He adds a complete set of notes and references used at the end of each chapter in addition to the nineteen complete documents he includes at the end of the book. He completed exhaustive research, so his ideas are not simply based on speculation; they are well thought out and thoroughly investigated. He uses a combination of books, articles, letters, memoirs, and other written documents to ensure he has a broad cross section of historical documents as evidence for his conclusions, as well. This is an interesting look at a part of history that many other historians do not discuss. He offers valid arguments for his position, backed up with much research and historical evaluation. The fact that the founding fathers called all men equal, but failed to abolish slavery has always been a perplexing question in my own mind. This book helps answer that question once and for all. He looks at the economic question surrounding abolition, along with the social question. (Many...
His conclusion is that both the North and South were to blame for not ending slavery, and that ultimately led to the Civil War in 1860. I agree with much of his assessments, and after reading this book, the entire question of slavery during the Revolutionary period has become clearer. It is a sad time in American history, and after reading this, it seems even more sad and unnecessary. Americans had the chance to do the right thing at the right time, and they chose not to do it. Choosing to end slavery certainly would have changed the face of American history, and it could have saved countless lives lost in the Civil War. It is always easy to look back in hindsight, but this book does that with not only opinion, but also proof and that is what makes it so interesting and sad at the same time.
Nash's work may have contributed to the wider reading our modern texts include, rather than the revisionist version which paraphrases down to 'the North had to accept slavery against its will because the South would have balked from the new republic.' Our selection of texts, particularly the primary material, consider this dynamic with more balance than in the century and a half prior to Nash, if his historiography is true.
This happened because blacks had learnt that they no longer had to obey the people that illegitimately enslaved them. Slaves had been determined to fight for their freedom through any means possible, and, they took advantage of any opportunity that they had to become free. According to Nash, tens of thousands of slaves have left the American continent as the British forces advanced inland. Apparently, a great number of black
In fact, the American Revolution may have served to assert the natural rights of some people, but those people were limited to a class of white males. It is important to keep in mind that one of the ideological underpinnings of the Revolution was a challenge to imperialist ideals, and race-based oppression and slavery had long been major parts of the imperial system. Despite that, it is unfair to characterize
We would not accept such an assertion about any other historical notion. Who would say that the revolution was inevitable, without the fight of the patriots and the leadership of the Founding Fathers? Yes, the question of slavery was a contentious issue -- but it was just as contentious a hundred years later, a hundred more years of bondage for blacks, and a hundred more years of making the
Race and Revolution An iconoclastic figure in the study of American History, Gary Nash, who is Director of the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA, writes from a position of authority as he questions the history that many of us were taught during our primary and secondary educations. In Race and Revolution, Nash turns his keen vision toward the matter of slavery at the time our country was
Gary Powers Spy Plane Issue The Cold War has been called the twentieth century's 'longest-running international morality play.' It was a play that lasted decades and produced thousands of players, both major and small, as well as two critical scenes set in Cuba and Berlin. The full weight of the drama settled on one person, an American pilot named Francis Gary Powers. When Powers 'fell from the sky' outside the Soviet
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