The GGG weekly digest -- list of topics is down below.
Posted on 07/26/2026 4:51:31 AM PDT by MtnClimber
After 13 days of bombing Iran, on Friday we took a break. If we were dealing with rational opponents, the war in Iran would be over now, but we are dealing with fanatics and a situation where the monsters are fighting each other, and no one seems sufficiently in charge to enter into a meaningful surrender.
In the meantime, we can turn to domestic matters, and to my mind, the situation at the Smithsonian Museum warrants our attention. It seems that we are paying super-woke people to denigrate our history and culture, and because of the way in which the governance of this important institution is set up, there’s little power for the White House to quickly change it.
This month, the White House issued a 165-page report on the Smithsonian which sets out in detail its failure to fulfill its mission of providing historical education and scholarship.
The National Museum of American History, whose director is Anthea Hartig, draws considerable attention for turning the museum into a tool of “extreme political activism.” She has
explicitly stated that she sees history as a “prime tool of social justice” and one of her roles as connecting “research and scholarship to activism and advocacy.” Hartig has also stated that “we work to reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of U.S. history for visitors.” She claims to have had a personal head start “propped up as I was and I am by the cushions of whiteness and the pillows of the bourgeoisie.”
Hartig believes the museum profession has “to figure out” how “we’re going to” “problematize” the “250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026,” that “loving America is very complicated,” and that objects in the Museum’s collection should be used to move attention away from an “Anglo-centric” focus on the
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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It depends on when you're talking about. Early on, the Brits, Spanish and Portuguese were undoubtedly much bigger slave traders. Later on however, New England became the top slave trading area. The overall volumes probably do favor the Europeans simply because they got a much earlier start and in larger volume. The 13 colonies only had 2.5 million people in 1776.
https://www.amazon.com/Complicity-Promoted-Prolonged-Profited-Slavery/dp/0345467833
“New England became the top slave trading area.”
Any data to substantiate that conclusion? I would certainly like to see it.
This is the worst of scenarios. Oil rich Muslims fighting each other, destroying each other’s oil infrastructure. I can’t think of any other scenario worse other than a nuke going off.
Slavery Persisted in New England Until the 19th Century The colony of Rhode Island once had the highest percentage of enslaved people in New England, and was a dominant player in the global slave trade.
“Most of the general public in the U.S. has no understanding of the very long history of slavery in the northern colonies and the northern states,” says Christy Clark-Pujara, a professor of history and Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island.
“They don’t have a sense that slavery was integral to the building of New York City and places like Newport and Providence, that many of these cities had upwards of 20 percent of their populations enslaved…and that slavery lasted in the North well into the 1840s,” she says. “Some states, like New Jersey, never abolished slavery, so slavery legally ends there in 1865.”
By 1750, the Colony of Rhode had the highest percentage of enslaved people in New England, and was a dominant player in the global slave trade. “The North was in many ways the engine behind the expansion of slavery in the South,” Clark-Pujara says. New England’s thriving textile mills used cotton picked by enslaved people in the South. Rhode Island fueled its rum trade by trafficking humans in Africa and the Carribean. Enslaved people performed numerous types of free labor throughout New England, and Clark-Pujara says that this northern slavery was just as brutal as it was in the South.
Some northern states passed bans on slavery in the late 18th century, but many white people continued to keep Black people illegally enslaved in those states. In states like Rhode Island, which banned slavery in 1843, slavery continued until just before the Civil War. Others like New Hampshire and New Jersey never banned slavery. There, slavery only became illegal with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865.
https://www.history.com/articles/slavery-new-england-rhode-island
more
New England ports were also the originating points of Transatlantic voyages. From 1645 until 1860, at least 1,170 ships departed from New England en route to Africa, where at least 148,659 kidnapped African women, men, and children were packed into their cargo holds. The business of buying and selling Black people was not limited to large firms, but was pervasive among New England business owners, who purchased shares in Transatlantic voyages.
In Rhode Island alone, at least 700 individuals owned or captained ships carrying enslaved people. Indeed, about half of all voyages originating in North America departed from ports in Rhode Island, making it the most prominent organizing port in North America and one of the top 15 in the world. More than half of these Rhode Island ships sold enslaved people in the Caribbean; the rest sold enslaved people in South Carolina and other North American markets.
In what became known as the “Triangle Trade,” New England traders imported sugar and molasses produced by enslaved people on Caribbean plantations and manufactured rum that they shipped to West Africa, where it was exchanged for enslaved Africans, who were sold to Caribbean plantations for more sugar. Rhode Island and Massachusetts built the largest distilleries in the colonies. Rum production became New England’s biggest manufacturing business until the American Revolution.
Connecticut dominated New England’s insurance industry, which insured human property for enslavers around the country until the 1850s. Insurance companies based in Newport, Hartford, and New London issued policies to enslavers and shipowners that promised to pay enslavers hundreds of dollars for each enslaved person who died onboard or while performing grueling labor.
Federal laws passed in 1794 and 1800 barred citizens from “owning, outfitting, investing in, or serving aboard ships” that carried enslaved people to ports outside the U.S.—and white New Englanders violated them both. Thus, trafficking of enslaved people in New England continued even after Congress formally abolished the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1807.
https://eji.org/report/transatlantic-slave-trade/new-england/#laws-limiting-freedom
more
While New England produce was expensive, it was still cheaper and more reliable than imports from Europe. By the late seventeenth Century, the West Indian trade had become the cornerstone of New England commerce involving half the ships entering and leaving Boston. This trade, aided by co-religionist and family contacts, led Boston and the nearby town of Salem, along with Newport on Rhode Island, to embark on an ambitious programme of ship-building; a 300-ton ship was built in Salem as early as 1641. John Winthrop himself financed the construction of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first ship, the Blessing of the Bay, launched in 1631. By 1700, Boston and nearby towns were turning out 70 ships a year – the most in number and tonnage in the Western Hemisphere.
American-built ships not only dominated the West Indian and Coastwise trades, where they accounted respectively for 96 percent and 93 percent of the ships, but were even important in the shipping coming directly from Africa. On this route, they accounted for 44 percent of the ships, with English-built ships making up the rest.
This reliance on the slave trade and the West Indian slave economy persisted up to the 13 colonies’ struggle for independence in the latter part of the 18th century. The effects of this slave trade were manifold. On the eve of the American Revolution it formed the very basis of the economic life of New England; about it revolved, and on it depended, most of her industries. The vast sugar, molasses and rum trade, shipbuilding, the distilleries, a great many of the fisheries, the employment of artisans and seamen, even agriculture – all were dependent on the slave traffic.
https://mayflowermavericks.wordpress.com/2019/07/03/new-england-colonies-and-the-british-caribbean-slave-colonies/
Regarding the point here about slavery. I am not sure how exactly you it applies to this story by Clarice Feldman. I think there is zero chance that she supports slavery or thinks the Smithsonian should. Slavery was an unequivocal evil feature about America and everywhere else and it is right and good that it was eradicated. That is the lesson that should be learned about slavery. Not that everybody did it.
There is no doubt that New England was heavily involved in the Slave trade of the United States. But to say that it was the epicenter of the New World slave trade is incorrect.
related, from the FRchives:
The GGG weekly digest -- list of topics is down below.
Heck, send her to Western Europe so she can witness first-hand where her way of thinking takes half of a continent. She might get some hands-on experience with all the cultural enrichment that “refugees” from formerly-colonized lands bring to Europeans.
It’s always best when their own words are turned against them in innocuous ways but square completely with what they said and the way they meant it.
The lesson is that slavery was universal. It is not something invented in America. Nor was it worse in America than it was in other places. Nor was it central to America any more than it was any other place it was practiced. In short, there is nothing unique about Slavery in America.
The claim that it was somehow unique in America or THE central principle of the founding of America is just a lie put forth by Leftists to try to demoralize us.
That depends on When. It certainly was for North America and for the Caribbean for a long time. Later on, it became a key supplier of slaves brought to South America as well.
About half of the GOP, and every neocon, join the Left in demonizing the South. VDH, Mark Levin, Nikki Haley, there’s no shortage of South haters.
Of course once you discover that ‘48er radical immigrants, as well as their pal Karl Marx, played a major role in the early GOP this is just the party being true to its forgotten beginning. Not that it explains the current era of haters who appear to be motivated by opportunism and virtue signalling.
A commonality is that most of them have no American roots going back far at all so they happily urinate on history that is not theirs.
The US stopped participating in the transatlantic slave trade in 1808. There were illegal shippers afterwards, often operating out of New York City or Southern ports, but they were a small part of the business. New England certainly participated in the slave trade before that, but its ports were no match for British, French, and Portuguese ports.
That was the most disappointing thing. They were so blinded by their hatred of all things Southern that they simply could not see they were next.
I argued this and argued it when I was in college and law school from the early to the mid 1990s. I was told I was just being paranoid, that would never happen, the South was just uniquely evil, blah blah blah.
Then the same Leftist deconstructionists came for them and their symbols and leaders they admired. I'm not only not suprised, I'd be lying if I didn't get some grim satisfaction from their distress over it.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get some grim satisfaction from it.”
grrr. We need an edit button.
A big word for Lie...
Very sorry, but I had not meant in any way to criticise you.
I am afraid we are having a misunderstanding here.
I couldn’t agree more with you, and as a historian by profession, it really is just might which has always made right.
Furthermore, I still have so many happy memories of the good conversations we have had throughout the years here on FR. Haven’t we always been in accordance?
😔
As a PS: the weak have always been the soccer ball of the strong, as the German proverb goes.
And if you ask me, it was Christianity with its ethics of compassion for the weak, which did a world of good to improve their lot.
Needless to say, in some cases even the moderating effect of Christianity failed, but in many cases they did work.
I still remember the plates which showed the image of a black slave in chains, circumscribed with the moving question „Am I not a Man and a Brother?“
Unless I am gravely mistaken, it was Christian organizations which sold these advertisements for the abolition of slavery, or even gave them away….
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