriff by ambush.” A black Republican, Wyatt Outlaw, was dragged from his home and hanged; four Klan members killed Republican senator John W. Stephens by cutting his throat and stabbing him in the heart. Several children were killed.

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How Grim the Reaper?

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured Steven Pinker, a well-known philosopher and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. What interested the Chronicle most was Pinker’s optimism. As interviewer Tom Bartlett said, ”Pinker writes that intellectuals hate ‘the idea of progress’ while happily enjoying its multitudinous comforts (‘they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia’).”[1] Pinker, in contrast, believes that “today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth,” as he wrote in the New Republic in 2007.

It does seem that many intellectuals are pessimistic about the future and also pessimistic about the past. That is, they devalue the progress that has taken place. For example, the status of women has changed enormously since the 1960s. (When I started working, prominent magazines like Time didn’t hire women reporters, just researchers who worked with male reporters). But Laurie Penny, a London writer, recently disparaged the positive story of “empowerment” she was taught to believe in. She can’t get beyond the fact that “behind every one of the brave and brilliant women I sketched in my schoolbooks were a great many men who tried to destroy her.”[2]

Robert J. Norell wrote a devastating book about the experience of Jim Crow (the racial segregation following Reconstruction and continuing until the civil rights movement). The book, The House I Live In, was written partly to show how much race relations have improved in the United States. But (unlike his more recent Up from Slavery, about Booker T. Washington) it received a cold shoulder,  especially from academics. The story of progress is not all that attractive, it seems.

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A Treasure Trove of Stories

Until a few months ago, I had never heard of William McNeill, a historian who died in 2016 at the age of 98. In my class in world history, I came across his book The Rise of the West, an 828-page volume published in 1963.[1] Not only did it receive the prestigious National Book Award in 1964, but it was extremely successful—even a popular Christmas gift. For historians, its significance is that it expanded thinking about world history away from a narrow view based on Europe and the United States.

That accomplishment is ironic because the book itself, a wonderful treasure trove of information about the entire world, looks somewhat old-fashioned and out of date now. But it’s still fascinating.

The title would never fly today. The Rise of the West sounds like just what McNeill was combating: Eurocentrism. His narrative starts with the origins of humans in the African savannahs and ends in the year 1917 with the Russian Revolution). It unabashedly celebrates the “era of Western dominance,” which began around 1500 and hadn’t ended by the book’s conclusion (or, for that matter, by the end of McNeill’s life).

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Historians and Economists, at Odds

Historians and economists think differently. Historians tend to be self-effacing and tentative; economists are bold.

Let me illustrate this by a statement from  a historian introducing a more scientific way of looking at the Black Death:”The new microbiology . . .opens up entirely new questions, ones we did not previously know we needed to ask.”[1]

Notice:  . . . opens up entirely new questions . . . not answers.

The following statement is from two path-breaking economists. “This book explains that unique historical achievement, the rise of the Western World.”[2]

Notice: This book explains  . . .

Do you see the difference? One asks questions, one asserts. Continue reading “Historians and Economists, at Odds”