2. The topic of Murphy’s article is the Nesbitt Manufacturing Company, an iron factory near Spartanburg, South Carolina. She uses the business correspondence of Alabama investor, enslaver, and industrialist, Franklin Elmore, located in the Library of Congress.
3. This company used slaves as assets in sophisticated ways, mainly by:
a) hiring slaves as workers in the factory
b) using these same slaves to purchase company stock
c) pledging the slaves as collateral for loans
There isn't a day that goes by that I wonder to myself, where did we go wrong?
There are lots of valid responses. The 1980 election is one because we're still suffering the consequences.
But I can't shake the feeling that Bush v. Gore was where it all went wrong.
Try to imagine a counterfactual where Bush doesn't become president. Do we have a 9/11? Maybe. Do we have a war in Iraq and torture? Probably not. Do we get Roberts and Alito. No. Do we get a housing/insurance bubble? Tough to say.
I think about Bush v. Gore because it was the SCOTUS boldly and unabashedly inserting itself into the political process. It had been political before but not in the same way. SCOTUS was delegitimizing itself by functioning as the arm of FoxNews.
THREAD. With the protests against stay-at-home orders mushrooming across the U.S., journalists and pundits are making comparisons to the Tea Party protests of 2009-2010. It's worth revisiting what many historians concluded about the Tea Party.
The national debt had indeed gone up during these years. TARP, Medicare Part D, tax cuts, foreign wars, the ACA all contributed. There was an (in)famous rant by Rick Santelli on CNBC that supposedly coined the phrase.
Was the Tea Party a genuinely grassroots movement that erupted spontaneously or was it concocted from above by wealthy billionaires?
It's impossible to give a definitive answer. Certainly Americans for Prosperity may have amplified a pre-existing phenomenon.
This thread contains some of my thoughts + images.
2. Students of economic history in the early American republic often equate the Panic of 1819 with the name Murray Rothbard, the famous libertarian economist who wrote the definitive account of this subject as his 1962 doctoral dissertation.
3. After nearly six decades, we finally have an update in Andrew Browning’s The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression, the publication of which fell on the 200th anniversary of this watershed event.
Thread. The @nytimes's #1619 project reopened some old wounds between economists and historians with respect to the #Historyofcapitalism subfield. What explains this tension between the disciplines and can we improve it for future collaboration? #econhist#slavery#capitalism
@nytimes Before continuing further, some qualifications...as I often do, when I thought to mention this, I figured I also needed to mention that and as a result, this thread would get way too long. I'm pressed for time with the start of the semester and developing an online class
@nytimes but I didn't want to give up and had to write something. So here goes.
I'm literally nerding out on this series of maps I've created. Sometimes a bit of repetitive, mundane work can pay off! These maps show Dem v. GOP candidates at the presidential level by county every four years from 1944-2016. historianstevecampbell.com/uploads/4/4/6/…
You can read it from left to right to see change over time through periods of 20 yrs, which has the advantage of smoothing out freakish elections when something rare was going on or when there was a third party candidate, and from top to bottom to see change between each election
I'm focusing on the South because it's arguably the best place to test the influence of race on electoral returns. You can see the shift of voting patterns between white southerners and African Americans.