American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860

Key Question Being Explored in This Insight:

How did the diverse voices of 19th-century America shape the nation's highest ideals of equality and justice?

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How did the diverse voices of 19th-century America shape the nation’s highest ideals of equality and justice?

Image courtesy of interviewee. December 5, 2024

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The speaker reflects on a significant but often overlooked period in American history that spans from the founding of the United States to the Civil War. They emphasize the tension between profound injustices, such as the dispossession of Native Americans and the expansion of slavery, and the emergence of visionary figures who advocated for fundamental American ideals like democracy and freedom. This video era was crucial in shaping the nation's identity, going beyond traditional political history to include the cultural and artistic contributions of poets, musicians, and other creators who championed liberty and human rights.

The speaker argues that while political events and figures are notable, they may not define America as thoroughly as the voices from the margins—those who were often ignored but whose ideas ultimately influenced the direction of society. The narrative acknowledges both progress and setbacks in movements for abolition and women's rights, highlighting how cultural expressions later gained significance, such as the impact of the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in the abolitionist movement.

As they discuss themes of inclusion and exclusion, the speaker warns that the contradictions seen in earlier American history continue to resonate in current society. They conclude by urging listeners to recognize the historical roots of contemporary political conflicts and the ongoing struggle to define the nation’s ideals of inclusivity and equality.

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Here are five key points from the video:

1. **Understanding the Antebellum Period:** The author emphasizes a critical period between the founding of the United States and the Civil War, often overlooked, which fundamentally shaped American identity and history. This period is marked by significant contradictions, including the expansion of slavery and the ideals of democracy and freedom.

2. **Role of Visionaries and Cultural Figures:** Throughout this period, various poets, novelists, artists, and musicians significantly contributed to expanding the concepts of liberty and freedom. The author argues that these cultural expressions often had a greater impact on American society than political events or figures.

3. **Voices from the Margins:** The video discusses the importance of listening to voices from marginalized groups, such as abolitionists and women's rights advocates, whose contributions shaped the future of the nation. The author highlights how these individuals worked tirelessly to align American ideals with the reality of injustice and exclusion.

4. **Expansion of Slavery as a Driving Force:** The relentless expansion of slavery is identified as a defining characteristic of this period, shaping political and social dynamics. The conflict over slavery ultimately contributed to the onset of the Civil War, as northern leaders, led by Abraham Lincoln, pushed back against further expansion.

5. **Continuing Legacy of Inclusion and Exclusion:** The author notes that themes of inclusion and exclusion from this period resonate in contemporary American society. Conflicts surrounding race, gender, and immigration reflect deep historical roots, and understanding these tensions can inform current discussions about identity and belonging in the United States.

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Here are some key quotes from the video that capture its central themes and ideas:

1. **Understanding a Crucial Period**:
- "I began the book with a belief that there's this period between the founding of the United States and the Civil War that we don't really understand."

2. **Fundamental Tensions**:
- "There's this fundamental tension that drives much of American history. On one hand, you have the greatest wrongs in American history... On the other hand, we had remarkable visionaries who spoke for to imagine enduring American ideals of democracy and freedom."

3. **Visionaries vs. Standard History**:
- "Ironically, I set out to include more of the standard history topics... But I came to see that they were simply less important... than people like Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau."

4. **Voices from the Margins**:
- "What I was looking for were people who saw how we might align America's best ideals with the realities of history."

5. **Cultural Expressions and Their Impact**:
- "Sometimes it was like time-release vision, people who said things that were not registered that we recognize now... that matter a lot more than what somebody might say in a presidential address."

6. **Historical Progress**:
- "There’s really one fact that lies at the heart of this period, which was the relentless expansion of slavery."

7. **Expanding Definitions of Freedom**:
- "The strength of both the abolitionist and the women's rights advocates is that they spoke in a Native American language of rights and of equality."

8. **Reflection on American Expansionism**:
- "The United States is inherently expansionist for two reasons, both because our economy drives for ever larger markets and because we think we embody universal ideals of freedom."

9. **Summary of Inclusivity vs. Exclusivity**:
- "The heroes of the book are the people who call for inclusion... The people opposed to them were about exclusion."

10. **Enduring Legacy of History**:
- "There are deep reservoirs of history that shape the United States today. Deep reservoirs of slavery and native dispossession are still there... But there are reservoirs of determination and resilience... that finds this could be the country that embraces all kinds of people."

These quotes highlight the author's exploration of the antebellum period, the tension between ideals and realities, the importance of cultural movements, and the lasting impact of historical narratives on contemporary American society.

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I, I began the book with, a belief

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that there's this period between the founding

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of the United States and the Civil War

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that we don't really understand.

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Uh, and as I, we don't even have a good name for it.

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We sometimes call it antebellum, which just means

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before the war, but we always live in an antebellum period.

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We just don't know when the war is coming.

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And, but as I looked into this, I realized

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that there's this fundamental tension that,

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drives much of American history.

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On one hand, you have the greatest

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wrongs in American history.

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In this period. You had the dispossession

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of the native people who had

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occupied this land for millennia.

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You had a cancerous spread

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of slavery into the largest system

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of slavery in the modern world,

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and you had a war against the neighboring republic.

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So those were pretty, damning facts about this period

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that we often just call a period of expansion.

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Well, the United States did expand,

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but it expanded in those ways.

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On the other hand, we had, as you, as you implied,

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remarkable visionaries who spoke for

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enduring American ideals that we, you know, have

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to imagine there are enduring American ideals

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of democracy and freedom.

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And I don't think there's ever been more at stake than there

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was in American history at this period.

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Uh, it was really defining the very shape of the country,

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the very nature of what it was going to be,

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and which had not been defined at the beginning.

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It was just had the Constitution, the Declaration

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of Independence, or just kind of sketches.

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But over these 60 years,

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people really figured out what it was going to be.

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So, there's not really a more

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relevant period of American history ironically than this,

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even though it's off often overlooked.

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And then as I really started exploring it more, I realized

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that poets and novelists and artists

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and musicians also worked to expand, ideas

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of liberty and human freedom, for religion

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and gender and race.

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And so it turned out that there were a lot more visionaries

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than I had realized.

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Uh, when I started the book,

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the book ended up being a lot broader than I thought it was

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gonna be at the beginning.

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Ironically, I, I set out to include more

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of the standard history topics,

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talking about the various presidents and laws and so forth.

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But as I worked through it, I came to see

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that they were simply less important,

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in defining the United States over the long haul than say

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people like Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Row,

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or even Stephen Foster, who wrote, you know,

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the popular songs of the era.

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And I decided that that standard history is easy to find.

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But the history that I was exploring was scattered around

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among specialized scholarship on music and art

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and literary scholarship, or an economic history,

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or the history of science and technology.

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And so, it is broad.

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Uh, in some ways what I decided that,

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most important were voices from the margins of people

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who had been silenced in their own time.

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Uh, people who had been neglected since.

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And so, once I came up with the idea of visions

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as the defining concept, imagine paths

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between the way things are

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and what they might become,

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then I had a clear set of priorities.

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What I was looking for were people who saw

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how we might align America's best ideals

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with the realities of history.

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Now, I've written about politics elsewhere, so I'm not,

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allergic to political history,

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but it just turns out that in this period, it's not

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what ended up mattering very much.

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Now, I'll also say that as I started thinking about visions

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of combining people, imagining what the future might be,

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I ended up including people that,

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and topics that I thought were less inspiring,

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the invention of handguns, for example,

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or scientific racism, or the reliance on fossil fuels

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or partisan division, moral exhaustion.

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And so it turns out that most of the themes

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that drive the rest

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of American history suddenly appeared in

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just these few decades.

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And so, if we're going to take a broad view of history,

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we have to listen to all the different,

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cadences of history.

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You can't just focus on the front page.

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And so a lot of my history is really about the things

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that people did in private, the things that people said

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that didn't get much attention at the

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time that we still read.

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You know, I tell the story of Henry David Thoreau,

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who talked about, I have a library of 800 books.

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Unfortunately, I wrote 750 of them myself,

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because he couldn't sell the books.

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And yet Thoreau was taught in every classroom

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in America today.

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So sometimes it was like time release vision, people

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who said things that were not registered

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as important at the time, but

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that we recognize now we're saying things

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that matter a lot more than

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what somebody might say in a presidential address.

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Turns out that a lot of time these cultural expressions in

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literature or art

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or music didn't matter until they suddenly did.

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I mean, abolitionism is the, the, the clearest example.

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For decades, these people who accounted for about 2%

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of the population

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of the United States in this period, many of them women.

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And so they were without any kind

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of formal political power at all,

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felt they were beating their heads against the wall.

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They, they kept trying for year after year

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or to expand the range of people in the north

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of white people in the North, who would recognize

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that slavery was just wrong.

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You know, it was a violation of Christianity.

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It was a violation of a Declaration of Independence.

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Uh, and so it didn't seem to be taking hold very much,

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but then it takes hold with a novel Uncle Tom's cabin

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that people have heard about, which is written by a woman

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for many other women who suddenly recognized,

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this is really about motherhood.

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This is about family. Slavery is not just about politics,

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But it's about our very identity of who we are.

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And so that's not until the late 1850s, so by this time,

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abolitionists have been working for 20 years trying

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to expand the moral vision of white northerners.

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Suddenly it shifts with, with a novel.

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And then when political events bring on the American Civil

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War, the abolitionists are ready.

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They have a language of freedom and of black dignity

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and of autonomy that they use to sort

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of push Abraham Lincoln toward emancipation.

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They push the United States toward emancipation in the

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context of the war.

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And if you'd not had those cultural developments going on,

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if they're not been a language of, of freedom

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and of obligation to live up to our ideals,

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the United States could not have ended slavery in just five

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years, which nobody would've predicted was possible.

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On the other hand, it's not always that cheerful.

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Uh, at the same time, the abolitionists were, working

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so were, women's rights advocates.

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Uh, and they pointed out that women had virtually no rights

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of their own in America at the time.

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Uh, but they didn't come to any kind of success until 1919

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when finally the vote

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for women was instituted in the United States.

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And in many ways, what they called for female autonomy,

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freedom, self-determination didn't really arise again till

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the 1960s and seventies, more than a century later.

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And of course, they remain unfinished today,

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but the strength of both the abolitionist

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and the women's rights advocates is

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that they spoke in a Native American language

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of rights and of equality.

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And those, languages allowed their advocates

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to seize the moment when it came.

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And the, that's the way the Civil

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Rights movement was as well.

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It seemed that for generations, it made no progress.

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And then suddenly people recognize this is a violation of

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what America stands for, partly

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because of our fight against the Nazis

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and other forces of, of injustice around the world.

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People said, we have injustice here at home.

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We need to fix that. There's really one fact,

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that lies at the heart of this period,

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which was the relentless expansion of slavery.

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Uh, it was both a defining structure on the ground

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that embraced in perpetual bondage, 4 million people,

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and which was many more than it had at the be at the

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founding of the United States just a few decades before.

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And it expanded over an area of the size

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of continental Europe in just a few decades.

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And then it wanted to expand the United States,

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influence and connections.

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It already been draw drawing from industrialization

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of England, which is creating the cotton textile industry.

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That's the market for a huge amount of the cotton

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that enslaved populations producing.

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But the United States slaveholders are pushing to California

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because they dream of the market in China and of India,

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and in Central America.

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So there's an inherently expansionist impulse

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behind slavery, and that's

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what drives the United States into the Civil War.

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What happens finally, is

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that white northerners under the leadership

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of Abraham Lincoln said enough that that's

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as far as you can expand.

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You've already occupied enormous part

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of the American North American continent.

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You've already dispossessed the native people

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and pushed them in across the Mississippi River,

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but you're not gonna allow you to expand any further.

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And that's when the Civil War came.

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You know, for its echo in our own time,

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the United States, is inherently expansionist

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for two reasons, both

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because our economy drives for ever larger markets and

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because we think we embody universal ideals of freedom.

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And those two purposes are often confused and conflated.

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Sometimes they work together.

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Sometimes the United States has been a great force

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for expanding freedom.

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Now, you think about the Marshall Plan

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after World War ii,

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in which American capitalism helped rejuvenate large parts

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of Europe with the ideals of freedom.

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But as we know many other parts of the world,

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those ideas requests for markets

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and requests for freedom are tangled and in conflict

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and often, cause problems not only

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for the United States, but for other people.

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As in so many other facets of American life.

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Uh, the pattern was set back in this period.

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And so today's politics replay the fundamental tension that

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emerged in the new nation, ex inclusion and exclusion.

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So the heroes of the book, are the people who call

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for inclusion either by race or gender

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or religious faith, or, you know, ethnicity

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or, peculiarity.

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You know, there's not, they don't really have a language

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for, sexual orientation,

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but they're trying to make space for people

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who don't fit into easy categories of male and female.

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Uh, and they are often saying that

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everyone is equal, not only in the eyes of the government

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and the Declaration of Independence.

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All men are created equal,

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but also in the dominant religion

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of the United States in this period

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of Protestant Christianity.

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You know, those who, attack slavery say,

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would you want to be enslaved?

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Uh, would you want your family to be enslaved?

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Well, if not, then you're violating the golden rule

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of treat everyone the way you would want to be treated.

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So they spoke of inclusion in really often radical ways.

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They also spoke of inclusion of, of, of an environmentalist,

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perspective that they expanded so much

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to in their understanding to say

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that we are one with nature.

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Okay? So that's the inclusion model.

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The people opposed to them were about exclusion.

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How it is that we, we take out the immigrants,

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especially who were Irish

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and German at this time, especially, how do we go

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to war against Mexico to keep them from,

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infiltrating the United States with, what their,

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their Catholic, and Spanish influence?

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Um, and how do we, just make sure

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that the United States is, insulated from the world

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and those voices of exclusion,

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we find echoes today in the same way

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that we find the voices of inclusion.

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And, I think that it's important that we understand that

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how deep these conflicts run.

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Uh, I think Americans have very

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short memories, by and large.

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Uh, we tend to think about what happened a week

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or two ago was really what matters.

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It turns out what mattered a couple hundred years ago is a

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lot more what matters now, this is good news and bad news.

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I mean, there are deep reservoirs of history

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that shape the United States today.

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Deep reservoirs of slavery

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and native dispossession are still there,

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still causing enormous pain.

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But there are reservoirs of determination and resilience

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and self-awareness that say that this could be the country

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that embraces all kinds of people, that finds,

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common humanity.

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So I think in many ways, the dilemmas

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and the conflicts of today's politics are the same dilemmas

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and conflicts they defined back in the early 19th century.

Defining Tensions: The Antebellum Period in American History

00:00:00 - I, I began the book with, a belief that there's this period between the founding of the United States and the Civil War that we don't really understand. and as I, we don't even have a good name for it. We sometimes call it antebellum, which just means before the war, but we always live in an antebellum period. We just don't know when the war is coming. And, but as I looked into this, I realized that there's this fundamental tension that, drives much of American history. On one hand, you have the greatest wrongs in American history. In this period. You had the dispossession

00:00:35 - occupied this land for millennia. You had a cancerous spread of slavery into the largest system of slavery in the modern world, and you had a war against the neighboring republic. So those were pretty, damning facts about this period that we often just call a period of expansion. Well, the United States did expand, but it expanded in those ways. On the other hand, we had, as you, as you implied, remarkable visionaries who spoke for

00:01:06 - to imagine there are enduring American ideals of democracy and freedom. And I don't think there's ever been more at stake than there was in American history at this period. it was really defining the very shape of the country, the very nature of what it was going to be, and which had not been defined at the beginning. It was just had the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or just kind of sketches. But over these 60 years, people really figured out what it was going to be. So, there's not really a more

Rediscovering Overlooked Voices in American History

00:01:42 - even though it's off often overlooked. And then as I really started exploring it more, I realized that poets and novelists and artists and musicians also worked to expand, ideas of liberty and human freedom, for religion and gender and race. And so it turned out that there were a lot more visionaries than I had realized. when I started the book, the book ended up being a lot broader than I thought it was

00:02:11 - Ironically, I, I set out to include more of the standard history topics, talking about the various presidents and laws and so forth. But as I worked through it, I came to see that they were simply less important, in defining the United States over the long haul than say people like Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Row, or even Stephen Foster, who wrote, you know, the popular songs of the era. And I decided that that standard history is easy to find. But the history that I was exploring was scattered around

00:02:45 - and literary scholarship, or an economic history, or the history of science and technology. And so, it is broad. in some ways what I decided that, most important were voices from the margins of people who had been silenced in their own time. people who had been neglected since. And so, once I came up with the idea of visions as the defining concept, imagine paths between the way things are

Visions of America: Aligning Ideals with Historical Realities

00:03:16 - then I had a clear set of priorities. What I was looking for were people who saw how we might align America's best ideals with the realities of history. Now, I've written about politics elsewhere, so I'm not, allergic to political history, but it just turns out that in this period, it's not what ended up mattering very much. Now, I'll also say that as I started thinking about visions of combining people, imagining what the future might be, I ended up including people that,

00:03:50 - the invention of handguns, for example, or scientific racism, or the reliance on fossil fuels or partisan division, moral exhaustion. And so it turns out that most of the themes that drive the rest of American history suddenly appeared in just these few decades. And so, if we're going to take a broad view of history, we have to listen to all the different, cadences of history.

00:04:19 - And so a lot of my history is really about the things that people did in private, the things that people said that didn't get much attention at the time that we still read. You know, I tell the story of Henry David Thoreau, who talked about, I have a library of 800 books. Unfortunately, I wrote 750 of them myself, because he couldn't sell the books. And yet Thoreau was taught in every classroom in America today. So sometimes it was like time release vision, people who said things that were not registered

Echoes of Abolition: The Power of Cultural Expression

00:04:50 - that we recognize now we're saying things that matter a lot more than what somebody might say in a presidential address. Turns out that a lot of time these cultural expressions in literature or art or music didn't matter until they suddenly did. I mean, abolitionism is the, the, the clearest example. For decades, these people who accounted for about 2% of the population of the United States in this period, many of them women. And so they were without any kind

00:05:21 - felt they were beating their heads against the wall. They, they kept trying for year after year or to expand the range of people in the north of white people in the North, who would recognize that slavery was just wrong. You know, it was a violation of Christianity. It was a violation of a Declaration of Independence. and so it didn't seem to be taking hold very much, but then it takes hold with a novel Uncle Tom's cabin that people have heard about, which is written by a woman

00:05:52 - this is really about motherhood. This is about family. Slavery is not just about politics, But it's about our very identity of who we are. And so that's not until the late 1850s, so by this time, abolitionists have been working for 20 years trying to expand the moral vision of white northerners. Suddenly it shifts with, with a novel. And then when political events bring on the American Civil War, the abolitionists are ready. They have a language of freedom and of black dignity

Pathways to Emancipation: Voices for Equality

00:06:26 - of push Abraham Lincoln toward emancipation. They push the United States toward emancipation in the context of the war. And if you'd not had those cultural developments going on, if they're not been a language of, of freedom and of obligation to live up to our ideals, the United States could not have ended slavery in just five years, which nobody would've predicted was possible. On the other hand, it's not always that cheerful.

00:06:56 - so were, women's rights advocates. and they pointed out that women had virtually no rights of their own in America at the time. but they didn't come to any kind of success until 1919 when finally the vote for women was instituted in the United States. And in many ways, what they called for female autonomy, freedom, self-determination didn't really arise again till the 1960s and seventies, more than a century later.

00:07:26 - but the strength of both the abolitionist and the women's rights advocates is that they spoke in a Native American language of rights and of equality. And those, languages allowed their advocates to seize the moment when it came. And the, that's the way the Civil Rights movement was as well. It seemed that for generations, it made no progress. And then suddenly people recognize this is a violation of what America stands for, partly

Slavery's Expansion and the Road to Civil War

00:07:57 - and other forces of, of injustice around the world. People said, we have injustice here at home. We need to fix that. There's really one fact, that lies at the heart of this period, which was the relentless expansion of slavery. it was both a defining structure on the ground that embraced in perpetual bondage, 4 million people, and which was many more than it had at the be at the founding of the United States just a few decades before. And it expanded over an area of the size

00:08:31 - And then it wanted to expand the United States, influence and connections. It already been draw drawing from industrialization of England, which is creating the cotton textile industry. That's the market for a huge amount of the cotton that enslaved populations producing. But the United States slaveholders are pushing to California because they dream of the market in China and of India, and in Central America.

00:09:02 - behind slavery, and that's what drives the United States into the Civil War. What happens finally, is that white northerners under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln said enough that that's as far as you can expand. You've already occupied enormous part of the American North American continent. You've already dispossessed the native people and pushed them in across the Mississippi River, but you're not gonna allow you to expand any further.

Expanding Freedom: The Tension of Market and Idealism in U.S. History

00:09:31 - You know, for its echo in our own time, the United States, is inherently expansionist for two reasons, both because our economy drives for ever larger markets and because we think we embody universal ideals of freedom. And those two purposes are often confused and conflated. Sometimes they work together. Sometimes the United States has been a great force for expanding freedom. Now, you think about the Marshall Plan

00:10:01 - in which American capitalism helped rejuvenate large parts of Europe with the ideals of freedom. But as we know many other parts of the world, those ideas requests for markets and requests for freedom are tangled and in conflict and often, cause problems not only for the United States, but for other people. As in so many other facets of American life. the pattern was set back in this period. And so today's politics replay the fundamental tension that

00:10:38 - So the heroes of the book, are the people who call for inclusion either by race or gender or religious faith, or, you know, ethnicity or, peculiarity. You know, there's not, they don't really have a language for, sexual orientation, but they're trying to make space for people who don't fit into easy categories of male and female. and they are often saying that

Radical Inclusion vs. Exclusion in American Ideals

00:11:10 - and the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal, but also in the dominant religion of the United States in this period of Protestant Christianity. You know, those who, attack slavery say, would you want to be enslaved? would you want your family to be enslaved? Well, if not, then you're violating the golden rule of treat everyone the way you would want to be treated. So they spoke of inclusion in really often radical ways.

00:11:40 - perspective that they expanded so much to in their understanding to say that we are one with nature. Okay? So that's the inclusion model. The people opposed to them were about exclusion. How it is that we, we take out the immigrants, especially who were Irish and German at this time, especially, how do we go to war against Mexico to keep them from, infiltrating the United States with, what their, their Catholic, and Spanish influence?

00:12:13 - that the United States is, insulated from the world and those voices of exclusion, we find echoes today in the same way that we find the voices of inclusion. And, I think that it's important that we understand that how deep these conflicts run. I think Americans have very short memories, by and large. we tend to think about what happened a week or two ago was really what matters.

Echoes of History: Resilience and Conflict in American Identity

00:12:43 - lot more what matters now, this is good news and bad news. I mean, there are deep reservoirs of history that shape the United States today. Deep reservoirs of slavery and native dispossession are still there, still causing enormous pain. But there are reservoirs of determination and resilience and self-awareness that say that this could be the country that embraces all kinds of people, that finds,

00:13:19 - So I think in many ways, the dilemmas and the conflicts of today's politics are the same dilemmas and conflicts they defined back in the early 19th century.

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