The Importance of Complex Thinking About History

The founders, the white founders and the Continental Congress in the 1770s and 1780s were a living in what we can call a shotgun wedding. They could not break apart in separate confederacies because they would fight civil wars over numerous things. One of those models for why the founders perpetuated slavery is that they were racist. That's entirely irrefutable. Another is they had inherited themselves, an economic system in which slavery was entrenched by both Southerners and Northerners. And the last here again is what I call in the book the survivalist interpretation of the founding period.