The Growth and Collapse of One American Nation, The Early Republic 1790-1861 By Donald J. Fraser Fraser & Associates, Roseville, California, 2020, 605 pp. A Book Review by Nancy Spannaus June 21, 2020—In examining the question of what defines an American identity, author Donald Fraser has chosen one of […]
Part 2 of The American Revolutionaries’ International War Against Slavery: 1765-1767 (For Part 1, click here ) By Colin Lowry In early January of 1765, Prime Minister George Grenville was determined to whip the American colonies into complete dependence on Britain, and he devised the Stamp Act in an effort to […]
By Nancy Spannaus December 26, 2019—It’s about time. Five prominent U.S. historians have come forward to challenge some egregious errors in the NY Times’ 1619 Project, a major intervention on the issue of American slavery’s role in the United States which the Times published in August of this year. The […]
By Nancy Spannaus October 23, 2019—Growing publicity for the off-Broadway play “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda,” which seeks to rebut the presentation of Alexander Hamilton as an abolitionist, has inspired me to write my own rebuttal. I assert that Alexander Hamilton’s economics aimed to end slavery, from the very beginning, […]
By Nancy Spannaus July 4, 2019—There was perhaps no more ardent supporter of the Declaration of Independence than Abraham Lincoln. He saw the Declaration as the moral foundation of the nation, upon which the Constitution was based. Thus, no matter how much the United States population fell short of its […]
By Nancy Spannaus June 16, 2019—In my Internet scanning today, I happened to note that it is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech, which was given at the Illinois State Republican Convention in 1858. This was the convention which nominated Lincoln to run against Stephen Douglass for […]
By Nancy Spannaus May 20, 2019–George Washington’s “Grand Idea” of uniting the country through developing the Potomac River as the gateway to the West, was the subject of a lively book talk last night. Author Joel Achenbach spoke to a group of approximately 30 people about his book The Grand […]
Part I. Ben Franklin and Massachusetts Lead the Way (Part 2 is now available here.) By Colin Lowry March 19, 2019 In the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and John Adams, is a paragraph condemning King George III of Britain for the […]
A Book Review by Nancy Spannaus No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding Sean Wilentz Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2018, 349 pp. March 5, 2019—I can say without hesitation that anyone writing about the history of slavery in the United States should read […]
By Nancy Spannaus June 14, 2020—On March 31, Representative Danny Davis (D-Ill) introduced a new bill calling for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank. H.R. 6422 is cosponsored by Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass); it has been referred to a several Congressional Committees for deliberation. The bill’s magnitude and import […]
Lessons Still to Be Learned By Angela Vullo May 31, 2020–Those of us who never bought into the last 50-year economic shift into de-industrialization and financial speculation should not be shocked at the social unrest which has been unleashed in our country. The murder of George Floyd, a Minneapolis black […]
Why We Declared the Right to Happiness
by Nancy Spannaus July 3, 2020—On the occasion of this Fourth of July, which is bound to be fraught with virulent attacks on the Declaration of Independence, I was tempted to simply repeat Abraham Lincoln’s stirring refutation (which I featured last year). But there was a deeper philosophical point to […]