Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

“What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?”

Two books

Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth-century orator, abolitionist, and escaped slave, is a hero of our country. Many biographies of him have been written, one of them a Pulitzer Prize winner; at least six books deal with his relationship with Abraham Lincoln; and a book has even been devoted to one famed speech of 1852, “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?”

Douglass is not famous only for his eloquence, but also because of his long years of political activity in which his unfailing message was that the United States could and should carry out the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. That message did not end when the Civil War ended.

But for a long time Douglass and his message were eclipsed by history. The purpose of this post is, in addition to honoring Douglass on the Fourth of July, to explain why Douglass’s fame faded for more than half a century. At the same time, I recommend two books that will clarify this further. One is a short biography by Timothy Sandefur; the other is David Blight’s massive Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.[1] Continue reading ““What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?””

Posted on

Why Was St. Louis an “Also-Ran”?

St. Louis Union Terminal now a Doubletree

Urban historians sometimes puzzle over why one city grows and its competitors do not. One rivalry, between St. Louis, Missouri, and Chicago, Illinois, is particularly interesting.

In 1840, St. Louis was a thriving part of the “urban frontier,” with a population of 35,979. It managed a rich fur trade, was a major transfer point for goods coming upriver from New Orleans (the nation’s third-largest city at the time), and its two major rivers enabled it to send grain from Midwestern prairies down the Mississippi for shipment east.  Indeed, as one historian noted,

“Perhaps no American city was born under such favorable auspices as St. Louis, Missouri. It was located at the confluence of navigable water courses which drained over a million square miles of the continent, and it was built by a number of big businessmen (“big” for that time, which was 1764) who knew precisely what they were doing.”[1]

In contrast, Chicago was a hamlet of 4,470 people.

But by 1880, when St. Louis had grown to 350,158 people, Chicago’s population had galloped ahead to 503,185.[2] Continue reading “Why Was St. Louis an “Also-Ran”?”

Posted on

Laws, Sausages, and Land-Grants

Montana State University

Why do so many U.S. states have two rival flagship universities, one focused on agriculture and technology and the other steeped in liberal arts traditions? In Montana, for example, one is (jocularly) the “cow college,” the other, “the dancing school over the hill.”

The agricultural and technical university, which often has “state” in its name, is typically a land-grant university formed under the auspices of the Morrill Act of 1862. It was meant to be a practical, down-to-earth “people’s university,” and even today it is less prestigious than the state’s traditional university, usually founded much earlier. But the emphasis on technology has made some of the land-grant universities research powerhouses and often bigger than their in-state rivals.

The history of these schools is so complicated and idiosyncratic that it provides a fertile field for understanding how history moves forward (in time, not necessarily making progress). My illustration above of “State U.” vs. “University of” is a simplification; some traditional colleges added agriculture and mechanics to their curricula after the Morrill Act passed and there were other patterns as well. Ultimately, all 50 states got at least one land-grant college.

READ THE ORIGINAL AT AIER.ORG.

Image above is of Montana Hall at Montana State University.

Posted on

Where Did the Workers Come From?

England before the Industrial Revolution

When I was in high school, I “knew” why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Great Britain.  Tenant farmers were forced off landlords’ estates by the British enclosure laws;  they moved into the cities and fueled the new factories. This seemed rather obvious (otherwise, where would the workers have come from?) and it was the conventional wisdom.

In 1928, for example, the celebrated historian Paul Mantoux had said, “Industry was in fact the only refuge for thousands of men who found themselves cut off from their traditional occupations. The manufactures were to offer them the living they could no longer earn on the land.” [1]

This conventional wisdom, however, was wrong. Continue reading “Where Did the Workers Come From?”

Posted on

The Medieval Church and Its Consequences

Monastery

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”