History

Families will argue this Thanksgiving. Such arguments have a long tradition. The Pilgrims had clashing ideas about how to organize their settlement in the New World. The resolution of that debate made the first Thanksgiving possible. The Pilgrims were religious,...

There was nothing inherent to the lighthouse that made it a public good. It became a public good because government regulation made it so.

In addition to not understanding our Constitution, Hannah-Jones’ article, like in most discussions of black history, fails to acknowledge that black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles in the shortest span of time than any other racial group in mankind’s history.

America was not made richer from slavery. America was made poorer by slavery.

Interest in the history of American capitalism is on the rise, although curiously this line of study is being advanced for anticapitalistic ideological reasons.

In each and every case, the aforementioned authors carelessly repeat a claim that they want to believe and that affirms their political priors. No effort is made to check sources or investigate whether the claim itself is reputable.

Edward Baptist, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others of the “New History of Capitalism” demonstrate their ignorance in their dishonest attempts to associate American capitalism with slavery.

What is America, and what does it represent?

A staggering 28 percent of free blacks in the Crescent City owned slaves.

The idea that there was a time in American history when many more matters of daily life were considered the domain of personal decision-making and voluntary collaborative community effort has mostly been erased from people’s memory. We live in a time when an...

I recently have been reading a number of books written by European travellers who visited the United States, particularly, in the early and mid-decades of the 19th century.

In the 19th century, liberalism was identified with the belief in and the defense of individual liberty in various spheres of life.

The opportunities open to my young relatives in Harlem — and to other young blacks elsewhere — were not nearly as good as the opportunities open to me back in 1948.

The Pilgrims nearly starved to death. They’d tried to farm collectively — the entire community owning all the land and sharing everything, like socialists.