Heather Cox Richardson on "The American Paradox": equal rights in theory with actual inequality

The historian Heather Cox Richardson has been indulging in some prolific public-intellectual activism over the last year with regular columns on her Facebook page and with a series of YouTube lectures on history. This is the first one in a nine-part series called The American Paradox 05/30/2020 (it appeared on Facebook in late March):

She takes a liberal-left approach to history which takes an approving, enthusastic attitude to democracy while paying realistic and engaged attention to its dark side, which she defines braodly as the notion that political equality in the sense of the Declaration of Independence has from the first existed with major inequality. (Given the name of this blog, it probably won't surprise anyone that I would be more inclined to use the more Hegelian "contradiction" rather than "paradox.")

She covers other useful reminders of what was shaping the world while Europeans were settling the Americas, such as sail technology.

The focus of this lecture is to frame the development of the English political tradition. She stresses the diversity of the population in what is now the US, but focuses on the English tradition because the governmental system of the Declaration and the US Constitution comes primarily out of that tradition. She discusses Shakespeare's play The Tempest (circa 1610) as a European look at the "New World" of the settler colonialism in the Americas. She uses that to describe the emerging European ambiitions and imaginations of what they consider the "New World".

She reminds us of the religious wars going on in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s and how large they loomed in European politics of the day, which shaped the classical liberal notions of freedom of religion and opinion.

This is a good example of how it's possible to take an engaged view of history that it's even partisan toward democracy and equality but also pays close attention to facts and indentifiable historical trends.

One point I want to mention is that, while I can't argue with her estimates of 90% death rates among the native population from illness in the early 17th century on the Atlantic coast being colonized by the English. But I do want to mention that the broader question of the effect on native populations of European diseases in the Americas is heavily dependent on the assumption of the "pre-Columbian" indigenous population. My understanding is that there is no solid general consensus at this point among the relevant experts.