I agree it was “meaningful”. The numbers are the author’s estimates of the chance of contracting malaria before enlisting in the Union army. So if there is a 40% chance of contracting malaria, presumably 60% of people didn’t. And, of course, malaria isn’t normally fatal. The paper is trying to tease out long term health impacts.
Most whites in Georgia (for example) were not slave owners. Some of them were independent farmers. White people thought the heat and health risk were acceptable tradeoffs for other things they wanted. I expect if the farmland had been cheaper (because no slaves), Europeans would have found it sufficiently attractive to live there in greater numbers.
“All the news that’s fit to print” has devolved into “All the news that causes fits, print!” Negative news sells. The 1619 Project focused only on negatives, and exaggerated them to the point of falsehood, while ignoring and/or downplaying any positive history.
The 1619 Project is nothing more than clickbait. It was generally regarded by historians as inaccurate, and they made revisions in response.
The key concept that it neglects is that there wasn’t even a concept of what we think of nowadays as this country in the 1600s. What would later become the United States were a set of British colonies, very siimilar to Britain’s other colonies in the Caribbean, and the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch possessions in the Western Hempishere. The portrayal of America as an evil concept of those days is ludicrous; the European superpowers all generally regarded slaves in the same manner.
No, I think I pretty much nailed it in that it makes for good clickbait for SJWs sitting at their computers. I was also correct in that the British colonies were no different than the other European colonies in terms of their treatment of the triangular slave trade. The Western Hemisphere was more or less ground zero for battles for colonial supremacy for hundreds of years.
Uh… did you take the introductory US history course up through the Civil War at your university? They do talk about it. It’s not like they devoted a whole week to it or anything; there’s too much other ground to cover in a semester.
That’s kinda the problem the 1619 project was designed to address.
It’s not just the triangular slave trade. It’s the 200 years of slavery that followed, Jim Crow, the civil rights era, none of it gets enough air time in US history classes. Along with what was happening with native people and other minorities (Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, etc).
A school year is what, about 40 weeks. We can’t even devote 2.5% of that to the nations greatest sin and try to learn from it?
I’m thinking high school level at the moment. In university my “US history” class was really mostly a “right wing talking points” class, with the semester pretty evenly divided between political science, economics, and history. The history part was pretty light in most every topic.
What are you even talking about? A semester is what, like 16-18 weeks? No, there isn’t enough time in a 100-level course to spend a whole week on that.
For history majors, if you want a 300-400 level course that specifically focuses on it, or graduate studies on it, different story. But let’s not pretend that a general US history course totally ignores it.
In the world history class I took in college we spent a fair bit of time on the Irish Potato Famine. Had to read a book about it. Great example of the impact of colonialism. We probably spent at least 2 days of class talking about it (I don’t remember if that was a twice a week or three times a week class - so it might not have been a whole week’s worth of lectures, but the better part of one at least).
Actually, I might have taken that class in a Spring or Summer term, so the 2 days would have been a much higher %-age of the course. I’m pretty sure it was a standard semester though.
The 1619 Project focused only on negatives, and exaggerated them to the point of falsehood, while ignoring and/or downplaying any positive history.