America is named after Amerigo Vespucci (Americus Vespuccius in Latin), who wasn’t the first to make landfall in the New World — that was Columbus— but he did take part in important voyages of discovery along the coast of South America. His reports to his sponsors were circulated (or bootlegged or plagiarized or something) widely in Europe. He and others realized that the land masses they were exploring were not part of Asia but were rather a previously “undiscovered country,” as Shakespeare put it. A German mapmaker named Martin Waldseemuller used Amerigo’s accounts in depicting the new lands on a world map, shown below, and proposed giving his name to what is now South America. That continent you see on the far right is labeled “America.” The name stuck and was later extended to North America as well.
Columbus didn’t do too badly, either, with the nation of Colombia and the capital district of the United States named for him.
In a way, it was. The British government refused to engage in any direct relief. All it did was buy some corn (maize) in the United States, with plans to “throw it on the market” to reduce grain prices in Ireland if they got too high. Unfortunately, the corn was a very hard, dry variety which had to be boiled for a long time to make it edible. Not knowing this, many Irish bought it and suffered great pain from eating indigestible corn.
Other than that, the British government relied on market forces that did not work to end the famine.
To make matters worse, English owners of Irish land were allowed to evict Irish people who were unable to pay their rents, and to tear down their hovels. Thousands of hungry people were set on the road with nowhere to go.
The government pretty much stood by and watched as a million Irish people died of starvation.
Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia, 1856, from The Illustrated London News (Library of Congress)
I’m glad I am not a social studies teacher in Florida, because the standards adopted by the state board of education cover 216 pages and touch on a dizzying variety of topics and do so in a very matter-of-fact way. I imagine the average student will feel like the little girl who began her report on a book about dolphins with, “This book told me more about dolphins than I really wanted to know.”
The bit about slaves learning useful skills is in there, and it’s quite true. Some enslaved people in some situations were sometimes able to learn skills (carpentry, shoemaking, gardening, cooking, etc.) that sometimes allowed them to benefit their own families and sometimes even to earn a little money.
That’s an interesting fact, but it pales in comparison to the essentially brutal and exploitative nature of American black slavery. If you are going to stipulate some details and not others, you will end up with a very distorted view of history.
The standards seem determined to portray African slavery in the 13 colonies and the new nation in a larger context in which forced labor was just another aspect of life. That’s true as far as it goes, but seems to fall far short of the American exceptionalism also advocated by Florida standards.
Students should be taught that slavery was a horrible system, that it was the underlying cause of a war that nearly destroyed the Union, and that we are still living with its after-effects today. The details can be negotiated, but the big picture needs to be presented clearly.
“Men of Harlech, stand ye steady . . . Welshmen never yield.”
If you are looking for a documentary, “Zulu” isn’t it. But if you want a brilliant and enthralling war movie, seek ye no further.
Other answers note the various inaccuracies in the film. But some of them are essential to the story. For example, the fact is that the British regiment was not predominantly made up of Welshmen. But that impression is deliberately given to set up the scene shown above, when the soldiers steady their nerves by belting out the Welsh anthem “Men of Harlech.”
Now, that just didn’t happen (the sing-off and the battle on the second day, that is). Not only didn’t the British engage the Zulus in a sing-off, they didn’t fight the Zulus on the second day at all. IRL, the Zulus took a look at the makeshift fortress by the light of day, and shoved off.
But that wouldn’t be much of an ending, would it? So the film sets up the armed choir competition and the final Zulu assault, repelled by the redcoats and their Martini-Henry rifles which, luckily, don’t jam.
Didn’t happen, but who cares? Makes a hell of a climax.
Baron von Steuben Drilling American Recruits at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in 1778.
You’ve confused Baron von Steuben with General Patton, who insisted that World War II combat soldiers wear neckties. What von Steuben taught the Continental Army was how to drill and maneuver— critical skills in warfare at the time — and he did that amazingly well despite all sorts of deficiencies of equipment and organization. The proof was in a grand review in the spring of 1778, when units up to brigade size did their evolutions very well for the benefit of General Washington and guests. Even better, the Continental Army held its own that summer in the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, in part because of the training led by von Steuben. The British never seriously engaged the Continental Army in the middle or northern colonies again.
Von Steuben learned something from the experience himself. In Europe, he said, it was sufficient to tell the soldier what to do. In America, he said, you had to explain to the soldier why he should do something, and then he would do it.
Is it possible that the United States could have abolished slavery in a gradual manner that would have prevented a war?
Slaves picking cotton on a plantation in Georgia, 1858.
One huge factor overwhelmed any progress towards gradual emancipation: cotton.
By 1860, the Southern states of the U.S. produced most of the cotton grown in the world. Of the 5.4 million bales of cotton produced in the U.S. in 1860, 1.6 million went to mills all over the country, most of them in New England. Some 3.8 million bales were sent abroad; the U.S. provided 77 percent of the cotton consumed by textile mills in Britain.
I can’t find a number for the value of U.S. cotton production, but plainly it was in the millions of dollars, much of which poured into the hands of the plantation owners who built those grand houses you saw in “Gone with the Wind.” Cotton profits stocked cellars with fine wines and libraries with old books from South Carolina to Texas. The upper South was less dependent on cotton but participated in the industry as well by selling surplus slaves to the booming plantations in the cotton belt.
Northern businessmen profited as well, both from the textile business and from the financing and shipping of exports.
Cotton was the world’s largest industrial enterprise, and it depended on slave labor.
Some people suggest that the abolition of slavery in the British Empire (in the West Indies and southern Africa) could have been a template for American compensated emancipation. The British government committed twenty million pounds (then worth about 100 million dollars) to buy the freedom of about 800,000 slaves. The U.S. had four million enslaved people in a more vibrant economy, so presumably the cost could have been on the order of half a billion dollars at least and possibly several times that much. The federal government at the time had total revenues of only thirty or forty million dollars a year. No such pot of gold was available.
The last serious discussion of emancipation in the South before the Civil War was in the Virginia legislature in 1832, in the wake of the Nat Turner slave uprising in 1831. There was serious interest in trying to get rid of slavery once and for all, but no one could figure out how to pay for it, and the issue was put off for another day.
Attitudes towards slavery hardened in subsequent years, with Southerners ever more committed to slavery and opposed to abolition.
It is commonplace today to suppose that slavery would have died out in due course. But experts are skeptical. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, in their “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” suggest:
“But in the southern United States, slavery continued with undiminished vigor. Indeed, in this region it became more and more deeply entrenched during the last three decades of the antebellum era. With servitude crumbling all around them, and with their peculiar institution under increasing attack from abolitionists in the North, southern politicians moved to strengthen the legal bulwarks of their system.”
” . . . There was little to encourage the view that southern slavery was on the brink of its own dissolution.”
Tragically, absent a rather unlikely and sudden change of heart on the part of thousands of slave owners, there was probably no peaceful and harmonious solution to the problem of American chattel slavery. It was a problem from hell.
How much did the Iroquois Great Law of Peace influence the constitution of the United States?
James Madison: Not a wampum guy
It’s a charming story, that the Iroquois confederacy’s constitution may have influenced that of the United States. Trouble is, the Iroquois had no written language, and there is no evidence that it was written down, and translated into English, in time to influence the James Madison and the other Framers of the Constitution.
At the time, the Great Law of Peace existed mainly as a wampum belt, and as far as I know, James Madison had no knack for interpreting wampum.
In fact, it’s quite possible that it worked the other way around: that when English versions were developed, the developers and translators were influenced by the U.S. Constitution. Lacking an early, written version, we don’t know.
Given that the Constitution has no civil power to grant rights, what exactly is the common-law right of the people (predating the Constitution) referenced in the 2nd Amendment that cannot be “infringed”?
Thanks, England!
The right of the people to keep and bear arms — that is, to form a militia, as opposed to a standing army — goes back at least to the English Bill of Rights in 1689. That document lists this among the rights of Englishmen, or at least some of them:
“That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;”
The English Bill of Rights was drawn up by Parliament and agreed to by the new monarchs, William and Mary. They replaced James II, who had made the mistake of being both Catholic and rather authoritarian.
The Bill of Rights made it clear that the monarch could not have a standing army without the consent of Parliament. Furthermore, it made it clear that the people (Protestants, at least) could have arms for self-defense. In context, this was obviously not meant for shooting burglars, but rather for resisting attempts at tyranny by the Crown.
The right to keep and bear arms was one of several rights the Framers carried over from the English Bill of Rights into the Bill of Rights added to the U.S. Constitution to ensure its passage. The early Americans were much attached to the “rights of Englishmen” and insisted that these had to be codified in the new Constitution.
The right to keep and bear arms was one of several rights the Framers carried over from the English Bill of Rights into the Bill of Rights added to the U.S. Constitution to ensure its passage. The early Americans were much attached to the “rights of Englishmen” and insisted that these had to be codified in the new Constitution.
How panicked was FDR when he heard about the Pearl Harbor attack?
Panic wasn’t FDR’s style. He consulted with his civilian and military advisors, met with the cabinet and leading politicians, talked on the phone with Winston Churchill, and prepared the speech he would give to Congress the next day. Secretary of State Cordell Hull gave him a lengthy, lawyerly draft of a speech; FDR thanked him and put it aside. FDR’s speech was a masterpiece of direct and forceful oratory that rallied the nation and added “day of infamy” to the catalogue of unforgettable phrases.
When he got to the Capitol, Roosevelt had to make his way down the center aisle of the House chamber and up to the rostrum. Of course, he couldn’t walk, but with the help of heavy steel braces and his son’s supportive arm, he could shift his weight from one leg to the other, swivel his hips, and thus move forward. A man who dealt bravely with that sort of handicap was not a man to panic.
At the end of the Civil War, was slavery completely abolished in the US?
Slavery in the United States was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, which was passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified as of December 6, 1865.
AMENDMENT XIII
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865.
Courtesy National Archives.
The final vote on the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives was celebrated with an uproarious celebration on the House floor, as shown in this contemporary engraving and also depicted in the movie “Lincoln.”
Some people argue over what “slavery” is. In context, it clearly meant chattel slavery of persons of African descent, a point made by the Supreme Court in Butler v. Perry, 1916, in which it ruled that states and localities could continue the ancient practice of requiring able-bodied men to get out and work on the roads:
Richard Lobb 