"The Most Popular, Most Robust and Most Influential Global Social Movement of the Day"

"[F]rom its very inception, the movement wasn't about sin-obsessed puritans, but rather a backlash against 'the most predatory and dangerous of all big businesses,' in which unregulated liquor traffickers hooked their customers on a highly addictive substance, just like Big Pharma stoking the opioid crisis. In both cases, every market incentive drives the industry to maximize private profit by flooding the community with wares that destroy the public welfare. In penning his famous Six Sermons on Intemperance—which jumpstarted the modern temperance movement in 1826—Boston preacher Lyman Beecher repeatedly used but one Bible verse: 'Woe unto him that giveth his neighbor drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunk also' (Habakkuk 2:15). Temperance activists aimed not at the drink or the drunkard, but the predatory drink seller, to be confronted through a consumer boycott."

Mark Lawrence Schrad at Politico reconsiders the Prohibitionists.

"An Uncomfortable Familiarity"

"'Weirdly, part of this is that with partisan gerrymandering, a lot of members of the House do not fear losing reelection—they're afraid of losing primaries,' Eric Foner, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University and an expert in Reconstruction and the Civil War, told TPM. 'With all these Republicans loaded into their districts, they figure they'll always win so there's no benefit to them to take a reasonable stance before primary season.'"

Kate Riga at Talking Points Memo talks to historians about the Republican Party's embrace of violence

Casey Michel at Politico discusses how President U.S. Grant can provide lessons for President Joe Biden now that "the Red Shirts of South Carolina have been replaced with the Red Hats of MAGA."

And at The Bulwark, Mona Charen writes that "Republicans Make Me Proud I Voted for Biden."

"Women Can Hold Their Own When It Comes to Violence"

"To some (let's be honest, probably mostly white) people, the fact that white women have the capacity to inflict violence and to cruelly manipulate the lives of others—to be what Jones-Rogers, in our conversation, called 'evil and dastardly'—is an eternal revelation. That's why we still get curious, 'look at this weird phenomenon' articles about white women at Unite the Right, or within the alt-right movement. Or why we need to be reminded again and again that white women gleefully attended lynchings, flocked in the thousands to form auxiliaries for the Ku Klux Klan, and avidly protested school integration in the South and the North. This history of slave-owning women's economic relationship to slavery, Jones-Rogers says, should 'remove the surprise.' 'If you think about the value, the importance of whiteness in their lives, being a source of power, being a source of empowerment and emboldenment, then throughout history these little things make sense,' she said."

Rebecca Onion at Slate reviews Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers's They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. 

"Portrays Douglass Unequivocally as a Hero While Also Revealing His Weaknesses"

"Ironically, his popularity is also due to ignorance. Some who commend him would probably cease doing so if they knew more about him. Frederick Douglass was a whirlwind of eloquence, imagination, and desperate striving as he sought to expose injustice and remedy its harms. All who praise him should know that part of what made him so distinctive are the tensions—indeed the contradictions—that he embraced."

Randall Kennedy in The Atlantic reviews David W. Blight's Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

"It Cannot Be Blindly Quoted, as a Visionary Paean to Simple Virtues"

"And yet it's easy to forget that Democracy in America was not written under President Lincoln, but under President Jackson, in the America of the Trail of Tears, and it can only feel strange that a book from this moment in time is the one frequently hailed as capturing some of America's finest characteristics. True, Tocqueville, an abolitionist, both condemned African-American slavery and Native American dispossession, and did so eloquently. Yet his democracy stops long before them, in his elegiac passages of the happy slaves at work in the fields, or in his conviction that 'the Indians will never civilize themselves, or that it will be too late when they may be inclined to make the experiment.' One would happily toil, one would quietly vanish—that was Tocqueville's shrug."

Ben Judah at The American Interest questions blithe understandings of Alexis de Tocqueville.

"Has There Ever Been Another Independence Day Speech to Match It?"

"In the end, the promise of the Declaration could not be delivered without force of arms. The contradictions between freedom and slavery were etched so deeply into the nation that no orator's tongue could resolve them. Still, Douglass called down the storm, whirlwind, and earthquake in the attempt, and his oration deserves a place of honor in the American canon. It would please the wrathful prince to receive the recognition that is his due; though he would surely be careful to accept it only through faintly pursed lips. And then, with that tight smile, he might wonder if we too would be rash enough to ask him to speak on our Fourth."


James West Davidson in Slate analyzes Frederick Douglass's speech from July 5, 1852.

"History Can Be as Stirring as the Most Gripping Fiction"

"This was the period when the term underground railroad came into widespread use, and if infuriated Southerners tended to overestimate the scope and power of ad hoc arrangements that helped perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 runaway slaves during that decade (a pitiful percentage of the 4 million enslaved), they accurately perceived that legal maneuvers and covert action combined to undermine what they saw as their sacred property rights."


Wendy Smith in the Los Angeles Times reviews Eric Foner's Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.

Massive Resistance

"Mihm said today’s fight has a parallel in the nullification movement of the 1830s when John C. Calhoun, who had resigned the vice presidency to run for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina, devised a strategy to oppose a tariff that he said hit the South unfairly. If the state legislature passed a law that refuted the federal one, the state could ignore it based on what he called a 'concurrent majority.'
"President Andrew Jackson eventually interceded and thwarted the nullification movement. Had it gone forward, Mihm said, it may have led to the breakup of the Union before the Civil War.
"Now, he said, those who want to stop Obamacare 'are trying to find another way to nullify that poses a much graver threat, but not to the law,' Mihm said, referring to a possible failure to raise the nation’s debt ceiling.
"'Our debt is something we all, every one of us, are on the hook for,' he said. 'And the idea that you can take that and make that a bargaining chip is very similar to the idea of the nullifiers.'"

Michael Tackett at Bloomberg compares today's Republican Party to Southern conservatives of the past.

Smoke Out Hickory

"But after an election in which Democrats rode a wave of minority support to keep the White House and Senate, party activists should wonder about one of the founders for whom that event is named. If branding matters, then the tradition of honoring perhaps the most systematic violator of human rights for America’s nonwhites should finally run its course."

Steve Yoder in Salon argues in favor of dumping Andrew Jackson from the name of Democratic Party fundraising events.

The Unknown World

"Most of us will find the news that some black people bought and sold other black people for profit quite distressing, as well we should. But given the long history of class divisions in the black community, which Martin R. Delany as early as the 1850s described as 'a nation within a nation,' and given the role of African elites in the long history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, perhaps we should not be surprised that we can find examples throughout black history of just about every sort of human behavior, from the most noble to the most heinous, that we find in any other people's history."

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at The Root explores the history of black slaveowners.

The Night Was Clear and the Moon Was Yellow

"Stagolee is one such character, a 'bad man' who shot a man over, in various versions, a muddy glass of water, tainted meat, or a Stetson hat. Similarly, the character Bad Lazarus broke into a commissary counter and then 'He walked away, Lord, Lord, he walked away." In the 1890s, Railroad Bill was a 'mighty mean man' who 'shot the light out of a poor brakeman's hand,' then bought a pistol as long as his arm to 'shoot everybody ever done me harm.' Like the characters in the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, the bad men in post-Civil War black folklore were ciphers. Never fully described, they wore big hats, rode horses, and spoke with their pistols."

Scott Reynolds Nelson at The Chronicle of Higher Education places Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained into a tradition of American folklore.

"A Man Who Would Probably be Nominated for Sainthood if He Was Catholic"

"In closing, he alluded to Southern Baptist history--the convention was founded in defense of slavery and later supported segregation--and noted that it was time to signal a change."

Molly Hennessy-Fiske in the Los Angeles Times reports that the Southern Baptist Convention has elected the Rev. Fred Luter to be its first black president.

Hennessey-Fisk presents information about Luter in an earlier article.

"'Until Distance'—or, as One Black Minister Bluntly Put It, 'the White Man'—'Do Us Part'"

"Why does the ugly resuscitation of the myth of the happy slave family matter? Because it is part of a broad and deliberate amnesia, like the misleading assertion by Sarah Palin that the founders were antislavery and the skipping of the 'three-fifths' clause during a Republican reading of the Constitution on the House floor. The oft-repeated historical fictions about black families only prove how politically useful and resilient they continue to be in a so-called post-racial society. Refusing to be honest about how racial inequality has burdened our shared history and continues to shape our society will not get us to that post-racial vision."

In The New York Times, Tera W. Hunter explains the conditions of marriage during slavery.

"Both Stowe and Tom Deserve Our Reconsideration"

"But this view is egregiously inaccurate: the original Uncle Tom was physically strong and morally courageous, an inspiration for blacks and other oppressed people worldwide. In other words, Uncle Tom was anything but an 'Uncle Tom.'"

David S. Reynolds in The New York Times revisits Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Compromised

"Clay came closest to winning the White House in 1844 but lost to James K. Polk.The skills and personality that got things done in Washington struck many Americans as evidence of the corruption and lack of principle that Jackson never tired of denouncing, particularly where Clay was concerned. But voters were reacting to more than personal attributes and tactical errors. A significant number in Clay’s own party wouldn’t vote for a slaveholder; some issues were beyond compromise."

Andrew Cayton in The New York Times reviews Robert V. Remini's At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union and David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler's Henry Clay: The Essential American.

A-Mouldering in the Grave

"After decades of mistrust and recrimination over the conflict between slavery and free labor, many in the North and South now found themselves even more fundamentally at odds. As Northerners increasingly hailed Brown as a hero, panicky Southerners execrated him as the devil himself."

Steven Lubet in Salon marks the sesquicentennial of John Brown's Raid.

A Peculiar Historian

"'He was really a pioneer, demolishing the magnolia and mint juleps view of slavery,' said Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia. 'And the Reconstruction book was in the same revisionist mode, sweeping away myths. Among serious history scholars, nobody is going to go back before Stampp.'"

Bruce Webber in The New York Times writes an obituary for Kenneth M. Stampp.

"Devil's Half Acre"

"Kathleen Kilpatrick, director of the state Department of Historic Resources, said the jail has national significance. She called it 'ground zero' for understanding the slave trade.
"David Herring, who heads a local historical conservation group, said the slave trade and the city are inextricably linked: 'Richmond would not be here without the slaves that built this city.'"

David Zucchino in the Los Angeles Times reports the excavation of Lumpkin's Slave Jail in Richmond, Virginia.

What Hath God Wrought

"Thus, President James Monroe observed that a growing network of canals and turnpikes and the development of the steamboat were helping stitch a disparate country together, even as other Americans, like DeWitt Clinton, foresaw a calamitous 'dismemberment of the Union,' East to West, unless it were bound to­gether by a common thread like the Erie Canal. Thus, average Americans worshiped Andrew Jackson as 'Everyman writ large,' even as the new Whig party saw him as an unbridled despot. Thus, countless utopian movements blossomed across the country—'We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform,' Ralph Waldo Emerson breathlessly wrote—along with movements to help the poor, heal the sick and assist the deaf, even as Native Americans were brutally marched to their deaths along the Trail of Tears and plans were being made to ship free blacks off to Africa, or elsewhere."

Jay Winik in The New York Times reviews David S. Reynolds's Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.

Debating Society

"As an exemplar of the gauzy distortions of hindsight, Guelzo cites late media scholar Neil Postman's pronouncement that where Lincoln-Douglas embodied a literary oratory and belonged to 'the Age of Exposition,' Nixon-Kennedy and subsequent made-for-TV clashes were nothing but creatures of 'the Age of Show Business.'
"Please, Mr. Postman. Scholars should know better than to traffic in such nostalgia; the Lincoln-Douglas contest, after all, provided plenty of entertainment, too. Guelzo's feat is that he does more than just resist the romanticized view of the event. He takes on with equal relish the counterclaim, widely accepted by academics, that the Lincoln-Douglas encounters were simply the trashy 'political theater' of a pre-wired era. While some historians have argued that the turnout at debates like these reflected simply the robust energies of the party machines, which hustled out crowds and plied them with food and drink, Guelzo gives the debates their popular due.
"He does so by locating them within the context of the 1858 senatorial campaign, enfolding them in a seamless, if sometimes heavy-going, narrative. He also grounds them in confident analyses of the period's political culture: the state of the parties, the prevalent style of campaigning and public speaking, and the issues that voters worried about—above all, the debate over slavery's expansion into the American West."

David Greenberg reviews Allen C. Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America in Slate.