History
A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation by David W. Blight. A Slave No More is many books in one. The heart and soul of the work are the never-before-published emancipation narratives written by Wallace Turnage and John Washington. Blight provides historical context by matching their…
Note Bene: One of the ancillaries of having a history blog was receiving, from time to time, a review copy of a book from its publisher. Well, although the aformentioned blog is now dormant, I still occasionally receive books and I think offering the occasional Sunday review seems appropriate. Life is more than politics and…
Once again, I find I must recommend an inaccessible article in National Review, this one by Gettysburg College history professor Allen Guelzo: The antidote to slavery, Lincoln insisted, was also economic free labor. In the 19th century, free labor was the shorthand term for a particular way of viewing capitalism: as a labor system, in…
During my time as a college English student, with professors being predictably as you can imagine they were, I was struck by how powerful a set of letters “nigger” could be — first, as a dehumanizing attack and, later, as a literary marker of the speaker’s ignorance. Particularly in postbellum literature, and especially in certain…
It doesn’t diminish the fields of history and science to express fascination that it’s entirely possible for some bones or fragments thereof to reorder the entire history of man: A Tel Aviv University team excavating a cave in central Israel said teeth found in the cave are about 400,000 years old and resemble those of…
This is very neat; an animated chart of global health and wealth over two hundred years. The discouraging aspect is the continued struggle within Africa to advance. On a different note, Hans Rosling breaks some nations into regions to illustrate differences; it’d be interesting to see a similar effort covering the individual states of the…
Thanks to the folks at Reason.com for reminding people that political campaigns have been dirty for quite some time (say, a couple hundred years, at least).
As Rich Lowry explains in his latest column, we Americans are perpetually paranoid about our government, whether it’s the liberal paranoia throughout the Bush years (Patriot Act, world hegemony) or the right wing paranoia amongst conservatives in the Clinton years (Waco, domestic anti-terrorist laws post-Oklahoma City). Lowry explains that our paranoid view of government has…
In these times, the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville seem as apt as ever: [Government] takes upon itself alone to secure [the people’s] gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was…
ProJo scribe Ed Achorn just released a new book, Fifty-nine in ’84, which tells the story of Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn’s 1884 season with the Providence Grays when he won 59 consecutive games. Old Hoss was indeed a character, something that can be seen even in the stills captured in this video: But there’s more…
