★★★★★ 5
how a country could develop a "national character" founded on the love of liberty while simultaneously importing thousands and t
Format: Paperback
This book lays out hte paradox, how a country could develop a "national character" founded on the love of liberty while simultaneously importing thousands and thousands of bondsmen to provided the "free people" with the necessities of life: i.e., why slavery was necessary to support the kind of freedom the white folk wanted to become accustomed to.... and implicitly, why the industrial revolution finally changed the hearts and minds of enough Americans to make slavery seem unnecessary and therefore, if was no longer a necessary evil, why it had to be overthrown.
Morgan writes objectively -- but his feelings are always detectable through his writing style, which is perhaps the best academic English to be found anywhere. I found it gripping. The book was published in 1972, and has doubtless been corrected by many subsequent researchers in some of its particulars -- but it was the fountainhead for a new way of understanding American history that young people all have learned about in high school, but which many baby-boomers have never seriously encountered.
Reading it accomplished a MAJOR retrofit in my sense of how the USA got to be the way it is today. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Tea Party and many trump supporters seem to adhere to the values of the original American Republicans [and to think that Black folk should be pushed back to a place where their feelings don't matter], and to long for a return to the status quo ante -- with ante referring to a time long LONG ago
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Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2016
