"'Let Me Make the Songs of a Nation, and I Care Not Who Makes Its Laws'"

"The reasons for these disparities go beyond modern policy differences and extend back to events that predate not only the American party system but the advent of shotguns, revolvers, ammunition cartridges, breach-loaded rifles and the American republic itself. The geography of gun violence—and public and elite ideas about how it should be addressed—is the result of differences at once regional, cultural and historical. Once you understand how the country was colonized—and by whom—a number of insights into the problem are revealed."

At Politico, Colin Woodard writes that "Gun Violence Is Actually Worse in Red States."

"Far From a Tyrant"

"Had British statesmen possessed the diplomatic acumen of Franklin and Washington, Mr. Roberts argues, a way through the impasse in North America might have been found. Many colonists had hoped that George III would take their side against Parliament. The king himself spoke of 'fighting the battle of the legislature.' Instead, the British establishment—the king included—determined to crush what they viewed as a conspiracy of the colonial elite. The result was a conflict that, while not unwinnable, stretched Britain's resources to the limit."

At The Wall Street Journal, William Anthony Hay reviews Andrew Roberts's The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III.

"A Rare Example of Cooperation"

"By 1620, Wampanoag weakness had provided an opportunity for a rival group to the west, the Narragansett, who had largely escaped the impact of the disease. When the Plymouth settlers arrived, Ousamequin was struggling to prevent the Narragansett from subjugating the remaining Wampanoags and forcing them to pay tribute. While he initially kept his distance from the Mayflower's inhabitants, fearing further aggression—and disease—Ousamequin evidently came to the conclusion that an alliance with the new English arrivals in the region could help protect his people."

Sarah Pruitt at "History Stories" discusses the backstory of the 1621 Thanksgiving.

"Yet Hope Always Remains"

"The city on a hill does not seem very shiny in the year 2020. Pandemic, economic crisis, and an incumbent president attempting to overthrow the democratic election he undoubtedly lost by a large margin: If the eyes of all people are upon America now, they are not witnessing an edifying spectacle." 

David Frum at The Atlantic discusses Abram Van Engen's City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism.

"Traffic Analysis, in a Different Form"

"Along with Yale University historian Edmund S. Morgan and other contemporaries, he challenged the theory of Charles A. Beard that the founders were wealthy opportunists less interested in ideas than in power, using revolutionary rhetoric to arrange a society that primarily benefited themselves. Through a close reading of political pamphlets, Bailyn believed that the founders held sincere and reasoned ideas about democracy and profoundly objected to British claims of ultimate power to enact laws for the colonies."

Hillel Italie at The Daily Sentinel reports the death of Bernard Bailyn.

Gordon Wood praises Bailyn in a 2015 Weekly Standard article.

As does Daniel N. Gullotta at The Bulwark.

"The Unwritten Rules Aren't Cutting It Anymore"

"For the company's founders and the residents of New England, the text of the corporate charter served a dual purpose: as a consensual source of sovereign authority that safeguarded them from English rule and as a constitution of their civil government. The charter gave the corporation 'full and Absolute power and Authoritie to correct, punishe, pardon, governe, and rule' all New England residents, granted the authority to pass 'Lawes and Ordinances,' and bestowed upon British residents in the colonies 'all liberties and immunities of free and naturall Subjects … as if they and everie of them were borne within the Realme of England.' As the colonists faced greater threats of dissolution from the crown, the 'Charter Constitution' gained increasing importance in the social and political culture of New England. And although the Massachusetts Bay Company charter was unique in its independence from the crown, by the 1760s, almost all the colonies were governed by 'charter governments.' Bowie shows that these charters provided the templates for America's first written state constitutions, and the modern U.S. Constitution as it exists today."

Danny Li at Slate argues that Britain needs a written constitution.

Servants into Slaves

"Even in 1700, Africans were hardly the only unfree colonists, for a majority of those laboring in Virginia were people bound to service. They were indentured whites. Population numbers are crucial in understanding the demography of labor in early Virginia. By 1680, only about 7% of Virginians were of African descent; 20% of Virginians were of African descent by 1700, and by 1750, the 100,000 enslaved Virginian men and women accounted for more than half the population. Here lies the demography of enslavement."

Nell Irvin Planter at The Guardian reminds readers that the first Africans in colonial Virginia were not enslaved.

And Olivia B. Waxman at Time discusses August 1619.

The Great Settlement

"For years, people in and around Arkansas City have found artifacts—arrowheads, weapons and cooking utensils. But a translation done in 2013 by the University of California, Berkeley of the Onate expedition provided more details that Blakeslee was able to use to match geographical details with archaeological evidence.
"He began searching the area.
"What he found in Arkansas City, he believes, may rewrite American history."

Beccy Tanner at The Wichita Eagle discusses the newly discovered lost city of Etzanoa in southern Kansas.

"But the Main Purpose of Militias—North and South—During This Period Was to Suppress Slave Rebellions"

"Throughout the 17th century, almost all the English colonies along the Eastern Seaboard passed legislation prohibiting women and slaves from owning guns and forbidding the sale of guns to native peoples. By the 18th century, gun ownership had become a defining feature of white masculinity in the English colonies and guns played an integral role in Colonial men's public displays of that masculinity.
"The public training exercises Colonial men participated in as part of their militia service were central to such displays and offered opportunities for them to participate in competitions to demonstrate their martial prowess. In many cases, guns were not only central to these demonstrations but were the prize for victory. The commander of the militia in Henrico County, Va., William Byrd, noted in his diary that he made a practice of awarding pistols to the men who won the competitions that took place on militia days. Such guns thus acted as material manifestations of a Colonial man's physical domination of his peers, augmenting his reputation in terms of property ownership and bodily prowess."

Nathan Wuertenberg at The Washington Post explains the origins of American gun culture.

And Thom Hartmann in a 2013 Truthout article explains how slave patrols ended up in the Second Amendment.

"The Number of People Living in Mexico Fell From an Estimated 20 million to 2 million"

"Bos and her team have previously identified plague bacteria in the teeth of Black Death victims, but the cocolitzli samples presented a different challenge. Scientists already suspected that the Black Death was caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, but no one is as certain about the exact cause of cocolitzli. So Bos's team repurposed a method called metagenomics that sequences all of the DNA in a sample, generating a long list of all bacteria present in the teeth. One researcher went through the list by hand, and a specific strain of Salmonella enterica popped up repeatedly. Dental pulp samples from five people who died before European contact but buried in the same site contained no significant amounts of S. enterica."

Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic reports on recent research on the cause of "mysterious disease called 'cocolitzli'" in sixteenth-century Mexico.

"He Cannot Be Easily Purged"

"Serra's nature is open to debate. Once revered in history books as a protector of California Indians against the brutalities of the invading Spanish military—and canonized as a saint by Pope Francis in 2015—Serra's reputation has been tarnished by leftist thinking that regards all things Spanish and Catholic in the New World as colonialist oppression.

"But that ought to be beside the point. Serra is inextricably intertwined with the history of Stanford University, and the history of California itself."

Charlotte Allen in the Los Angeles Times argues that Junipero Serra "could be said to have invented the Golden State."

"America's Obsession With Guns Has Roots in a Long, Bloody Legacy of Racist Vigilantism, Militarism, and White Nationalism"

"Our national mythology encourages Americans to see the Second Amendment as a result of the Revolutionary War—to think of it as a matter of arming Minutemen against Redcoats. But, Dunbar-Ortiz argues, it actually enshrines practices and priorities that long preceded that conflict. For centuries before 1776, the individual white settler was understood to have not just a right to bear arms, but a responsibility to do so—and not narrowly in the service of tightly regulated militias, but broadly, so as to participate in near-constant ad-hoc, self-organized violence against Native Americans. 'Settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities, and nations,' Dunbar-Ortiz writes. 'Extreme violence, particularly against unarmed families and communities, was an aspect inherent in European colonialism, always with genocidal possibilities, and often with genocidal results.'"

At the New Republic, Patrick Blanchfield reviews Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. 

"In Conversation With Each Other"?

"Squanto and Pocahontas were raised in different regions possessing distinct cultural and historical traditions, languages and politics. The colonists who established the first permanent English settlements in America did not encounter some undifferentiated, unsophisticated, inarticulate Natives, but specific historic actors who must be viewed in the context of their own times, places, and individual life experiences. They were multi-lingual, politically and culturally aware, and they reacted in different ways, alternatively embracing and rejecting distinct elements of European tradition."

E. M. Rose at The Junto wonders if Squanto and Pocahontas met in London in 1616.

"Without Strong Governments and Effective Laws, They Believed, Liberty Inevitably Degenerated Into Licentiousness and Eventually Anarchy"

"I have been researching and writing about the history of gun regulation and the Second Amendment for the past two decades. When I began this research, most people assumed that regulation was a relatively recent phenomenon, something associated with the rise of big government in the modern era. Actually, while the founding generation certainly esteemed the idea of an armed population, they were also ardent supporters of gun regulations."

Saul Cornell at The Conversation discusses "Five types of gun laws the Founding Fathers loved."

"As Offensive as a Confederate Monument?"

"'The parallels are very obvious to us,' says Santa Monica activist Oscar de la Torre, a school board member, founder of the Pico Youth & Family Center and a prominent leader of the campaign to remove the mural. 'The European conquistadors, they practiced slavery. There was rape. There was murder. There was genocide.'"

Jason McGahan in the LA Weekly discusses the debate over the 1941 mural, History of Santa Monica and the Bay District, at Santa Monica City Hall.

"Truly Our First 'Civil War'"

"Taylor's not interested in a triumphalist account of the nation's origins; instead, his core arguments deliberately overturn the notion that the Revolution was fought for egalitarian, democratic principles. Most colonists, Taylor highlights, felt deeply attached to the British monarchy on the eve of the Revolution. There was no distinct American identity to speak of, and everywhere Britain's American colonists looked—north to French Canada, south to Spanish America—they saw settlers with virtually no political autonomy. Their king, meanwhile, granted them greater civil liberties than any other European ruler; for much of the 18^th century, British monarchs allowed elected Colonial assemblies to run their own affairs. But rather than inculcating a sense of independence, these Colonial assemblies only made American colonists cherish more deeply their status as 'free-born Englishmen.'
"So why, then, a war for independence?"

Eric Herschthal in Slate reviews Alan Taylor's American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804.

Though I Wear a Shirt and Tie

"The Cherokees resisted state and federal efforts to remove them from their Southeastern homelands during the 1820s and 1830s. During that time, most whites saw them as an inconvenient nuisance, an obstacle to colonial expansion. But after their removal, the tribe came to be viewed more romantically, especially in the antebellum South, where their determination to maintain their rights of self-government against the federal government took on new meaning. Throughout the South in the 1840s and 1850s, large numbers of whites began claiming they were descended from a Cherokee great-grandmother. That great-grandmother was often a 'princess,' a not-inconsequential detail in a region obsessed with social status and suspicious of outsiders. By claiming a royal Cherokee ancestor, white Southerners were legitimating the antiquity of their native-born status as sons or daughters of the South, as well as establishing their determination to defend their rights against an aggressive federal government, as they imagined the Cherokees had done. These may have been self-serving historical delusions, but they have proven to be enduring."

Gregory D. Smithers in Slate explains why so many Americans claim a Cherokee ancestor.

"Everyone Has Encouraged Us That What We're Finding Is Really Exciting and Terribly Significant"

"'We need to know more,' said Eric Klingelhofer, a vice president for research at the foundation and a history professor at Mercer University in Macon, Ga. 'This whole story is a blank—a blank page, a blank chapter of history, and I think archaeology is the only way to come up with answers.'"


Theo Emery in The New York Times reports on the discovery of possible artifacts from the lost colonists of Roanoke.

"I Look Upon This Catalogue and Am Puzzled to Find 'the Whole Truth'"

"When I think of Puritan 'temperance' I am reminded of cherry bounce and also the good old Jamaica rum which New England used to make in such quantities that it would float her mercantile marine. When I think of 'demonology,' I remember that son of Boston, Benjamin Franklin, whose liberality of spirit even Mencken celebrates, when he falsely attributes it to French influence, having never in his omniscience read the Autobiography. When I think of 'liberty and individual freedom,' I shudder to recall stories of the New England slavers and the terrible middle passage which only Ruskin's superb imagination could picture. When I think of 'pluck and industry,' I recollect the dogged labors of French peasants. Catholic in faith and Celtic in race. When I see the staring words 'brutal intolerance' I recall the sweet spirit of Roger Williams, aye, the sweeter spirit of John Milton whose Areopagitica was written before the school of the new freedom was established. When I read 'hypocrisy' and 'canting' I cannot refrain from associating with them the antics of the late Wilhelm II who, I believe, was not born in Boston. So I take leave of the subject. Let the honest reader, standing under the stars, pick out those characteristics that distinctly and consistently mark the Puritans through their long history."


The New Republic posts a 1920 article by Charles A. Beard taking on the Puritans of New England.

"There’s a Tendency to Grab a Hold of Some Historical Incident and Yoke It to a Current Agenda"

"Historians say that the settlers in Plymouth, and their supporters in England, did indeed agree to hold their property in common—William Bradford, the governor, referred to it in his writings as the 'common course.' But the plan was in the interest of realizing a profit sooner, and was only intended for the short term; historians say the Pilgrims were more like shareholders in an early corporation than subjects of socialism."

In a 2010 New York Times article, Kate Zernike discusses competing narratives about the Pilgrims.