American History Thread

rexanglorum

rexanglorum

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Hi Everyone, largely to keep the politics thread less crowded, I'm making this thread.

Articles and social media messages are fine although, I ask that the latter have links to reasonably researched articles. They need not be peer reviewed papers (in fact, I'd prefer that they not be), just not mere polemics or speculation with no sourcing. However, as this is 2025, I encourage video clips, be they fiction or non fiction.

Movie clips are great because either they get the history right or nearly right with a few details off and perhaps more importantly, historical inaccuracies. I used to bristle at gross historical inaccuracies, but now I find them insightful. They give us great information of historiography, the study of the study or perceptions of history. A prime example from US History movies would be "Gone with the Wind." the fact that they show slavery as a benign institution may not tell us a whole lot about the 1860's, but it can tell us a great deal about what the writer was thinking in the 1930's and how she was herself influenced by the deliberate work of daughters and grand daughters of the Confederacy who wanted to rewrite history and deemphasize the centrality of slavery as the motivation for succession.

I'll start with some non fiction



And then some historical fiction




I'll have some commentary Sunday or Monday but I invite everyone else to comment and ask questions (US History is not my strong suit but I research pretty quickly or better yet, someone on here with more knowledge can answer right away).
 
MetalMario said:
This channel always delivers the goods; breaking don’t the fiction and nonfiction elements in some great movies
Click to expand...


The Patriot gets so much wrong. The hardest inaccuracy to swallow was the idea that a planter in South Carolina would be having his cash crops picked by free, wage laborers. It was also ridiculous to show the place where escaped enslaved people congregated by the beach, were living in this carefree resort (which also doubles as wedding venue). Roland Emmerich means well but his portrayals of Black people always come off as very weird.


The OOP makes a good point that the loyalists were just following the law and fighting for their state. I am consistently sympathetic to revolutionaries but you simply cannot be a Judas or a Quisling to a country that basically doesn't exist yet. Moreover, if the Patriots had lost the War, the fact is that enslaved Africans would have been freed a generation earlier. Some historians have speculated that if Britain had retained control of its North American colonies, what would have eventually happened is that wealthy American slave owners, Western land speculators, and New England Merchants would have still gotten rich, they would have bought off MP's from so-call "rotten boroughs" (prior to 19th century reforms, Great Britain something like Gerrymandering and the US Senate taken to the power of 100). There were parliamentary seats representing a few villages and their handful of high prestige-cash poor gentry. Wealth North American British subjects would have bought them off. Westward expansion would still have happened and British tax payers would have had to foot most of the bill.

Basically 19th British North America would be like how Israel is for the contemporary US, just a bottomless pit of tax payer money. As often times happens, new and powerful elite emerge on the edge of an empire and capture the political process in the metropole or "mother country." North American elites would have used rotten boroughs/bribery to drain the British treasury in funding westward expansion AND Great Britain would have had to defend their home island against France and other potential continental threats (no French intervention, potentially no French Revolution of 1789, and no Napoleon. Which means that Spain would have retained its gold mines in Mexico and Peru and British-American westward expansion would have been slower so Spain would have had time to build more garrisons and more densely colonize what is Now the American Southwest, thus making British-American westward expansion even more costly) meaning that South Asian would have not been colonized or at least not so extensively colonized and that would have saved tens of millions of lives and prevented the equivalent of 25 trillion dollars (in today's money) from being transferred from the subcontinent to Great Britain.

The British had so many opportunities to win the war of American Independence, I can honestly see why already very religious folks who believe in one form of divine intercession or another see the US as being protected by God.


A few things that the Patriot gets right are three things:

The role of France in the war of American Independence is one. French money as well as arms and ammunition transfers, had started almost immediately in 1775-1776 and it was mostly the fact that the Patriot regulars could retreat in good order and keep an army in the field and wear out the British that convinced Louis XVI and his Court that France should go all in on supporting the Americans, more than any single victory did.

The popular mythology was that the American Revolution was won by ordinary, gun tottin' Americans taking precision shots, from behind the cover of the forest, at the foolish British who insisted in marching in tight columns down established roads. That myth is largely derived from the fact that in 1775, when a small force of Redcoats (I believe a battalion, so about 300 or so guys) were sent to the villages near Boston to seize the local militia's stores of ammunition. They had to split up and they got confronted and beat by the local militias, they reunited and marched back to their base in Boston. A few Patriots took pot shots at the red coats but that was about it. When the war escalated, the British sent in plenty of light infantry, light cavalry, and gave arms to pro British indigenous tribes in order to counter Americans' strategy of irregular war.

And finally as a corollary, the Patriots/Americans eventually got it together enough to beat the British regulars in conventional battle and with so much French material support, a small number of French regulars, and the French Navy's support, the US became an independent country, free to do all of the terrible **** that the US has done since the late 18th Century.
 
As far as Glory goes, I'd be lying if I said i didn't identify with Colonel Shaw a great deal.

This map has been my latest obsession

Yankeedom.jpg


The Union was a coalition of all of Yankeedom, almost all of the midlands, the Northern fringes of Greater Appalachia (although, in a practical sense, many, if not most whites, in Greater Appalachia, were effectively neutral). The Union also included small bits of the Tidewater. The Majority of the North foight simply to preserve the union and about a sixth of it's soldiers and politicians were New Engalnd radicals who actually wanted to see slavery ended, slavers punished, and Black people fully and equally integrated into broader American society. The heart of the Tidewater, all of the Deep South, and the more western parts of Greater Appalachia were pro confederate for one reason or another. The borderlands between the Deep South and Greater Appalachia (in the West, especially) and El Norte and the Midlands and the Left Coast and Inland West featured a lot of small scale but brutal score-settling skirmishes and raids.


Here's a few more scenes from the movie, I can't stop thinking about




The lower you go on the social hierarchies of Northern Whites, the more anti-Black racism you see but also the stronger the desire for brutal and personalized vengeance against the successionists.




When I get back to teaching disproportionately poorer Latine students, I'm, going to be tough on those who are truly smart and who show promise. Some will become revolutionaries, but most will simply becomes solid citizens and lawyers and businesspersons, and local political actors and that will have changed things a great deal where I live.




The majority of Northerners were White Supremacists as well. Using your privilege and power to push back on that is noble.




Like, I'm not seeking death but if it comes early, I'd prefer it being fighting MAGAs alongside a multiracial cohort.
 
I am fn here for this thread.

in recognition of today's observation (and ICE becoming one of the top 20 militaries on the planet the week after blowing the door off a family home for damn near no reason), I submit 1985's MOVE massacre, where an actual bomb was dropped on a row of Philadelphia homes.

the original local article appears below to show that the media always provides a fig leaf.

www.inquirer.com

From 1985: Police storm MOVE compound: Shots erupt as officers close in

The breaking news story on the MOVE siege from an Extra Edition, printed on May 13, 1985
www.inquirer.com www.inquirer.com

1751637395357.png

MOVE HOUSE IS BOMBED; BLAZE INVOLVES 60 HOMES FIRE ONE OF CITY'S WORST EVER

Author: Nussbaum, Paul; Gibbons, Thomas J, Jr; Goldman, Henry; (Also contributing to this article were staff writers; Dwyer, Timothy; Levine, Susan; Sutton, W; Mark Wagenveld)

Mayor Goode early this morning estimated the damage at $5 million, and said he would apply for emergency disaster funds from the state to help rebuild the three-block area.

The mayor said that the city would provide temporary shelter for residents, and that a team of city officials would be on the scene this morning to begin processing claims for the damages.

The American Red Cross said it would operate a disaster service center at St. Carthage Church at 63d and Cedar Streets. Firefighters did not begin to battle the blaze for more than an hour as it took hold, first in the MOVE compound and then in adjoining houses.

Goode blamed the slow response by firefighters on the armed MOVE members who had escaped from the surrounded house into a nearby alley. Six police officers and one firefighter were treated for minor injuries during the blaze.

More than five dozen houses were burning or in imminent danger by 10 p.m. as the fire roared from building to building, burning houses, trees and utility poles while Philadelphia watched on television. The task of controlling the fire was complicated by the distance from which more than 150 firefighters manned 37 pieces of equipment.

Fire Commissioner William Richmond said firefighters "backed down" after hearing shots fired shortly after the blaze started. Firefighters were escorted by heavily armed police as they slowly set up hoses and moved trucks near the burning homes.

Water pressure was reduced, and more equipment and personnel were needed, to fight an unrelated four-alarm fire that broke out at about 10 p.m. at a two-story warehouse and a one-story former supermarket in the Woodland Village Plaza Shopping Center at 61st and Woodland Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia, about 36 blocks from the site of the MOVE conflagration.

In West Philadelphia yesterday, angry residents milled outside police barricades, blaming Mayor Goode and police for the fire that was destroying their neighborhood.

"This just isn't necessary," cried Janice Walker, who lived two houses away from the burning MOVE house. "I'm sure my house is just destroyed. We want to know who's going to pay for it. We've been there 20 years . . . all of my family's aspirations are tied up in that house. "It's not fair for all the neighborhood to be destroyed . . .," she said. "I blame everybody. We moved out of our houses voluntarily for them to be destroyed."

The fire at the MOVE house started shortly after 5:27 p.m., when a heavy explosive contained in a satchel was dropped out of a state police helicopter onto the roof of the MOVE compound at 6221 Osage Avenue.

The satchel charge tore a hole in the roof and destroyed a reinforced steel and wood bunker that MOVE members had constructed in recent weeks. The fire leaped from the MOVE house on the north side of the 6200 block Osage Avenue to the adjoining houses and then to houses on the south side of Osage.

It crept north to 6200 block of Pine Street and east to 400 block of South 62d Street. A first alarm was sounded at 6:54 p.m., a second at 7:25. The third alarm was sounded at 8:02, a fourth at 8:27, and a fifth at 8:45. The fire mounted to a final, sixth alarm at 9:35. It was finally declared under control at 11:41 p.m.

More than 500 people - sightseers and evacuees - gathered on corners as the floodlights from fire equipment stationed on Cobbs Creek Parkway, one block to the west, gave an eerie illumination to the night.

One of them was Joseph King, a Democratic committeeman in the sixth district of the 46th Ward, who said the neighbors he had spoken with questioned the police action that started the fire. "Everyone I've talked to appreciates the patience the police have shown, but that move dropping the bomb, we despise that," King said. "You've got a 6,000-member police force, and you can't get 12 people out of a house. The way they did it is wrong."

The blaze, turning the night sky orange over West Philadelphia, was one of the the worst residential fires in the city's modern history. Fifty-four dwellings were destroyed on Jan. 1, 1963, by a fire at the Fretz Building, 10th and Diamond Streets. That fire was equal to a 13-alarm fire, and also consumed 41 other buildings, along with towers, boxcars and other equipment of the Reading Railroad.

In another disastrous residential fire, of eight alarms, 122 families were left homeless when fire swept through about 30 buildings between Ridge and Columbia Avenues at 23d Street on Feb. 8, 1942. Yesterday, West Philadelphia residents were confused and angry as they watched their homes turned into smoking rubble. "

All they said was evacuate and we'll (residents) be back in later," said Gary Winfield, who lived next door to the MOVE house. "Now who's going to give me restitution? . . . Somebody's going to give me something or they'll have MOVE II on their hands.

"All I have to say for the neighbors is, I hope you're satisfied."

Goode said at an evening news conference, in an estimate that quickly proved to be optimistic, that "we may very lose 14 to 16 homes* (*ED. NOTE- fn lol, see pic, article title) . . we're very saddened by that. We're also very saddened by the fact that there may be loss of life."

And he defended the police action, although he said, "I'm aware that there is a lot of frustration out there. There is no perfect way to bring this thing to a conclusion . . . we will do our best."

Goode said the city would examine claims for damage because of the fire. The mayor said that the city law department's special claims unit would investigate the damage, promising the agency "will go around and make sure that those persons who feel they have in fact been damaged in any way can file their claims appropriately."

But the mayor also said that while the city will consider such payments, "we do know that there are some homeowner policies that cover things like this. So we would be pursuing both those things with those persons who feel that they had property damage there."

Credit: Henry Goldman, Inquirer Staff Writers
Click to expand...

fun fact: went to HS in this city maybe 20 years later and never learned about this there.
 
I took Introduction to American History as an elective in college and while it became one of the densest workload courses, being a Canadian it was very interesting.

My final project was picking a film and analyzing its accuracy. I chose Ride With the Devil, did a somewhat passable job at the analysis, and ended up barely passing the course. :lol:

 
rexanglorum said:
The Patriot gets so much wrong. The hardest inaccuracy to swallow was the idea that a planter in South Carolina would be having his cash crops picked by free, wage laborers. It was also ridiculous to show the place where escaped enslaved people congregated by the beach, were living in this carefree resort (which also doubles as wedding venue). Roland Emmerich means well but his portrayals of Black people always come off as very weird.


The OOP makes a good point that the loyalists were just following the law and fighting for their state. I am consistently sympathetic to revolutionaries but you simply cannot be a Judas or a Quisling to a country that basically doesn't exist yet. Moreover, if the Patriots had lost the War, the fact is that enslaved Africans would have been freed a generation earlier. Some historians have speculated that if Britain had retained control of its North American colonies, what would have eventually happened is that wealthy American slave owners, Western land speculators, and New England Merchants would have still gotten rich, they would have bought off MP's from so-call "rotten boroughs" (prior to 19th century reforms, Great Britain something like Gerrymandering and the US Senate taken to the power of 100). There were parliamentary seats representing a few villages and their handful of high prestige-cash poor gentry. Wealth North American British subjects would have bought them off. Westward expansion would still have happened and British tax payers would have had to foot most of the bill.

Basically 19th British North America would be like how Israel is for the contemporary US, just a bottomless pit of tax payer money. As often times happens, new and powerful elite emerge on the edge of an empire and capture the political process in the metropole or "mother country." North American elites would have used rotten boroughs/bribery to drain the British treasury in funding westward expansion AND Great Britain would have had to defend their home island against France and other potential continental threats (no French intervention, potentially no French Revolution of 1789, and no Napoleon. Which means that Spain would have retained its gold mines in Mexico and Peru and British-American westward expansion would have been slower so Spain would have had time to build more garrisons and more densely colonize what is Now the American Southwest, thus making British-American westward expansion even more costly) meaning that South Asian would have not been colonized or at least not so extensively colonized and that would have saved tens of millions of lives and prevented the equivalent of 25 trillion dollars (in today's money) from being transferred from the subcontinent to Great Britain.

The British had so many opportunities to win the war of American Independence, I can honestly see why already very religious folks who believe in one form of divine intercession or another see the US as being protected by God.


A few things that the Patriot gets right are three things:

The role of France in the war of American Independence is one. French money as well as arms and ammunition transfers, had started almost immediately in 1775-1776 and it was mostly the fact that the Patriot regulars could retreat in good order and keep an army in the field and wear out the British that convinced Louis XVI and his Court that France should go all in on supporting the Americans, more than any single victory did.

The popular mythology was that the American Revolution was won by ordinary, gun tottin' Americans taking precision shots, from behind the cover of the forest, at the foolish British who insisted in marching in tight columns down established roads. That myth is largely derived from the fact that in 1775, when a small force of Redcoats (I believe a battalion, so about 300 or so guys) were sent to the villages near Boston to seize the local militia's stores of ammunition. They had to split up and they got confronted and beat by the local militias, they reunited and marched back to their base in Boston. A few Patriots took pot shots at the red coats but that was about it. When the war escalated, the British sent in plenty of light infantry, light cavalry, and gave arms to pro British indigenous tribes in order to counter Americans' strategy of irregular war.

And finally as a corollary, the Patriots/Americans eventually got it together enough to beat the British regulars in conventional battle and with so much French material support, a small number of French regulars, and the French Navy's support, the US became an independent country, free to do all of the terrible **** that the US has done since the late 18th Century.
Click to expand...
Yeah, The Patriot was just an entertaining movie. The moment I saw the scene where their rifles were accurately gunning people down past 30 feet, you knew lol.
 
Manny Fernandez718 said:
One of the biggest game changers to Africans and Native Americans , had to be The Caucasian man learning how to use gun powder . After it was discovered in the far East
Click to expand...

IMO...at least for Native peoples west of the Mississippi, the introduction of the horse was a bigger game changer than guns. That is not to say that guns weren't important, because every man wanted one, but horses meant you could be mobile. Now you had the ability to hunt, expand your family and your tribes hunting grounds, and make war on your enemies. Horses also meant you could kill larger amounts of buffalo which you could use for trade to acquire...guns and other items to make your life easier. Native people weren't stupid. They wanted white trade goods because they made their lives easier and more enjoyable.


If anyone has questions about the Plains Indian people, Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, etc ask away. Major was history with minors in African American and Native history.

Love this thread! Keep it coming.
 
MetalMario said:
I think it was the Apaches that were the first native americans to utilise the horse thus giving them the upper hand other tribes.
Click to expand...
Pueblo were probably the first to have access to horses but to your point the Apaches and Comanches were really the first two tribes who mastered using the horse and what advantage it gave them.

Something interesting to consider. When a raiding party went out it was typically rather small (less than 20) unless it was a large, summer raiding party. Those parties typically went out on foot and some of them would be gone for over a year.
 
cosmiccoffee9 said:
I am fn here for this thread.

in recognition of today's observation (and ICE becoming one of the top 20 militaries on the planet the week after blowing the door off a family home for damn near no reason), I submit 1985's MOVE massacre, where an actual bomb was dropped on a row of Philadelphia homes.

the original local article appears below to show that the media always provides a fig leaf.

www.inquirer.com

From 1985: Police storm MOVE compound: Shots erupt as officers close in

The breaking news story on the MOVE siege from an Extra Edition, printed on May 13, 1985
www.inquirer.com www.inquirer.com

1751637395357.png



fun fact: went to HS in this city maybe 20 years later and never learned about this there.
Click to expand...

This definitely does not get enough attention.

One reason is that it undermines the whole narrative that America continually is making progress. It's one thing to show Black people getting hit with fire hoses and attacked by police dogs in black and white. Showing American government officials using an ariel bombardment on Black community organizers the same year that Nintendo released the NES in the US, Michael Jordan won ROY, and the Teddy Ruxpin talking doll debuted. The notion of backsliding, and of reaction almost always coming on the heels of progress in areas of social justice, undermines the notion that progress just sort of happens with the passage of time.

Another, more anodyne reason is that US History classes, tend to not teach much in terms of recent history. It seems like Watergate and the fall of Saigon is where modern US history courses cut off. And by doing so, you're depriving students of much needed context for current events.


Bad Religion said:
I took Introduction to American History as an elective in college and while it became one of the densest workload courses, being a Canadian it was very interesting.

My final project was picking a film and analyzing its accuracy. I chose Ride With the Devil, did a somewhat passable job at the analysis, and ended up barely passing the course. :lol:

Click to expand...


I'll have to check this film out, I like Ang Lee's work.
 
The last bit of commentary that Barbara Fields gives in the last episode of Ken Burn's documentary on the Civil War, is still the most pertinent.



The Civil War never ended and right now the ideological descendants of the Confederates have won a few battles, but us, the ideological descendants of the Union are readying our counter attacks.
 
We used to be a literate society. The vast major of Cavett viewers did not have a college degree. They didn't need it because they took the time to read both of these guys' stuff and they had the critical thinking skills to create a well crafted opinion.



I've been on Cavett kick because this is what my mom and dad, in their youth, watched.

A big reason why I hate Trump is that he, at least in part, stole my dad from me. My dad was once a man of letters and as recently as 2008, he voted for Obama! Trump and his buddies in Silicon Valley have turned too many Americans into illiterate, dopamine seeking fools.

In the post war period, we had folks living in 900 square foot houses who were better read than today's rich kids with their own room, bathroom, and study.

Democracy cannot function without a genuinely literate people.



Edit: Here's how we see the weakness of philosophy (the mother of all academic disciplines) and it's the fact that it lacks empirical rigor



Philosophy is a wonderful discipline but many philosophers get lazy about gathering more empirical evidence. That'd why Baldwin kicks his butt.

The Politics Thread is to A Song of Ice and Fire
as
Cavett is to The Dance of the Dragons
 
Last edited:
Manny Fernandez718 said:
One of the biggest game changers to Africans and Native Americans , had to be The Caucasian man learning how to use gun powder . After it was discovered in the far East
Click to expand...

When whites supremacists say that our domination of the world is justified because were just so smart and innovative, I have to laugh.

Western Europe has perfect geography. It is close enough to the rest of Eurasia so my ancestors could pick and choose what ideas to adapt from North Africa, West Asian, South Asia, and East Asia. But at the same time, there were enough mountains and forest to keep us free from regular incursions of raiders from the Steppe. As a result surplus could be sparred to do other things which gave small and mid sized state rulers, the ability to wage war. That's to say nothing of the natural harbors and most navigable rivers which allowed Europeans to have small and competing states which ALSO enjoying all of Europe's natural infrastructure.

Recall that as recently as the Napoleonic wars, savvy British investors would invest in French privateering expeditions (legalized piracy, in other words) and it was not considered treasons. That was in the early 1800's, imagine how merchants and goods and mercenary companies would move through European easily and serving whomever was willing to pay them the most.

Western Europeans fought each other constantly and it created a level of competition where every prince was searching for either homegrown insights or new knowledge from the East (the Dutch, when fighting for independence from Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries built such good star forts that they replenished their treasury by selling books on how to build a good star fort). As the financial historian Niall Ferguson said, who would win? the Spaniards will they plundered gold and a literal mountain of silver, being mined by enslaved indigenous South Americans, vs a tiny country with a stock market.

Well, the tiny country of with a stock market country ultimately defeated the enemy who was stripping the Western Hemisphere of mineral wealth and we are, for better or for worse, living in its aftermath. The English and later the British copied all of this and figured out how to scale a remorseless, profit accumulating monster that covers the Globe.
 
Fozz said:
Yeah, The Patriot was just an entertaining movie. The moment I saw the scene where their rifles were accurately gunning people down past 30 feet, you knew lol.
Click to expand...

Just a small technical point. In the late 18th Century, Americans did have rifles which were accurate for a few hundred yards.

BUT

They took a full minute to reload and were not suitable for most forms of warfare during the American War of Independence, aside from light infantry.

So the scene where Mel Gibson ambushes a small group of British soldiers, which have his condemned son as a captive, it seems like he and his sons had many preloaded rifles, which could have made his attack plausible. And recall that Mel Gibson finishes the fight with his hand melee weapons.


But yeah, good repeating rifles made a short appearance during the end of the US Civil (along with trenches and machine guns) and they were further refined instrumental during Bismarck's invasion of France in the 18070's. The Frenchies still had muzzle loaded guns while the proto Germans had good breech loaded smokeless powder, repeating rifles (basically semi auto shooting).

the repeating action of fire arms (chiefly, the ability to take multiple shots before reloading) made the Franco-Prussian war a very short one.
 
The thing I find so fascinating with US history is how compact it is - a couple of you have sort of mentioned it already. You barely have to go back a generation and you’ve got folks who lived through the civil war.

My father in law (who, like others have said too, has gone totally off the rails the last few years) grew up in Appalachia without running water or much school. He didn’t get a birth certificate until he was something like 16 - and until not long ago was considered “colored” like other folks in that area. That seems ancient but as we’re now rediscovering the racist history of the US isn’t really history - and when it’s convenient things change.
 
kdawg said:
The thing I find so fascinating with US history is how compact it is - a couple of you have sort of mentioned it already. You barely have to go back a generation and you’ve got folks who lived through the civil war.

My father in law (who, like others have said too, has gone totally off the rails the last few years) grew up in Appalachia without running water or much school. He didn’t get a birth certificate until he was something like 16 - and until not long ago was considered “colored” like other folks in that area. That seems ancient but as we’re now rediscovering the racist history of the US isn’t really history - and when it’s convenient things change.
Click to expand...

I sometimes think that the way we Americans think of the Civil War must be how people in Tudor England or Early Stuart England thought about the Wars of the Roses. It wasn't in living memory but every one had a grand parents who had directly seen veterans of the Wars of the Roses or their grandparents' parents or grand parents knew someone who had fought in the Wars of the Roses.

The way we Americans think of the US Civil War is also akin to how the 1848er's, the Paris Commune, and the Bolsheviks thought of the French Revolution of 1789. It became a template and a mode of analysis.

There's also the fact that video has been around for more than a century now and very old videos with people who were already very old when they recording happened, give us a haunting far look back period.

Here's a great example (not American, but a great example of how video lets you basically visit ghosts who have pretty close links to even older historical figures and eras)



This one is heavy on linguistic analysis.



This one is short and features either the first or one of the first women in the US Senate



This one I can relate to the most because I had great grandparents (who spoke a different dialect than me), either recounting childhood memories of Los Angeles in the early 20th century and they had grandparents who lived there in the late 19th century and it was very different. The population was 11k in 1880 and only 1,500 of the people where white including my great, great, great grandparents who were Yankee adventurers.

These facts are why I laugh when people say its scary that whites will be the minority, if you're from an old California family, that had already been the case and it was no problem. Even up through the 1920's and 1930's, the fact that you could still live in the US but also kind of live in Latin America was selling point for realtors based on Los Angeles. (if anything we oversold California as a tropical paradise, when the hippy kids all came to San Francisco in the 1960's, they didn't bring a coat and they had a pretty bad time, and one of the reasons why California produces better eating oranges than Florida is because the more inland areas get regular but light freezes which makes for very sweet navel oranges)





So yeah, the US is both a huge and a very young country. When the Chicago Cubs won the World Series in 2016, there was a Chicago man, whose life coincided with another Chicago man who was a child when the Cubs had win their previous world series in 1908 and that man interacted with his great grandfather who was born when Thomas Jefferson was President.

As Faulkner said, the past, isn't even passed.
 


I'm not saying that Lincoln was a crypto Marxist but he did say that labor was superior to capital because without labor, there can be no capital. Moreover, it is a near certainty that Lincoln at least read Marx's articles in the New York Herald, the leading anti-slavery publication south of New England. Marx was a regular contributor to the Herald on European affairs, from his home in London.


Marx was a great admirer of the USA and I sincerely believe that one day an American flag that incorporates the Hammer and Sickle will be raised over the US Capitol.
 
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