My take on change over time
I hope my readers aren’t tired of the English poor laws because, after a year or two of research, something has occurred to me that I had completely missed. There is a flaw I didn’t see. Continue reading “A Blot on the Poor Law”
According to the United Nations, 40,000 children work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mining for the mineral cobalt. They work for up to 12 hours a day under dangerous conditions that can be deadly when they have to go underground.
Americans may be partly responsible for their work.
Cobalt is an essential ingredient of most electric vehicle batteries, and demand for electric vehicles is growing. The U. S government is promoting and subsidizing EVs. Recently, in a House-passed infrastructure bill, a Republican congressman tried to ban the purchase of battery ingredients that depend on child labor. His amendment was struck down.
Around 1780, thousands of children as young as 5 or 6 years old began to work 12 hours or more daily in British textile mills.[1] Can we learn something from that experience?
Children had always been expected to work in England, often for long hours, but the mechanized factories brought them out of homes and workshops. The textile mills didn’t need brawn; owners wanted women and children to monitor the moving machines and piece together broken threads. Their work cost less than men’s and they were more docile. Continue reading “Child Labor—in the Congo and in the Industrial Revolution”
It’s not a comfortable time for our country right now. For some reason, perhaps due to our enforced confinement, my husband and I started remembering family stories—our own family histories, good, bad, indifferent. Stories in which personalities peek through the misty past.
I’d love for you to share such stories, those that you like to tell but may not have an audience for, especially if you have exhausted the patience of children and grandchildren. To me these stories bring the past alive. Here are two of mine:
First story:
My great-grandfather’s parents came from Ireland in 1837 and farmed in Ohio. (I always praise the potato because without it they [and thus I] would probably not have been born, and they were lucky to miss the horrible famine of 1847). Their son John was born in 1847 in Ohio. Like many countrymen, the family moved west around 1860. They reached St. Louis, where they were to wait for a boat to take them up the Mississippi to Wisconsin. The family briefly dispersed, with plans to meet at the port. But John, then aged 14, never arrived. Continue reading “You and I Are What History Is About”
I thought it was an original discovery of mine—the notion that present-day concerns often direct historians to study particular aspects of history.
In the 1960s, for example, economists and politicians were trying to help newly independent, but underdeveloped, countries grow. Sidney Pollard, a historian, thought that a better understanding of the first great period of development, the Industrial Revolution, would “help forecast, and pave the way for, the next steps to be taken by living economies”; thus its study had “a severely practical basis.”[1]
While composing my post, however, I learned that historian David Cannadine had already written an essay detailing how present concerns shape investigations of the past. Writing in 1984, he identified four waves of historical analysis of the Industrial Revolution up to that time. He ingeniously tied each one of them to economic conditions at the time of writing.
While historians like Pollard had treated the Industrial Revolution as a model for future development, by the mid-1970s disillusionment about economic growth had set in. “[T]he British Industrial Revolution is now depicted in a more negative light,” Cannadine wrote, “as a limited, restricted, piecemeal phenomenon, in which various things did not happen or where, if they did, they had far less effect than was previously supposed.”[2]
Should such periodic re-investigation make us wonder about the validity of historical findings? That is, are those findings anachronistic (a word that historians dread)? An anachronism is something inappropriately included when depicting a particular period of time. For example, Shakespeare has a clock chime in Julius Caesar. Clocks did not chime in ancient Rome. [3] Academically, anachronism occurs when historians “pose the past in a form that would have been alien to the period we are describing.”[4]
It does not surprise me that Paul Finkelman (cited in Allen Guelzo’s article in National Review) argues as he does—he’s long twisted history to promote hostility toward the Aerican Founders. What is more surprising is that most of the Constitution’s defenders, including Prof. Guelzo, have overlooked the actual reasons for the three-fifths clause, which, of course, is Exhibit A in the case against the Constitution.
In the course of researching my 2015 article on the use of financial phrases in the Constitution, I uncovered those actual reasons. They should not be so obscure: the apportionment formula flowed from the framers theories about representation and wealth rather than from any desire to accommodate slavery per se. Here is the relevant excerpt from my article. What the Constitution Means by “Duties, Imposts, and Excises”—and Taxes (Direct or Otherwise), 66 Case Western Res. L. Rev. 297 (2015). The many footnote citations are omitted:
Agreeing on the general principle of apportionment was less difficult than settling on a formula applying it. The Confederation system of allocating requisitions by state land values had proved impractical. Apportionment by actual taxes paid seemed to be likewise unworkable. A new formula was needed.
The starting point in the search was collective agreement that each state’s contribution in federal taxes would be a function of (1) the state’s population (2) and its wealth. Fortunately, experience strongly suggested that, for the most part, wealth followed population. In other words, population usually was a good proxy for wealth. Madison reported Connecticut’s William Samuel Johnson as telling the Constitutional Convention that “wealth and population were the true, equitable rule of representation; but … these two principles resolved themselves into one; population being the best measure of wealth.”
What was true in general, however, was not true always. Slavery created a valuation problem. Although few of the framers thought slavery was a good thing, slavery was a fact and they had to address the conundrum it created. The conundrum was this:
Continue reading “Guest Comment: Robert Natelson on Allen Guelzo”