Eight People our History Classes Lied About (or Ignored): More from “A People’s History of the United States”

Who’s ever been asked to write a report about a favorite president in an American grade-school classroom? I assume the answer is damn near everybody. The same goes for the explorers, the generals, and the businessmen. If we’re lucky, our school will ask us to do the same about a civil rights leader we admire, although I’ve heard of those that wouldn’t, and those that would reject a report about Malcolm X or Phillip A. Randolph unread. It’s amazing who gets excluded in our national mythology, and who gets selectively revealed. Here’s eight people I discovered or rediscovered through reading for Prole Academy, particularly A People’s History of the United States and The “S” Word.

Sources: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn; The “S” Word by John Nichols

Bartolome de las Casas

A Spanish priest that wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.  He argued the Spanish colonizers’ and explorers’ treatment of enslaved natives in the Americas amounted to barbarism, and popularized knowledge of their crimes in Europe through his writing.  Unfortunately he initially suggested that Africans would handle the harsh work of agricultural and mining servitude better than native Americans.  Once he saw enslaved Africans in person, however, he realized the barbarism of this institution as well.

Thomas Paine

This rabble-rouser of the American Revolution wrote Common Sense, a pamphlet that was inspiring to all classes, providing the language of the larger revolutionary movement and much of its ideological basis. Almost every literate person in the colonies read it.  His other works, such as the Rights of Man, the Age of Reason and Agrarian Justice are on my list to read as well.  Thomas Paine and others led rhetorical attacks on major property owners and the wealthy, calling such concentrations of wealth dangerous to society as a whole, and suggesting that governments should have a right (and in fact have an obligation) to remedy this for everyone’s benefit.  Among other things, Paine called for a single chamber popular assembly, opposed property requirements for voting, and believed in early models of property redistribution, social security, and a universal basic income of sorts for children reaching adulthood.

Lucy Stone

A women’s rights activist and abolitionist in the 1800s.  She married her husband Henry Blackwell while explicitly stating their marriage as one of equality, and did not take her husband’s name.  When she refused to be taxed without being represented (something Americans tend to give a shit about, but not when it happens to women in the 1840s), the government took all her possessions including her child’s cradle as payment for the debt. She kept fighting for the abolition of slavery until the passage of the 13th Amendment, and for woman’s suffrage for the remainder of her life until her death in 1893.

Robert Smalls

An enslaved man during the US Civil War who stole a Confederate steamship and sailed it past the Confederate forces, liberated himself, his crew and their families.  He joined the Union Navy and took the ship back into battle.  After the war, he joined Congress from South Carolina.  In my head, he’s always Robert Fucking Smalls, said with awe and admiration.  Why?  Read his story again.  That’s why. 

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