Thursday, November 8, 2012

Alternet :: Founding Finance

Founding Finance
By William Hogeland

Alternet.org has posted an excerpt from William Hogeland's Founding Finance:

"In a new book on America's founding era popular-finance movement, William Hogeland brings us forgotten folk heroes who fought against early elites. Many were Bible-toting, end-time Christians.

 
Editor's Note: You wouldn't know if from the way the Rev. Billy Graham cozies up to today's elites, but Evangelicals were once the staunch enemies of America's privileged class. In his new book Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation, William Hogeland wipes away the cobwebs, slogs through the fog of historical consensus, and challenges the cherished myths of both the left and the right to take a clear-eyed look at what was really going on in late 18th Century America when the Revolution was born.

In Hogeland's refreshingly unsentimental account, which favors primary sources, the Great Myth of founding era struggles as a unified front of liberty-loving Americans v. British despots instantly dissolves. In its place, we see that across the newly forming nation, especially in the western regions, economic radicals were agitating to fight regressive taxation, absentee landlords, and economic privilege among their own countrymen. Popular accounts of the Revolutionary Period obscure the fact that ordinary working Americans mounted aggressive challenges to rich oppressors at home and risked their lives to see an America develop that truly represented "We the People" -- and not just a small group eastern merchants, planters, and financiers. And they met with determined resistance."

Read the full article and excerpt on alternet.org>>


1 comment:

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