History

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation (modeled after the earlier War Finance Corporation) was created in early 1932 under the Hoover Administration as what amounted to the “discount lending” facility of the Federal Reserve System: it would lend to financial institutions chartered by states and in rural areas.

The reputation of the 1619 project’s other essays, many of them entirely unobjectionable adaptations of scholarly insights for a popular audience, has suffered because of the NY Times’ inflexible refusal to address erroneous historical claims in the essays by Hannah-Jones and Desmond.

While Lincoln’s colonization remarks grate the modern ear, and evince a patronizing paternalism toward the program’s intended participants, they also reflect the sincerity of his anti-slavery beliefs and an accompanying recognition that white-supremacist violence would not end with the formal abolition of the institution.

Ginsburg explores the U.S. Constitution and features interviews with and gains the perspectives from constitutional experts of all political views — liberal, conservative and libertarian.

Seventy-five years have now passed since that fateful meeting at Yalta. Stalin, who helped Hitler start the Second World War, reaped his reward at the end of it: Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, at the cost of terror and tyranny for all the people who were forced to live in the “socialist paradise” for almost half a century following the end of the war in 1945.

One of the most heated and controversial issues today concerns the place of slavery in the history of the United States, and attitudes toward the institution of human bondage in the Western world in general.

A short yet hard-hitting indictment of the economic and political repression that so often follows from attempts to structure a society around Marxist ideology and centralized economic planning.

Was the American Revolution fought in defense of slavery? Was Abraham Lincoln a racial colonizationist or exaggerated egalitarian? Did slavery drive America’s economic growth and the emergence of American Capitalism? Did the 1619 Project seek adequate scholarly guidance in preparing its work?

Far from representing non-white scholarly voices and introducing challenges to a previously stagnant historiography of slavery, the NHC school is actually a stunning embodiment of everything it charges against its critics.

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.

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.

A few historical and inconvenient notes left on the cutting room floor during Black History Month.