A few things online that caught my attention this week:
Lin-Manuel Miranda and Alexander Hamilton
Allen Guelzo reviews Edward Baptist, The Half Has never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Phil Sinitiere reviews Michael McVicar, Christian Reconstruction: R.J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism
New York Times has discovered evangelicals in New York City!!
Do history majors come from the upper middle class?
Chris Beneke on America’s “unofficial religious establishment“
Black lives in South Carolina
Jonathan Den Hartog reviews Scott Rohrer’s Jacob Green’s Revolution: Radical Religion and Reform in a Revolutionary Age
What’s inside a 1970s Alabama high school history book
David Letterman’s new Top Ten List
George Washington looking for his slaves
Tracy McKenzie on the Confederate Flag
A bibliography on American exceptionalism
Apparently David Barton is on my case
A “friendly wrestling match” in the village of Whitesboro, NY
Christian Colleges after Obergefell
Would that more scholars had Allen Guelzo's guts, taking on the debasement of the social sciences by the latest ideological fads.
http://www.claremont.org/featured-article/slavery-all-the-way-down/#.VaLt7V9Vikp
We should call torture by its name,” Baptist insists, and torture thus “extracted an amount of innovation virtually equal in numerical measure to all the mechanical ingenuity in all the textile mills in the Western world.”
It is with that sentence that Baptist unloads what I suspect is his real indictment, against capitalism and industry as a whole, since for him, all capitalist production is “systematized torture,” which was “crucial…to the industrial revolution, and thus to the birth of the modern world.” Critics of slavery might like to bleat that coercion was inherently inferior to free wage labor, but Baptist will have none of it. Plantations are, simultaneously, engines of efficient production and “slave labor camps,” even (borrowing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor) an “archipelago of slave labor camps, a literal organism of economic production.”
***
Of course, if we define capitalism solely as, in Adam Smith’s terms, a natural inclination to truck and barter, then it has no more “progressive” meaning than the natural flow of a river; whether it serves to protect the life of a people or serves to enslave them is of no consequence to our estimate of rivers. But it evidently does make a difference to Edward Baptist, who can hardly wait to conflate the tortures of slaves with the labor of an automotive assembly-line, and, for an entirely different set of reasons, it should make a difference to us, as well.