Seeds of Crisis: 1834-1836 caused high inflation, then comes the panic of 1837, after that, late 1840s great depressions set in. Mattapoisett Museum in Massachusetts still have this memory in exhibition. The depression came at a time when the town was bustling with shipbuilding and numerous supporting business activities. Fiscal and monetary policies in the United States and Great Britain, the global movements of gold and silver, a collapsing land bubble, and falling cotton prices were all to blame for the multi-year economic depression that followed the Panic of 1837. Another panic occurred in February 1857, possibly caused by over development in the West and excessive railroad construction during this period, according to the economists. After American Civil War, a Long Depression worldwide began in 1873 and lasting until either March 1879, or the year 1899, depending on the metrics used. It was most severe in Europe and North America, which had been experiencing strong economic growth fueled by the Second Industrial Revolution.
President Andrew Jackson long held dislike towards banks for causing the economic chaos. In his second annual address to Congress on December 7, 1830, the president again publicly stated his constitutional objections to the Bank’s existence. He called for a substitute national bank that would be wholly public with no private stockholders. It would not engage in lending or land purchasing, retaining only its role in processing customs duties for the Treasury Department. The battle over the Second Bank of the United States which pitted states’ rights advocates against proponents of the federal financial institution, took its toll on the nation’s economy on May 10 1937.
A 2021 book It Wasn’t About Slavery – The Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham Jr, an American author and military historian who specializes in the German war effort during World War II and the Confederate war effort during the American Civil War. Author of more than 40 books, he challenges the causes of our nation’s greatest tragedy. It gets into the macro issues, global trade, tariffs (the only source of federal revenue before income tax), the arguments over our form of government, the industrial revolution, sectionalism. Mitcham argues in the book: no political party advocated freeing the slaves in the presidential election of 1860. The Republican Party platform opposed the expansion of slavery to the western states, but it did not embrace abolition. The real cause of the war was a dispute over money and self-determination.
Before the Civil War, the South financed most of the federal government—because the federal government was funded by tariffs, which were paid disproportionately by the agricultural South that imported manufactured goods. Yet, most federal government spending and subsidies benefited the North. The South wanted a more limited federal government and lower tariffs—the ideals of Thomas Jefferson—and when the South could not get that, it opted for independence. Lincoln was unprepared when the Southern states seceded, and force was the only way to bring them—and their tariff money—back. That was the real cause of the war. A well-documented and compelling read by a master historian, It Wasn’t About Slavery will change the way you think about Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the cause and legacy of America’s momentous Civil War.
September 30, the news of Israel-bound plane pilot attempted to crash the aircraft by stabbing fellow pilot, aiming crash Dubai-Tel Aviv is all over the news outlets. Why there are so much antisemitism everywhere in the world? That reminds me during the America civil war, just weeks before Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, When General Grant Expelled the Jews (Jewish Encounters Series) on December 17 1862 by issuing what remains the most notorious anti-Jewish order by a government official in American history. His attempt to eliminate black marketeers by targeting for expulsion all Jews “as a class” from portions of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi unleashed a firestorm of controversy that made newspaper headlines and terrified and enraged the approximately 150,000 Jews then living in the United States, who feared the importation of European anti-Semitism onto American soil. The incidence caused trouble for Grant during the 1868 election. Never before had Jews become an issue in a presidential contest and never before had they been confronted so publicly with the question of how to balance their “American” and “Jewish” interests. Award-winning historian Jonathan D. Sarna gives us the first complete account of this little-known episode—including Grant’s subsequent apology, his groundbreaking appointment of Jews to prominent positions in his administration, and his unprecedented visit to the land of Israel. Grant’s administration was famous for corruption and many scandals that shuffles officials. Author sheds new light on the Jews of his day, and on the ongoing debate between ethnic loyalty and national loyalty that continues to roil American political and social discourse.
Another book, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America (2020) by Mary Grabar rebuke Zinn’s history as popular, but it is also massively wrong. Her argument open our mind to different perspective of the debates. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: A National Bestselling Book on U.S. History and the Fight for Racial Equality (2015) has sold more than 2.5 million copies. It is pushed by Hollywood celebrities, defended by university professors who know better, and assigned in high school and college classrooms to teach students that American history is nothing more than a litany of oppression, slavery, and exploitation.
- How Columbus was not a genocidal maniac, and was, in fact, a defender of Indians
- Why the American Indians were not feminist-communist sexual revolutionaries ahead of their time
- How the United States was founded to protect liberty, not white males’ ill-gotten wealth
- Why Americans of the “Greatest Generation” were not the equivalent of Nazi war criminals
- How the Viet Cong were not well-meaning community leaders advocating for local self-rule
- Why the Black Panthers were not civil rights leaders
To be a good citizen of United States, we certainly need to cultivate critical thinking, upgrade our qualification, and even more so for the government officials who take big paycheck.