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August 7 - August 8, 2023
Isn’t it just as accurate to say that Native Americans discovered Columbus — a lost and confused soul — when he landed upon their shores?
Over the first seventeen years, six thousand people arrived, but only twelve hundred were alive in 1624. One guy ate his wife.
Tobacco changed the entire dynamic of colonization and control in North America. Finally, there was money to be made. The Englishmen shipped the newest vice eastward and pulled a handsome profit in return. Our beloved forefathers were early drug dealers. More migrants now crossed the Atlantic to get in on the tobacco windfall.
Virginians sought to exploit the land, mine its resources, compete with the Spanish, and turn a quick profit.
the Puritans. They strove to settle, to put down roots and thrive in an idealized community. Their middling origins combined with communal goals resulted in familial plots with widespread landownership
The point is that colonial New England was inhabited by zealots — conformist and oppressive fundamentalists who strictly policed the boundaries of their exalted theocracy. Forget the Thanksgiving feast: this was Islamic State on the Atlantic!
In the Pequot War, Massachusetts militiamen attacked a native fort at Mystic, Connecticut, and through fire and fury burned alive four hundred to seven hundred Indians, mostly women and children. The survivors were sold as slaves.
If colonial Virginian society was fundamentally based on white unity at the expense of African slaves, then perhaps Puritan Massachusetts was founded upon Anglo zealotry at the expense of a “savage” Indian “other.”
If only one in three colonists became dyed-in-the-wool patriots, then what of the others, the silent majority, so to speak? Well, most historians estimate that another third were outright pro-empire loyalists. The rest mostly rode the fence, too engaged in daily survival to care much for politics; those in this group waited things out to see which side emerged on top.
Thus the battle lines of tenant riots in the 1760s became the dividing lines between patriot and loyalist a decade later.
Merchants, artisans, and laborers in northern cities, such as Boston, tended to identify with the protest movement. These working- and middle-class urbanites were egged on by firebrands like Samuel Adams
In the South, conversely, the landed gentry tended to be patriots, and it was the smallholders who were often loyalist.
While most Britons in the United Kingdom were members of the state’s Anglican Church, the preponderance of colonists were Protestant dissenters — Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and Congregationalists — who had broken with the Church of England.
Colonists were fiercely chauvinistic Protestants with an intense hatred of Catholics. Thus, when Parliament passed the Quebec Act in 1774, allowing religious freedom to French Canadian habitants, many colonists threw a fit!
This is an old story. American soldiers in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have learned this lesson again and again as foreign military presence angered the locals and united disparate political, ethnic, and sectarian groups in a nationalist insurgency.
Like it or not, the American variety was no exception. The patriot minority used threats and violence to enforce their narrative and thrust their politics on the loyal and the apathetic alike.
Colonists slaughtered natives, beat slaves, and publicly executed criminals, often leaving their bodies to rot in the town square. Alcohol abuse was endemic, and drinking men regularly settled tavern disputes with fists and knives.
Arson and looting were often rampant as the mobs took on a life of their own.
In our collective memory, of course, such rebels are heroes. This is strange, as modern-day racial protests — in Ferguson and Baltimore — are regularly pilloried as riotous criminal actions.
the ostensibly tyrannical British practiced very little chattel slavery within the United Kingdom itself.
the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, threatened to, and eventually did, offer freedom to the slaves as a punishment to rebellious planters. This confirmed the worst fears of the landed class.
Though Franklin spoke out against slavery, he himself owned five slaves, which, unlike George Washington, he never freed.
Thus in 1771, when an anti-slavery bill came before the Massachusetts Assembly, it failed. As James Warren wrote in his explanation to John Adams, “if passed into an act, it should have [had] a bad effect on the union of the colonies.”
To critique the motives and tactics of the patriots or our Founding Fathers is to invite rebuke and passionate defensiveness.
The British, even late in the hostilities, continued to see the colonists as misguided countrymen and hoped at some point to reconcile, not shatter, American society.
Vermont, too, had a radical trajectory, becoming the first state to ban slavery outright, in 1777. New Jersey even extended voting rights — however temporarily — to women, something no other state would achieve until Wyoming did so nearly a century later, in 1869.
Your 4th of July is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license…your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery. — Frederick Douglass (1852)
Many were members of the 1st Ethiopian Regiment, raised in November 1775 by the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, in a famed proclamation that bore his name. Stitched into the uniform of each member of the Ethiopian Regiment were three words: liberty to slaves.
Some years later, in 1792, more than a thousand set out for the west coast of Africa, where they founded a new city, the aptly named Freetown, now the capital of Sierra Leone.
the Revolution was also the greatest slave rebellion in American history. It terrified the owner class and tightened an increasingly brutal slave system.
the great slave revolt of 1775–83 spooked southern planters into developing a more stringent, controlled, and vigorous antebellum slave system than that which existed before the Revolution.
2001 an excellent historian by the name of Daniel K. Richter penned a comprehensive native history of early America, with the paradigm-shifting title Facing East from Indian Country.
Recruiting for the Continental army — a miserable, long, thankless duty — became difficult as the war dragged on. Recruiting officers, as ever, needed some way to entice enlistees. It became necessary to promise volunteers land, often Indian land, beyond the mountains, a total of ten million acres. Native land was thus promised to future settlers without the permission, or even the knowledge, of the tribes.
a considerable degree the dregs of society who filled the ranks of the Continental army. These were the poor, the landless, the immigrants — mostly German and Irish — the former criminals, the wayward youths; those, to be frank, who were most expendable in respectable colonial society.
The stats are instructive: 150,000 to 200,000 colonists performed some military service, about 10 percent of the population; 25,000 Americans perished in the war (about 8,000 in battle, 8,000 of disease, 8,000 on filthy British prison barges), or more than 2 million in today’s terms; 100,000 citizens chose exile over residence in the new republic (60,000 loyalists and 40,000 slaves), or some 8 million in contemporary measures.
To a large extent, larger than most Americans are comfortable with, the United States owes its independence to France. Without the French army, and more vitally the French navy, transforming our revolution into a global
all helicopters in the US Army inventory — Iroquois, Apache, Blackhawk, Chinook — bear the names of tribes or leaders the US government once fought and conquered.
By the end, more than sixty million people would die in the war, only about four hundred thousand of them American.
In the second half of 1941 alone, Russia had suffered three million casualties, and it would eventually sacrifice some thirty million military and civilian lives in the epic struggle with Nazi Germany.
Eight out of ten Germans killed in the war fell on the Eastern Front.
Russian sacrifice and Russian manpower were the decisive factors in Allied victory. That, of course, is a discomfiting fact for most Americans, especially because World War II was so quickly followed by the Cold War
US service members in combat, the average American’s chance of dying in battle was only one in a hundred, one-tenth the rate of the American Civil War. Furthermore, as a proportion of the total, US military casualties were lower than among any of the other major belligerents in World War
fewer Americans were killed than Hungarians, Romanians, or Koreans. Twice as many Yugoslavians died as Americans, ten times as many Poles, and fifty times as many Russians.
a flawed American democracy had little choice but to partner with an unabashed maritime empire (Britain) and a vast communist land empire (the Soviet Union) to fight international fascism. Such an alliance would be messy from the start.
Although JFK is revered as a specifically liberal icon by most American Democrats and independent progressives, his actual record hardly warrants such a label.
Kennedy administration actually appointed fewer women to high-level federal postings than did his predecessors. His cabinet, in fact, was the first since Herbert Hoover’s not to include a single woman. JFK, in short, was no political reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt.
On his watch, it can be said without exaggeration, the United States shifted from covert to overt imperialism.
No amount of relative politeness or sentimental painting of veterans’ portraits during retirement can absolve Bush of his war crimes and disastrous legacy.
there were and are two Americas — the people, and especially their elected representatives, are tribal and divided.
much of the Trump effect is a modern-day reflection of America’s historical trends and baggage.
