Optimistic, Pessimistic About 2024? Whatever Happens, It’s Not Inevitable

Happy New Year! I’ve spent a lot of time pondering whether 2024 will be an extraordinarily good year or an extraordinarily bad year. Whatever happens, I tend to believe it will be a historic turning point for the United States and possibly the world. “The future is never inevitable,” historian Heather Cox Richardson observed in an interview …

Was US Civil War Inevitable?

Historian David Blight has a piece in the NYT Magazine tracing the path to disunion in the 1850s — and the lessons it holds for our own era of deep division. It begins with Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, two days after the inauguration of President James Buchanan in March 1857, reading aloud the court's …

Could the US Civil War Have Been Avoided?

In some respects, the American Civil War seems INEVITABLE. A nation founded on equality embedded the inequality of African Americans into the Constitution at its birth by permitting slavery and the 3/5s Compromise. There was no possible peaceful compromise on this issue. As Abraham Lincoln said, the nation could not continue to exist half-slave and …

How Robert E. Lee Made the Momentous Decision To Oppose the Union

In light of the movement to take down Confederate statues, the life of Gen. Robert E. Lee deserves further examination. Jonathan Horn wrote about Lee's choices that changed history in his book, "The Man Who Would Not Be Washington." In it, he points out that in 1860, Lee was considered the representative of George Washington's …

Happy Birthday, Maine! Its’ Proud and Integral Contribution to Slavery’s End

March 15, 1820 was the day that Maine joined the Union as part of the Missouri Compromise engineered by House Speaker Henry Clay of KY. That legislation stopped northern attempts to prohibit slavery's expansion by admitting Missouri as a slave state. But Mainers were upset that their state was used to legalize slavery in any …

Massacre of Native Americans At Wounded Knee: Inevitable?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ-cUsUg_J0 Brief overview of the massacre at Wounded Knee. Other videos. "One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability. But it is never too late to change the future." …

John C. Calhoun, Vice President for Opposing Presidents and Powerful Advocate of State’s Rights, Slavery

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) of South Carolina was a master politician on the national stage for 40 years, serving as vice president to bitter enemies --President John Quincy Adams, from 1825 to 1829 -- and to President Andrew Jackson from 1829 to 1833. He started out his political career in 1810 as a member of …

Female President, Astronauts, Britain Rejecting Brexit, the Inevitability of Pandemic: New Alt-History Novels, TV Shows

New alternative history novels and TV shows imagine life with Hillary Clinton as president, Britain rejecting Brexit, a female astronaut being the first human to set foot on the moon. These stories are "potent reminders of how different today might have been," writes Caryn James on the BBC website. She concludes: "If we can imagine …

8 Weak Presidents and Fragmenting Political Parties,1836-1860

Presidents Andrew Jackson, 1829-1837 and Abraham Lincoln 1861-65 were powerful -- they transformed the country, bent the nation to their will, and forced adversaries to do what they did not want to do. There are books called The Age of Jackson and The Age of Lincoln. But in the 24 years between 1836 and 1860, …

The Road to World War I in Europe

Crash Course European History: "Much has been written about what exactly caused World War I. As befits a true global war, the reality is that there isn't a single cause. There aren't even three causes. There are a vast array of causes. Today we'll get into just a few of those causes, including the complex …