Click here to access article by Paul Craig Roberts from Boiling Frogs Post.
I have long concluded that we know very little about the significance to the American Civil War because its history has been written by the ruling capitalist class. Our history like everything else in our nation has been shaped by the influence of this class. To free ourselves, we must recover not only our history but every institution in our society, and then create new institutions to reflect and promote our needs, those of the Ninety-Nine Percent.
I haven't yet read this book which is introduced and reviewed by Roberts, but his description of the DiLorenzo's interpretation of this major event in our history may offer an opportunity to discover and recover the real history. From what Roberts reports about the book, I can confirm some of the important realities that DiLorenzo writes about that largely goes unreported in the history taught in our schools. For example, that the governing class in the North was strongly protectionist regarding trade and the opposite was the case in the South. I also do know that following the Civil War, capitalists went on the offensive in their land grabs and buying up everything of value including all the inventions that were made by working people in the following fifty years. Thus, by the end of this period capitalists had defeated both the rising labor and the populist farmers' movements, concentrated their wealth in large corporations, secured control of money following the establishment of a central bank in 1913 (the Federal Reserve), and then set out on a road to build an empire.
