All Posts Tagged With: "Civil War"
Civil War and the American Political Economy: Response to a Critic
When there are important material interests at work, they necessarily enter into an historical explanation.
16May2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 7 comments | ContinuedThe Freeman Plugged @ Reason Site
Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog gives a brief plug to our special Freeman issue on the Civil War. See it here.
14Apr2011 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Economic Costs of the Civil War
Even after 150 years, the Civil War evokes memories of great men and great battles. Certainly that war was a milestone in U.S. history, and on the plus side it reunited the nation and freed the slaves. Few historians, however, describe the costs of the war. Not just the 620,000 individuals who died, or the [...]
23Mar2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 7 comments | ContinuedGaining a Nation, Losing the Republic: Reconstruction, 1863–1877
A dead president, carpetbaggers, scalawags, burning crosses, white hoods, an occupied South, Boss Tweed, Thomas Nast cartoons, the New York Democratic machine, and an imprisoned Jefferson Davis—all provide vivid images of the dozen years following the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s forces at Appomattox in April 1865. As every historian knows, often to his chagrin, [...]
23Mar2011 | Bradley J. Birzer | 7 comments | ContinuedThe Question of Slavery
Slavery can neither fully explain nor ultimately justify the American Civil War. This realization is unfortunately obscured because most scholars and buffs alike have usually sought a single cause for those four years of soul-wrenching conflict. The early nationalist interpretation, put forward by historian James Ford Rhodes, blamed one factor and one factor only: slavery. [...]
23Mar2011 | Jeffrey Rogers Hummel | 21 comments | ContinuedThe Civil War and the Statist Mentality
On April 12, 1861, the American Civil War began with the Confederate bombardment of the U.S. military’s Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Nearly four bloody years later to the day, the war ended with Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. This issue of The Freeman is largely devoted to [...]
23Mar2011 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedAmerica’s Turning Point
The Civil War represents the simultaneous culmination and repudiation of the American Revolution. Four successive ideological surges had previously defined American politics: the radical republican movement that had spearheaded the revolution itself; the subsequent Jeffersonian movement that had arisen in reaction to the Federalist State; the Jacksonian movement that followed the War of 1812; and [...]
23Mar2011 | Jeffrey Rogers Hummel | 22 comments | ContinuedWhy American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism
In one of his most iconoclastic essays, “The Anatomy of the State,” Murray Rothbard observed that it is crucial to ruling groups to manipulate the thinking of the ruled. They must get the populace to accept that the rulers are truly good people working tirelessly to advance the common good. Toward that end, the rulers [...]
22Dec2010 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Census: Vehicle for Social Engineering
In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott commented on the role played by census data in the rise of the modern State: “If we imagine a state that has no reliable means of enumerating and locating its population, gauging its wealth, and mapping its land, resources, and settlements, we are imagining a state [...]
19Apr2010 | Wendy McElroy | 1 comment | ContinuedScott Horton, Lysander Spooner, and Me
Scott Horton interviewed me on Antiwar Radio the other day. The subject: Lysander Spooner and his relevance to our times. Here it is.
21Jan2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedRutherford B. Hayes and the Financing of American Prosperity
Rutherford B. Hayes, America’s nineteenth president (1877–1881), is generally dismissed as a minor, even below-average president. Matthew Josephson, the journalist-chronicler of the late 1800s, insisted that Hayes had “no capacity for . . . large-minded leadership.” Other historians have written him off as just another cipher among a string of forgettable chief executives of the [...]
23Oct2009 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 4 comments | ContinuedGreatest Emancipations: How the West Abolished Slavery
From time immemorial until the eighteenth century, slavery was an accepted fact of life in most of the world. It was hardly ever questioned, and there were no mass movements calling for its abolition. That finally changed as a result of the success of capitalism. Once people no longer had to labor unceasingly just to [...]
23Sep2009 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedLincoln
My friend Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, a Civil War scholar as well as an economist and economic historian, has written a spot-on op-ed about Abraham Lincoln in the Chicago Tribune. I highly recommend it.
12Feb2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedTariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War
In concise and clear prose Professors Mark Thornton and Robert Ekelund use basic economics to explain the causes, outcome, and consequences of the Civil War. Employing Public Choice theory—a subdiscipline of economics that focuses on how public officials and government bureaucracies make decisions—Thornton and Ekelund attempt to revise many standard accounts of the war. Although [...]
18Mar2006 | John Majewski | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Liberty Tradition Among Black Americans
Slavery and free institutions can never live peaceably together,” Frederick Douglass observed. “Liberty . . . must either overthrow slavery, or be itself overthrown by slavery.” Douglass, black America’s most renowned spokesman, made this argument during the Civil War. But what about after the war? Was it proper for the government afterward to intervene and [...]
1May2005 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – April 2003
Guns and Violence: The English Experience by Joyce Lee Malcolm Harvard University Press • 2002 • 352 pages • $28.00 Reviewed by Clayton Cramer Joyce Lee Malcolm’s new book is not the masterpiece that her previous book, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right, was. Still, there is much to commend, [...]
1Apr2003 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedWire and Rails: Comparing the Web and Railroads
Larry Schweikart teaches history at the University of Dayton. Not long ago the television show Silicon Spin glumly reviewed the latest news of the cellular phone industry. The guests concluded that even if tech stocks, especially telecoms, had hit bottom, it would be 2003 before the experts thought the majority of them could again struggle [...]
1Dec2001 | Larry Schweikart | 0 comments | Continued-
The Latest
Contraception: Insuring the Uninsurable
Update below. Controversy rages over the Obama administration’s mandate that all employers – including... Read More
The Snow Plowers’ Petition
The following might have happened in a small college town in upstate New York… In a cold and snowy... Read More
Super Bowl versus Education?
In the spirit of Super Bowl weekend I’d like to deconstruct a Facebook status update that a friend... Read More
Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market
When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are... Read More
Creating Jobs versus Creating Value
Picking on New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is one of the largest participation sports on the Internet.... Read More
