UNITED STATES HISTORY, VOLUME 1: Taking Sides--Clashing Views in United States History, Volume 1, Thirteenth Edition
Unit 1 Colonial Society
Issue 1. Is History True? YES: Oscar Handlin, from Truth in History (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979) NO: William H. McNeill, from “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” The American Historical Review (February 1986)
Oscar Handlin insists that historical truth is absolute and knowable by historians who adopt the scientific method of research to discover factual evidence that provides both a chronology and context for their findings. William McNeill argues that historical truth is general and evolutionary and is discerned by different groups at different times and in different places in a subjective manner that has little to do with a scientifically absolute methodology.
Issue 2. Was Disease the Key Factor in the Depopulation of Native Americans in the Americas? YES: Colin G. Calloway, from New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) NO: David S. Jones, from “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William & Mary Quarterly (October 2003)
Colin Calloway says that while Native Americans confronted numerous diseases in the Americas, traditional Indian healing practices failed to offer much protection from the diseases introduced by Europeans beginning in the late-fifteenth century and which decimated the indigenous peoples. David Jones recognizes the disastrous impact of European diseases on Native Americans, but he insists that Indian depopulation was also a consequence of the forces of poverty, malnutrition, environmental stress, dislocation, and social disparity.
Issue 3. Was the Settlement of Jamestown a Fiasco? YES: Edmund S. Morgan, from American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (W.W. Norton, 1975) NO: Karen Ordahl Kupperman, from The Jamestown Project (Harvard University Press, 2007)
Professor Edmund S. Morgan argues that Virginia’s first decade as a colony was a complete “fiasco” because the settlers were too lazy to engage in the subsistence farming necessary for their survival and failed to abandon their own and the Virginia Company’s expectations of establishing extractive industries such as mining, timber, and fishing. Professor Karen Ordahl Kupperman argues that Jamestown was America’s first successful colony because in its first decade of trial and error “the ingredients for success—widespread ownership of land, control of taxation for public obligations through a representative assembly, the institution of a normal society through the inclusion of women, and development of a product that could be marketed profitably to sustain the economy—were beginning to be put in place by 1618 and were in full operation by 1620, when the next successful colony, Plymouth, was planted.”
Issue 4. Was the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria Caused by a Fear of Women? YES: Carol F. Karlsen, from The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (W. W. Norton, 1987) NO: Mary Beth Norton, from In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)
Carol Karlsen contends that the belief that woman was evil existed implicitly at the core of Puritan culture and explains why alleged witches, as threats to the desired order of society, were generally seen as women. Mary Beth Norton associates the events in Salem to borderland disputes with Native Americans and the French in northern New England, which led residents of Salem and Essex County to conflate attacks by Indians with assaults by witches to explain the problems confronting Massachusetts Bay Colony in the late seventeenth century.
Unit 2 Revolution and The New Nation
Issue 5. Did the American Revolution Produce a Christian Nation? YES: Nathan O. Hatch, from “The Democratization of Christianity and the Character of American Politics,” in Mark A. Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics (Oxford University Press, 1990) NO: Jon Butler, from “Why Revolutionary America Wasn’t a ‘Christian Nation’,” in James H. Hutson, ed., Religion and the New Republic: Faith in the Founding of America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000)
Nathan Hatch argues that by eroding traditional appeals to authority and expanding the number of people who believed they were competent to think for themselves about freedom, equality, and representation, the American Revolution led to an expansion of evangelical Christianity that reinforced the democratic impulses of the new society. Jon Butler insists that men and women seldom referred to America as a “Christian nation” between 1760 and 1790 and that even though Christianity was important, most Americans opposed a Christian national identity enforced by law or governmental action.
Issue 6. Were the Founding Fathers Democratic Reformers? YES: John P. Roche, from “The Founding Fathers: A Reform Caucus in Action,” American Political Science Review (December 1961) NO: Howard Zinn, from A People’s History of the United States (Harper Collins, 1999)
Political scientist John P. Roche asserts that the Founding Fathers were not only revolutionaries but also superb democratic politicians who created a constitution that supported the needs of the nation and at the same time was acceptable to the people. According to radical historian Howard Zinn, the Founding Fathers were an elite group of northern money interests and southern slaveholders who used Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts as a pretext to create a strong central government, which protected the property rights of the rich to the exclusion of slaves, Indians, and non-property-holding whites.
Issue 7. Was Alexander Hamilton an Economic Genius? YES: John Steele Gordon, from An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (Harper Collins, 2004) NO: Carey Roberts, from “Alexander Hamilton and the 1790s Economy: A Reappraisal,” in Douglas Ambrose and Robert W. T. Martin, eds., The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America’s Most Elusive Founding Father (New York University Press, 2006)
Historian John Steele Gordon claims that Hamilton’s policies for funding and assuming the debts of the confederation and state governments and for establishing a privately controlled Bank of the United States laid the foundation for the rich and powerful national economy we enjoy today. Professor Carey Roberts argues that in the 1790s Hamilton’s financial policies undermined popular faith in the Federalist Party, diminished confidence in the federal government.
Issue 8. Was James Madison an Effective Wartime President? YES: Drew R. McCoy, from The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 1989) NO: Donald R. Hickey, from The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (University of Illinois Press, 1989)
Drew McCoy argues that James Madison was a man of integrity and virtue who exercised patience and restraint as commander-in-chief and who displayed great bravery in confronting both his domestic detractors and the nation’s military foes during the War of 1812. Donald Hickey contends that Madison failed to provide the bold and vigorous leadership that was essential to a successful prosecution of the War of 1812 by tolerating incompetence among his generals and cabinet officers and by failing to secure vital legislation from Congress.
Issue 9. Did the Election of 1828 Represent a Democratic Revolt of the People? YES: Sean Wilentz, from The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (Norton, 2005) NO: Richard P. McCormick, from “New Perspectives on Jacksonian Politics,” The American Historical Review (January 1960)
Bancroft Prize winner Sean Wilentz argues that in spite of its vulgarities and slanders, the 1828 election campaign “produced a valediction on the faction-ridden jumble of the Era of Bad Feelings and announced the rough arrival of two district national coalitions.” Professor Richard P. McCormick believes that voting statistics demonstrate that a genuine political revolution did not take place until the presidential election of 1840, when fairly well-balanced political parties had been organized in virtually every state.
Issue 10. Did the Industrial Revolution Provide More Economic Opportunities for Women in the 1830s? YES: Thomas Dublin, from “Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills: ‘The Oppressing Hand of Avarice Would Enslave Us’,” Labor History (Winter 1975) NO: Gerda Lerner, from “The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson,” American Studies (Spring 1969)
Professor Thomas Dublin argues that the women who worked in the Lowell mills in the 1830s were a close-knit community who developed bonds of mutual dependence in both their boarding houses and the factory. According to Professor Gerda Lerner, while Jacksonian democracy provided political and economic opportunities for men, both the “lady” and the “mill girl” were equally disenfranchised and isolated from vital centers of economic opportunity.
Unit 3 Antebellum America
Issue 11. Did Slavery Destroy the Black Family? YES: Wilma A. Dunaway, from The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 2003) NO: Eugene D. Genovese, from Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made(Random House, 1974)
Professor Wilma A. Dunaway believes that modern historians have exaggerated the amount of control slaves exercised over their lives and underplayed the cruelty of the slave experience—family separations, nutritional deficiencies, sexual exploitation and physical abuse that occurred on the majority of small plantations. Professor Genovese argues that slaves developed their own system of family and cultural values within the Southern paternalistic and pre-capitalistic slave society.
Issue 12. Was the Mexican War an Exercise in American Imperialism? YES: Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, from “Manifest Destiny and the Mexican War,” in Howard H. Quint, Milton Cantor, and Dean Albertson, eds., Main Problems in American History, 5th ed. (Dorsey Press, 1988) NO: Norman A. Graebner, from “The Mexican War: A Study in Causation,” Pacific Historical Review(August 1980)
Professor of history Ramón Eduardo Ruiz argues that for the purpose of conquering Mexico’s northern territories, the United States waged an aggressive war against Mexico from which Mexico never recovered. Professor of diplomatic history Norman A. Graebner argues that President James Polk pursued an aggressive policy that he believed would force Mexico to sell New Mexico and California to the United States and to recognize the annexation of Texas without starting a war.
Issue 13. Was John Brown an Irrational Terrorist? YES: C. Vann Woodward, from The Burden of Southern History, 3d ed. (Louisiana State University Press, 1993) NO: David S. Reynolds, from John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)
C. Vann Woodward depicts John Brown as a fanatic who committed wholesale murder in Kansas in 1856 and whose ill-fated assault on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 was an irrational act of treason against the United States. David S. Reynolds portrays John Brown as a deeply religious, yet deeply flawed, humanitarian reformer who employed violent means in Kansas and in the raid at Harpers Ferry against proslavery outrages at a time when the United States had failed to live up to its most cherished ideal of human equality.
Unit 4 Conflict and Resolution
Issue 14. Was Slavery the Key Issue in the Sectional Conflict Leading to the Civil War? YES: Charles B. Dew, from Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (University of Virginia Press, 2001) NO: Joel H. Silbey, from The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1985)
Charles B. Dew uses the speeches and public letters of 41 white southerners who, as commissioners in 1860 and 1861, attempted to secure support for secession by appealing to their audiences’ commitment to the preservation of slavery and the doctrine of white supremacy. Joel H. Silbey argues that historians have overemphasized the sectional conflict over slavery and have neglected to analyze local ethnocultural issues among the events leading to the Civil War.
Issue 15. Did Abraham Lincoln Free the Slaves? YES: Stephen B. Oates, from Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths (Harper & Row, 1984) NO: Vincent Harding, from There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981)
Stephen B. Oates argues that Abraham Lincoln, in his capacity as president of the United States, was the individual most responsible for sanctioning an unprecedented use of military power against state institutions in the form of the Emancipation Proclamation, which further encouraged slaves to abandon the farms and plantations of their rebel masters. Vincent Harding credits slaves themselves for engaging in a dramatic movement of self-liberation while Abraham Lincoln initially refused to declare the destruction of slavery as a war aim and then issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which failed to free any slaves in areas over which he had any authority.
Issue 16. Did Reconstruction Fail as a Result of Racism? YES: George M. Fredrickson, from The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Harper & Row, 1971) NO: Heather Cox Richardson, from The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Harvard University Press, 2001)
George M. Fredrickson concludes that racism, in the form of the doctrine of white supremacy, colored the thinking not only of southern whites but of most white northerners as well and produced only half-hearted efforts by the Radical Republicans in the postwar period to sustain a commitment to black equality. Heather Cox Richardson argues that the failure of Radical Reconstruction was primarily a consequence of a national commitment to a free-labor ideology that opposed an expanding central government that legislated rights to African Americans that other citizens had acquired through hard work.
