I recently finished listening to Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World by historian Jeff Fynn-Paul, and I think it is well worth reading or listening to.
Over the last several years, we have heard a very negative version of American history. The 1619 Project, attacks on our founders, the removal of monuments, and the idea that America was built mainly on racism, oppression, and stolen land have shaped the way many people now see our country.
The problem is that history is rarely that simple.
There were terrible things that happened in American history. There were injustices, wars, broken agreements, slavery, mistreatment, and people who did evil things. We should not hide any of that.
But we also shouldn’t take hundreds of years of complicated history and reduce it to:
“America was stolen, and its founders were terrible people.”
That is one of the things I appreciated about Not Stolen. The book goes back and asks many of the questions people are arguing about today:
Was America really stolen from Native Americans?
Did Europeans commit genocide?
Was Columbus simply a racist and genocidal conqueror?
Were Native American societies naturally peaceful?
Were the Founding Fathers anti-Indian?
Was the Trail of Tears genocide?
Did Europeans intentionally spread disease?
Is “settler colonialism” really the best way to understand the founding of America?
Are Native Americans owed reparations today?
You may not agree with every conclusion in the book. That’s okay. What makes it valuable is that it challenges you to look beyond slogans and ask whether the version of history we have been hearing lately gives us the whole story.
Another point that stood out to me is that America should not only be judged by the times it failed to live up to its ideals. We should also look at how often Americans have fought to live up to those ideals and extend them to more people.
America was founded on remarkable ideas about human liberty, individual rights, representative government, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and government being accountable to the people.
America did not perfectly live out those principles from the beginning. But generation after generation appealed to those same principles to correct injustice.
Abolitionists could point to America’s founding ideals and ask why slavery was allowed to continue.
Civil rights leaders could point to America’s promises of liberty and equality and demand that they be applied to everyone.
Reformers did not have to throw away America’s founding principles in order to make the country better. Often, they demanded that America live up to them.
And those ideas did not stay within America’s borders.
America and the broader Western tradition helped spread ideas such as constitutional government, individual liberty, religious freedom, equal citizenship, and basic human rights around the world.
We really need to recognize these contributions.
It is interesting that we sometimes judge people from hundreds of years ago because they did not completely share values that seem obvious to us today, while rarely stopping to ask:
Where did many of the values we take for granted today come from?
How did ideas about individual rights, equality before the law, religious liberty, representative government, and human dignity become so widely accepted?
America certainly did not invent every good idea, and Americans have not always practiced what they preached.
But the American story is much bigger than a list of sins.
It is also the story of a country repeatedly trying to become more consistent with some remarkably high ideals, and helping carry many of those ideals around the world.
Historical people should be understood in their own time and in the full context of what actually happened, not simply judged through a political narrative created hundreds of years later.
So here’s my challenge:
Do you believe America was founded on stolen land?
If your answer is yes, I would especially encourage you to read or listen to Not Stolen.
And if what you’ve been taught about American history has left you believing that America is mainly something to be ashamed of, I think this book is worth your time too.
We shouldn’t whitewash our history.
But we shouldn’t rewrite it simply to make people hate their country either.
We should know America’s failures.
We should also know what America got right.
America has never been perfect.
But I don’t think the full story of America is something we should be taught to hate.
It is a remarkable story worth understanding, and, in many ways, worth being thankful for.
If you’re an American, it’s part of your story.
Not Stolen by Jeff Fynn-Paul is a book I recommend.