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Was Southern Soil Exhaustion a Cause of the Civil War?

Cotton field

Studying U. S. agricultural history, as I have been doing, sheds new light on historical issues that once seemed solved. Thus my question: Could the deterioration of Southern soil have been a cause of the Civil War?

We know that the Civil War was not fought over freeing slaves but over whether slavery would expand as the nation moved westward. [1] It is less well-known that the South experienced widespread deterioration of its land during the half-century before the Civil War. Much of the South was planted in large monocultures, first tobacco and then cotton. Growing cotton and tobacco year after year takes the nutrients out of the soil.

What could southerners do? Continue reading “Was Southern Soil Exhaustion a Cause of the Civil War?”

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Battle of the Keys: Why Do We Have QWERTY?

Typewriter

Did you ever wonder why the computer keyboard has the design it does? It is called QWERTY, named after the first six letters located under the numbers, where you might expect to see ABCDEF.

The reason for this oddity is that the keyboard was designed in the 1870s for primitive  mechanical  typewriters. Some typebars (bars with letters on the end) kept hitting one another, stopping the flow of writing. By separating the most-used letters, the QWERTY layout reduced clashes of this kind (and in the process probably slowed down the typist).

But why do we have the same keyboard today, long after typebars no longer run into one another—in fact, typebars having long ago disappeared? That is the subject of a debate that  reflects different views of how markets operate. Continue reading “Battle of the Keys: Why Do We Have QWERTY?”

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Silos and Schism in the History Department

Torn Flag

Not long ago I identified intellectual “silos” in the fields of climate science and economics.  The term refers to scholars within an academic discipline who do not communicate with one another. When one segment of a discipline doesn’t even read the prominent works of another, the discipline suffers.

What about history? In this post I will argue that history does have silos but what is troubling is not silos, but schism,  that is, a “split or division between strongly opposed sections or parties, caused by differences in opinion or belief.”

First, silos. If you are studying the impact of the Anglican Church on England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 you may not have much in common with the professor researching the twelfth-century Anasazi in the American Southwest. Your intellectual coterie is likely to be composed of other professionals in your field (e.g., British history in one case, pre-Columbian American history in the other). Continue reading “Silos and Schism in the History Department”

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A Clash of (Agri)cultures

Chief Massasoit

Some years ago, in preparation for a conference, I read Harvard College’s 1650 charter. I learned that the school’s goal was “the education of the English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness.”

So Harvard was chartered to serve Indian as well as English youth? That surprised  me. My knowledge of Massachusetts Indians had stopped in elementary school, with Squanto aiding the Pilgrims.[1]  So I wondered, what was the relationship between Massachusetts settlers and Native Americans?

I am learning the answer, as I audit a course on U.S. agricultural history.[2]  Agriculture is an important part of the story of that relationship, which fell apart in a disastrous war in 1675. “No problem vexed relations between settlers and Indians more frequently in the years before the war than the control of livestock,” wrote Virginia DeJohn Anderson in a pioneering article on the causes of the conflict known as King Philip’s War.[3] Continue reading “A Clash of (Agri)cultures”

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Shelby Steele Knows How We Got to Critical Race Theory

Boy with basketball

I recently glimpsed a TV exchange between Fox News host Mark Levin and Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. As I walked by, Levin was asking Steele to explain why critical race theory has been embraced on college campuses and in K-12 classes. Steele said that the cause goes back to the 1960s, when “social morality” was added to  American culture.

I didn’t quite get it, but I was intrigued—I had been around in the 1960s and a civil rights worker to boot—so I bought Steele’s 2006 book White Guilt. [1]

If you read White Guilt, I promise you that you will understand why it is possible for critical race theory to be so prominent.  Continue reading “Shelby Steele Knows How We Got to Critical Race Theory”